Moonshots

The idea of Moonshots has always been an inspiration. Some of my earliest memories from the mid-80s were of watching the space shuttle launches back when each one was televised. I remember going to the Kennedy Space Center sometime before kindergarten. My family got to see a life sized replica of the shuttle and I vividly remember seeing the old footage (which was still fresh at the time) of the first Moon landings and President Kennedy's famous speech setting us on that path. Despite happening before my birth, my parents distilled in me the sense that this had still just happened within the frame of our lifetimes.

In the 90's the Human Genome Project was described as another Moonshot project. Then mapping the human brain and developing cures for AIDS and cancer. We have had a few inspiring moonshots in our lifetimes, each with narratives echoing first's audacity and mythos of the collective human spirit.

Despite being such big, lofty, titan sized goals, moonshots are made possible through the efforts of countless people doing small things that add up. Moonshots are only possible when we align networks of people inspired by common vision and values to organize into complex adaptive networks with leadership distributed throughout. Moonshots require perseverance and the cultivation of collective intelligence to align individual actions towards collective actions.

I bring the ethos of moonshots to this Space Cadets project as a frame to orient our (mine, yours, and whoever connects with us) attention towards systemic issues that require moonshot-level and moonshot-quality efforts to address. Because let's face it. We know that there are some fundamental changes that need to occur in our society. Changes to our cultures, physical and digital infrastructures, how our institutions operate and serve us, how we serve others and ourselves.

The arc of my writing on this blog the past few weeks has been about orienting myself outside of the mental frame of the tech and nonprofit industries in the midst of... well, all this.

There are any number of moonshots that we could name to address the current global resurgence of fascism, or even shooting beyond, to place building blocks for a sustainable egalitarian global societies beyond the era of climate crisis.

I want to begin exploring how some of these moonshots could be defined and framed, as well as how they can relate to each other. Because to say that we need a moonshot to build a better internet that centers the needs of the people rather than corporations, or to begin a multi-decade effort to build a progressive media landscape to counter the far right's narrative dominance, or to rebuild the US by renewing and resourcing our collective commitments to build national infrastructures, foundational institutions, and economic networks that serve all, is to mis-frame each of these.

In truth, each of these require multiple moonshots. Or, perhaps they require a single well defined, tangible, and inspiring one. In my mind each of these big societal+multinational scale efforts overlap to such a degree as to be essentially one. How do we tell that story? Where is the single big, audacious call to action that is simple enough for us to see how all our individual actions can begin to add up? Or, what is a collection of named efforts that will get us to the same location as a fleet of moonshots? I'm stretching the metaphor here a bit, but you get it.

As a technologist it's very easy to fall into a solutionist mindset, and I've been working to get out of that through my recent research and writing. It's not enough to say that we need to change the way the Internet works and assume that the reasons are self-evident. The reasons are what lead as our North Stars, inspiring others to align their efforts towards that common vision. Otherwise we're just shuffling societal power structures around the table without addressing the fact that governance is the big overarching problem to solve for. The Internet, the whole damn thing, is a means to an ends: to facilitate human connection and flourishing (Says me). It's a step along the way to being able to co-create the worlds and futures we choose to move from vision into reality.

So, what are our moonshots? What are the small actions we can take with each other to start on the path towards them? I've got some ideas which I'll be developing and sharing here over time. What are yours?

Drop some comments or let me know via DM via Signal, Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn. Especially if you work in media, are a browser and social web nerd like me, or are working on anything I talk about on this blog and are looking for people to join your team! I'm excited to hear from y'all!

-Lyre Calliope

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