03/17/2024
Two key binary opposites should be considered in the cooling of the planet.
One is essentially moonshot level tech, where profit and the private sector are contributors at this point since we have never had more wealth concentrated in so few.
A country by country consortium of billionaires and their companies could perhaps be motivated to create and perfect the high tech that could help to moderate world wide temperature and rainfall. Engineering and its tech got us into this mess, engineering and its tech should get us out.
The other binary is the subject of my new book, "Ambidex" which discusses a "rewiring" of our societies to reinvigorate craft, small villages, less travel, and the genius of "lo-tek".
I teach sketching at City College of San Francisco and UC Berkeley. I am also a software expert (I'm an architect), so I speak "from tech". My teaching method is to reinforce the importance of "getting eyes off the screens" by going back to pencil and paper, watercolor, oil painting, ceramics and carpentry, not as a Luddite, but using AI and tech if necessary to accelerate ideas. Not rejecting tech, but letting tech support craft.
My ultimate goal is to lower our energy profile by contributing to a revolution in reawakening to a non-outcome based creative activity, to reinvigorate small bazaars of one person shops (see Pike's Market in Seattle) in every city and town and to consistently find ways of pulling our heads out of the laptops.
Both binaries are essential to the long term viability of humanity.
