Trying to imagine a future beyond 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot more lately about the future. It started with money. The pandemic has thrown many things into sharp relief and long term financial stability is one of them. But imagining what that magical time of retirement will be like completely overwhelms me. This year crashed into me, into all of us, like a freight train. How do you plan for the decades ahead when it feels like anything can actually happen?

By future I mean beyond the next few years. I mean the next decade, I mean the next 20, 50, 100 years. What will the world of your golden years look like? What sort of world will your great grandchildren see, hear, smell, experience? I’m sure I’m not the only one who struggles with long-term thinking. New technologies and ways of communicating with each other keep pushing us to the bounds of what we understand, and are comfortable with. 

In the 1950s computers were huge machines that could weigh over 2,000 pounds. Nowadays we carry tiny computers (that can also make phone calls!) in our pockets. It took 182 years to build Notre Dame. There’s this particular kind of awe that washes over you when you stand at the foot of some huge and solid structure, knowing it’s been around for centuries, knowing it will out last you. Notre Dame, though charred, still stands. I know my pocket-sized computer will not outlast me, or maybe even next year. It, along with Facebook and Twitter, were invented after I graduated from college. Kids these days apparently don’t know how to use a rotary phone. So who can easily think in terms of 100, 200 years when tremendous shifts in something as basic as how humans communicate happened in less than 20 years?

So I marvel at the people who could continue showing up to work on one piece of Notre Dame, knowing they wouldn’t live to see the finished result. Maybe their great grandchildren would see it finished. But would they have pictured the world that those great grandchildren lived in as very different from theirs?

Trying to predict the future

We always want to know what the future will bring. We’ve used fortune tellers, crystal balls, oracles, our own imagination. Now we’ve added technology and sophisticated math, algorithms and polling and modeling, to the mix.

The worlds we try to predict are informed by our knowledge of and experience of what’s occurring now, if not what happened in the past. In some instances, software created with AI that we use to help make decisions, such as who should get a bank loan, who should or should not get parole because they’re more likely to commit a crime, are designed with reams of historical data that predict what might happen. Because the data is historical and because the programs are created by humans (often white, male humans) the results are algorithms that can be loaded with racial bias, gender bias, bias of any kind. Real harm can come to people because of these baked-in biases. You might not get that loan, or be denied parole not because of you but because of the algorithm. (I oversimplify, but see Weapons of Math Destruction for an eye-popping exploration of these topics).

On the other hand, programs using AI that are created and integrated into systems with thought and care, can literally saves lives. My point here isn’t to get into good or bad AI (I will do that in another letter). My point is, it’s hard to envision the next decade, the next generation, even at times the next few hours, but we’re harnessing as much computing power as possible to help see through that fog. If only we knew what would happen we could be better prepared. If only we knew who would actually commit a crime. If only I knew how long I needed to save money for, if only if only, I could make smarter decisions.

It’s scary not to know. We can only really make good guesses and bad guesses. Even the most informed are still guesses. 2020 has shown this to all of us. The future is murky, and I sometimes feel overwhelmed by it, and how my tiny little world will be affected.

However, far more imaginative people than me have clearer visions of the decades ahead, and are stretching their imaginations way beyond the next month, the next year. 

Imagining the future

Trying to figure out things like bank loans and saving money are like small potatoes compared to climate change. Even as we see, if not experience ourselves, the effects of climate change (more hurricanes, more fires etc), it’s still difficult to connect that experience to a greater whole, like to the polar ice caps melting. And then, what can you do about it, since individualist action alone will not save us? The sheer scale of this problem can be shattering whereas a few hundred years ago, the scale of our world was the size of Notre Dame. However, Greta Thunberg, climate change activists, scientists, the incoming Biden administration, are thinking decades ahead, to what the state of our whole planet could be, and they’re pushing the rest of us to do the same.

In another example, the protests over the summer brought national attention to the movement to defund the police (meaning reallocating money in police budgets to social, health, and community services). It seems to me the activists who’ve been pushing for these measures have a vision of what the future could look like, depending if we maintain the status quo or if we try something new. They have been posing tough questions: what might our cities and our communities look like if there was more funding for community health programs? If instead of calling the police for wellness checks, we called social workers, mental health professionals, crisis intervention teams? They’re asking of us, can you imagine a world where anyone who needed mental health support actually received it?

There are plenty of other writers, artists, thinkers who have been thinking long and hard about what the future could be. You probably know some.

The pandemic has given us an opportunity to think more deeply about the future, about the future we want to have, not the one we’re stuck in. Maybe it’s a little too early to broach this conversation with COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and many other parts of the world rising as they are. But I’m jumping in anyway. The pandemic has shaken up our routines, changed our behavior, and thoroughly upended the idea of “normal.” Scientists have been able to listen to the Earth in new ways, there’s been a sudden drop in CO2. Maybe there’s something in all the chaos and stress and anxiety we can learn from. Michele Norris on The Michelle Obama Podcast said something like, “Let’s not reach for normal, let’s reach for better.”

So what is better? Climate activists, the movement to defund the police, have visions for what is better. There are surely others looking ahead and imagining the possibilities. That is something I want to take with me into 2021: possibility instead of the lonely havoc of 2020. My world right now feels really small, like I can only see the end of my own nose. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, thinking so narrowly in terms of what I want and I need.  The people who built Notre Dame, I doubt they thought so narrowly. To work on such a grand project for so long I would think they imagined beyond their own bubble. Activists certainly aren’t thinking in bubbles.

So here’s a not-bad thing about the pandemic, I hope: more imaginative thinking. We aren’t able to use a crystal ball or algorithms to predict the exact future we’ll end up with. But we have the smarts and tools and resources to progress toward a future we do want.

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Voting rules can be confusing, but filling out a form shouldn’t be

Maybe it’s the uber importance of voting this year or the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment,  but for whatever reason I’ve gotten really into voting laws and the history of voting. Like did you know that we (by that I mean men) used to vote viva voce - with the voice. Can you imagine going to the polls nowadays and announcing to the entire room who you were voting for? 

I’m also indignant and exasperated that voting is way harder than it should be with the confusing rules, the bullshit rhetoric about fraud, and now COVID. Voting should be a really a boring endeavor. And by that I mean the actual physical act of voting, of engaging with the paper or the electronic ballot, not the emotional component or the sense of civic duty, not the anxiety over how you’re going to vote, or who’s going to win. The literal act of voting should be so boring and straightforward it’s just like dealing with every other survey or multiple-choice test you’d taken since you could hold a pencil. 

If you want to vote absentee, getting your absentee ballot should be equally as boring if you live in one of the 40 states that do not automatically send ballots to residents. My state of Illinois is one of these 40 and thankfully, requesting an absentee ballot online was easy peasy. The website I bought a sweater dress from had a more complex series of forms than the Illinois Secretary of State’s office. 

But here’s my bugaboo: requesting a ballot isn’t always easy. I mean, yes, it’s ridiculous that there are 10 states that just send ballots to voters and Wisconsin, for example, makes you upload an image of your photo ID before it will mail you one. But I’m talking about the issues with the websites themselves that could make filling out an application for an absentee ballot difficult, especially if you are 1 in 5 Americans with a disability. 

Voting can be a confusing process, but filling out a form shouldn’t be. We fill out forms all the time when we buy stuff online, when we need a new driver’s license, when we go to our doctors’ offices. It’s mindless drudgery, time that we could be spending baking cakes or playing video games. 

Things that can make any kind of work online easy, whether it’s reading an article, buying shoes, checking a bank statement, or requesting a ballot are those mundane, unnoticed design elements. Like, providing a label to a form field so you know what information to put in. Or making sure the colors on the website contrast enough that you can actually read the information. 

And yet, often websites don’t incorporate these basic elements or follow accessibility guidelines. A study of all 50 state voting websites revealed that many were riddled with some basic problems that make them hard to use. The average score of the websites was 77% (a C grade?!). 20 websites scored below 76%. This is bad for anyone with a disability, for anyone who needs to use a screen reader or has a vision or mobility impairment. Aside from proper color schemes and labels, issues were technical things like: 

• Keyboard focus (when you use the tab key instead of a mouse, you see the selected element of the page outlined) 

• Tab order (when you hit the tab key, the order of the outlined elements matches the visual order of the page) 

Now I realize this is not the most exciting design or engineering work. But it’s vital for anyone who comes to the website that basic accessibility guidelines are followed. And we all do benefit from proper form field labeling. And that’s the thing - if you’ve ever found a website difficult to use and the information hard to follow, it’s probably not you. It’s probably the website. These little things add up, and they matter.

As we’re all aware, voting this year is both critical and nerve-wracking because of the pandemic and Trump’s fear mongering. Boring it is not! Legislators have managed to weaponize some of the most mundane things we humans ever have to do: fill out forms and take a multiple choice test. Let’s not add poor website design on top of the nonsensical rules of the voting process. Voting websites that are not accessible (I’m looking at you, Rhode Island) are both a pain to use and could actively prevent citizens from fulfilling a constitutional right. 

It’s critical to get these basic things right. This is very much within the power of the designers and engineers who maintain the websites. These websites obviously must adhere to and communicate the rules, but they can take care to ensure the instructions are visually clear and information easy to input so citizens can fill out a form to get their ballot in the mail.

Are you registered to vote? How are you voting this year?

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What I learned from losing the internet for two days

A couple weeks ago, a band of nasty storms rolled across the Midwest, knocking out my sister’s power in Des Moines and my internet in Chicago. 

I was lucky that I kept my power. But to have electricity and no internet is disconcerting. My partner and I realized we lost service when we were pathetically trying to will Netflix to load, gaping like fish at the TV. How could it be gone???

If this had happened a year ago, I would have no trouble going to the cafe around the corner to go online. But under a pandemic, I don’t want to sit indoors in a public place for a sustained period of time. Planning a work day without online access and with limited options involved so many small questions I was tempted to say screw it and take the day off. 

How much of this report can I write without the internet? Where can I go to work now? Should I go into my old office? Will my partner be able to come with me? Can I book a study room at the library? That’s safe, right? Would it be worth going to a public place with WiFi for, like, an hour? Should we call Comcast again? Would that even help?

The first day sans internet I was able to work from home. I lucked out in that I had offline access to Google Slides so I could continue writing my research report, and the changes would automagically update once I got online again. (I still took screenshots of all 40 slides I put together out of terror that my work would be lost). Emails, Slack messages would have to be answered on my phone using data.

The second day, my partner and I braved the public bus and a 45-minute commute to go to my old office. Turned out, this was the very last day my office was open before movers were coming to box everything up. Internet chatter suggested service wouldn’t be restored for two more days, and I was teetering on panic on how I could meet this work deadline. Miraculously, service was restored by the time we got home that night.

At first it seems that going a few days without the internet should not be that big a deal. On vacations this is how I prefer to operate. Lack of internet won’t force you to throw out food or prevent you from cooking; lack of internet won’t plunge you into darkness after the sun sets or prevent the air conditioning from working. I wish I could say I learned something meaningful from these few days without easy online access, how I learned to be more present or whatever.

But when your work and school depends on your ability to communicate with others, access tools, and information, your world is completely disrupted. You cannot do much of anything. The internet is knotted so tightly into our normal lives that to have it or not is not a real choice. It is the means by which we chat with our family and trade jokes with friends. We play games, order food, shop, exercise, look up directions, listen to podcasts and music. We look for jobs, check healthcare records, pay bills. Our daily lives are defined by being online, even more so now under the pandemic. 

The thing I learned, rather, the thing that became visceral for me, was how vital the internet is to function in a modern society. I think we all knew this on some level. One hope I have coming out of this pandemic is that it’s laid this bare in an impossible-to-ignore way. This is how we live now.