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Most of us sense something's wrong with social media. A lot of people also say something's wrong with “capitalism”. (I'm using air quotes around capitalism, I’ll be more specific later.) And that something’s wrong with modern politics, liberalism, democracy, education.

People come at these problems from different directions—from climate change, from worries about “coordination failure”, geopolitics...

I came at it through social media.

I started out as an internet optimist. See, in 2008. I worked at Couchsurfing, which was growing fast. So was Meetup.com and Wikipedia. Flashmobs were booming! Anyone remember Improv Everywhere?

It seemed—to me and to others—that the internet was bringing us a better economy. People were working together, on giant projects like Couchsurfing, Wikipedia, and Linux. I was a true believer: Love would be the new motivator. Money would fade away.

So… that was naive. By 2012, I’d sobered up. By then, Facebook’s News Feed and YouTube had not only replaced TV, but had added hours of screen-time per person per day. The “attention economy”. In alarm, with Tristan Harris and others, I cofounded the Center for Humane Tech.

Actually, it wasn’t called “the Center for Humane Tech” at first— it was called “Time Well Spent”. This was part of my proposal to fix the problem. At CouchSurfing, we tried to maximize the amount of meaningful time our users spent with each other, rather than any measure of transactions. Tristan and I thought that, if more people did this—if they maximized “Time Well Spent” instead of “Time Spent”—it might fix social media.

That was still naive..I was young. I thought the problems around me were, technological.

But it goes a lot deeper than that.

There are many ways to say what the problem is—to say what markets, democracies, and so on—are failing at.

In this talk, I want to use an unfamiliar lens for this. An economic one. I’ll say that they’re failing to meet certain kinds of demand. They’re failing to give people what they want.

I’m going to use this lens, because it shows that there are solutions.

But first, what do I mean that markets and democracies aren’t giving people what they want?

Well, one thing I’ve realized, is, modern society is better at giving people individual experiences, than collective ones.

Now, people do want collective things: they want belonging, connection, community, love, they want adventures together. But if you look at long-term trends, we get less of these things year-by-year.

In most developed countries, people used to hang out on the porch with their neighbors, or in pubs; then they started watching TV as a family; then they switched to multiple TVs, one in each room in the house; finally the TVs got upgraded to smartphones. Each person staring at their own rectangle of glass.

Over the same period, church communities got replaced by individualized yoga classes; dating and friend groups got replaced by swipe-based apps and porn.

I mean, sure, some apps or websites might be good for community for a moment. I guess Couchsurfing was one. If you work on one of those, like I did, you might feel you’re changing the trend. But zoom out again and—no, sorry, the trend’s still there.

And there’s more:

Modern society can address a wide range of tastes—tastes in food, tastes in clothing. There are giant marketplaces. Amazon. The App Stores. Something for everyone.

Or so it seems.

They address a wide range of tastes. But a person isn’t only made of tastes. There’s a kind of difference between people, these marketplaces can’t serve. Everyone has different sources of meaning—you may find it meaningful to be wildly creative; she may find it meaningful to be quietly contemplative; just about everyone finds it meaningful to love and be loved deeply.

But somehow, even “the everything store” can’t connect us with our sources of meaning.

Now, I think this inability to meet demand—demand for togetherness and demand for meaning—explains a lot of the current predicament.

Togetherness isn’t just for kumbaya-singing hippies. When we don’t get our collective needs met, there’s a breakdown in politics and social trust. The basic cycles of love and dating breakdown. Schools become bureaucratic and cut-throat.

We need our togetherness!

And we need meaning too. As I’ll show, meaning is part of what keeps institutions like science and democracy working and keeps them from succumbing to perverse incentives. For society to function, we need to social networks to be meaningful for investigation and vulnerability; we need research labs to be meaningful for deep work. We need meaning to keep things working.

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Then, the next three chapters say what needs to change, to bring back togetherness and meaning.

All right, let's get started.

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I want to start with two ways we can think about daily life.

Often we ask questions like this:

For me, I want to get this video done and published. I’d love to delegate the editing.

What about for you? What do you want to accelerate or delegate?

But there’s another way to think: instead of accelerating something, we can ask questions like:

For me, I have a team meeting with a team I’m really grateful to have. I want to cherish that. It’s autumn in Berlin and the light is gorgeous, the leaves are bright yellow and orange. I want to linger on that light.

What about for you?

There’s something I’ve noticed asking questions like these.

Most people have answers to both sets of questions, but the answers come quicker with the first set. And they’re more specific. They can give paragraphs of information on what they want to get done, offload, or skip.

Answers to the second questions are at a lower resolution.

I think the reason is straightforward. We spend a lot of time making to do lists, very little time making to slow down or cherish lists. We practice the first questions a lot; the second questions almost never.

There's something sad about this. By focusing on those first questions, we miss everything worth celebrating; everything that makes it worthwhile to be alive. We see clearly what we want life to be rid of, but not what we want it to be full of.

This difference also affects what we make.

Imagine you’re building an educational platform. Are students there to pass the test or get a certification? Or are they there to follow their curiosity, to face their open questions, or to celebrate together the beauty and complexity of the world?

On top are things your customers want to get done, get over with; on the bottom, the things that make life worth living.

Call the things on the top our goals. We are intricately aware of them. They form a kind of superstructure—smaller goals fit into larger ones, and we are dimly aware of the whole tree. We make lists of goals, at different scales.

Call what’s on the bottom our sources of meaning. Or I often call them our values. We are much less articulate about them. We don’t see the same kinds of patterns in them, that we see in our goals.

This difference in articulacy makes things challenging for entrepreneurs. Say you interview your customers for “pain points” or “customer needs”—but what’s top of mind for both you and your customers are goals, not sources of meaning, you’ll only collect their goals.

So you’ll design for their goals.

You’ll think of yourself as building what I call a funnel or a tube, not a space. Funnels and tubes are goal-driven.

I call something a funnel if it gets everybody to do the same thing, or work on the same goal. By this definition, the checkout area in a supermarket is a funnel. So are many organizations. There's one goal for everyone.

Similarly, I'll call something a tube if it gets people from where they are to their own goal. So Amazon, and all marketplaces, are tubes. So are Google searches. Tubes accelerate everyone to their own goal.

Both are goal-driven things, that everyone involved would accelerate if they could—to get the goal accomplished more quickly.

Many entrepreneurs see all design tasks as funnels and tubes. But that’s a big mistake.

Some things aren't designed around goals at all. Instead, they are about values, or exploration according to values. I'll call those exploratory spaces.

There are

These are not goal-driven. You know something is a space if you don't want it to be over quickly. You would accelerate an Amazon purchase if you could, or an uber ride, or an organizational goal. The things you do in a space are things that you would not accelerate.

Note: when I say you wouldn’t accelerate a space, I don’t mean it has to be pleasurable, or fun — I just mean there’s something meaningful about what you do there, something you’d miss out on if you accelerated it or delegated it away. That means it’s not just about getting to a goal.

Anyways, most design tasks involve a mix of these three parts.

Imagine you're making a messaging app, like Telegram or Messenger.

A messenger app can be thought of as a tube, or it can be thought of as a space. And there are many, many things like this.

Same with that educational platform I mentioned before. If you focus on your users’ goals, you’ll think of it as a funnel or tube. If you focus on their sources of meaning, it’s a space.

This is even true with something like advertising analytics: it may seem like your customer has a straightforward goal—to have the most people see their promoted tweets. But you could also design an advertising analytics tool as a space—a space to explore your audience, to find audiences who meet you in certain ways, to build up a certain kind of meaningful rapport in a community.

So designers can often decide whether to make a funnel, a tube, or a space.

Or—as with our messaging app—they might make a mix of all three, where each screen or UI component participate in one or more funnels, tubes, or spaces.

So, let’s go back to the intro, where I talked about a long-term trend. A problem with togetherness. A problem with meaning.

We can now reframe it. These two problems—they’re the same problem! It's actually problem with spaces. Spaces have been experiencing a weird decline.

You can see a transition away from spaces in so many fields.

I’m going to tell you why.

In two parts: First, I’ll cover an initial mistake, which we made long ago, which kicked off the decline in spaces. After that initial mistake is clear, I’ll lay out some further events which made the problem even worse.

So, what was that initial mistake?

We made a deal with the devil. A deal that makes funnels and tubes cheaper to organize, but spaces more expensive.

Once upon a time, people were embedded in social networks, informally provide things to each other. They didn’t think of themselves as entrepreneurs or content creators. They just did things with their friends.

They are space-makers.

But there are problems with this setup: only Margaret’s friends get to enjoy her cooking. Only Sandra’s friends get to play her game. William has a small audience even if he’s a great poet.

In this early society, none of these offerings are scalable. There’s no competition, so excellent work doesn’t rise to the top. And the whole thing is awfully undemocratic, since everything is open only to friends.

To get out of this situation, we made a deal with the devil.

We reorganized things.

Now we have individual suppliers, individual consumers, and the consumers can find the suppliers they want.

In every case, there's a pile of strangers and there's some kind of professional that spends just a short time with each of them.

Margaret’s now a restaurant owner; Sandra runs a game-playing event; William’s a poet and content creator.

Their offerings are widely available. They serve people at less cost. More people eat delicious food and go to events. Different suppliers in the same category compete. Excellence rises. Margaret’s cooking and Will’s poetry get the acknowledgement they deserve.

We wanted something democratic, scalable, and excellence surfacing. And we got it!

But we paid a high cost.

I want to give a name to this new structure.

I'll call it: piling up strangers.

Here’s the essence of the deal we made: it became very easy to put yourself in a queue. That made it a bit harder to come together with friends, to address our deep desires, or to be fluid about roles.

You can see this everywhere:

All these things create a pile of strangers, next to one kind of professional.

This is baked deeply into our society, and it makes funnels and tubes cheaper, but makes spaces more expensive.

Remember: in a space, people are together in a non-transactional way. Instead of going after clear goals, they're motivated by sources of meaning.

When spacemakers adopt this pattern, of dealing with piles of strangers, they’re screwed.

When you learn to see it, you realize every day we put ourselves in numerous piles. And every time we do that, we make it harder for people to make a space for us. Easier for them to make a funnel or tube.

So, that’s the deal we made. We got a lot out of it—democracy, excellence, and scale—but we traded away our spaces.

If I could change one thing about modern society, I’d change this. I’d make all these buttons do something different:

It may seem impossible. How can we have the advantages of both — of piling up strangers and of friends only networks? How can we avoid disadvantaging spacemakers like this?

We’d need to do something with the strangers, besides pile them up.

I won’t answer this now. Instead, I’ll spend 20 minutes on it in Chapter 4. But I do think there’s a way to do it. And, if I’m right about that, it means that allllllll the structures that pile up strangers—social media, voting, markets, application processes—all this can be reinvented.

I’ll get to that.

But first, I’ll quickly call out four more things which make it even harder for spacemakers. We need a complete picture of the problem.

Corporate Disdain

Here’s the first: because corporate people are always dealing with piles of strangers, they see us at our worst.

This is why—I think—they sound so sad when they talk about us. They use terms like “eyeballs” and “users” for customers. They write pitiful user stories about us:

I call this attitude “corporate disdain”, and it makes it much less likely that corporations will make spaces.

Bias in Practices

Another thing that gets warped is business practices. Because funnel and tube entrepreneurs are mostly the ones succeeding, the “best practices” that are taught to entrepreneurs are best practices for funnels and tubes.

So, if you’re a spacemaker, all the processes you inherit will push you to make a funnel.

Recommender Disdain

Actually, it’s not just corporations that have this problem of disdain for the user. Sometimes the disdain gets baked into algorithms. Or more precisely, the disdain is baked into the data they are trained on.

The recommender systems used by social media see us mostly alone, mostly in a consumption role, and mostly interacting with funnels and tubes, not spaces.

These systems increasingly decide what we pay attention to, what we download, what we buy, even who we meet. And they’re unlikely to recommend spaces.

That means that even if develop your own space-focused business practices, the recommender algorithms won’t know to recommend it.

Grind-set

Without spaces, life is just hurrying from one thing to the next. Everything wants to be accelerated.

You forget you have the option to make your own life meaningful. You begin to think you’ll only have spaces when you’re rich, or when the world’s reformed. For now, you’ve got to be hustlemaxxing. Crushing it. Grinding. Up and to the right.

You come to think of meaning as a thin, vague layer of purely-personal paint, irrelevant to the hard facts of reality.

This gives us a way to answer another great puzzle about the modern world: Why’s everyone so fucked up?

For instance, If feeling feelings is natural, then why are so many people disconnected from their feelings? Why are so many depressed, or anxious? The idea that life is meaningless is closely connected to the idea that emotions are meaningless. That they're bio-physical phenomena, due to fluctuations in brains or hormones.

That disbelief—plus the fact that everyone is hurrying around without spaces—makes it unlikely that someone will feel their feelings.

I think it’s also why everyone has all of this “childhood trauma” all the sudden.

It’s kind of odd, when you think about it, that there’s so much trauma in modern countries. Life events are objectively worse in other places, and from earlier times.

But bad things happening isn’t enough to cause trauma. Trauma happens when bad things happen, and when there are no spaces, no togetherness, to feel through things when they happen. Or when no one believes feelings point to values and need space.

So, even when modern life gets cushier, trauma can get worse.

Inarticulacy

Finally, all this ends up affecting politics. Because it limits our vocabulary. The terms by which we speak up for ourselves.

So, let me sum this up.

I think this story explains a lot of the ‘modern predicament’.

People race around, looking for spaces, but not finding them. Meanwhiles, funnels dangle the vague promise of a space in front of them: "buy this beer and be loved by friends", "take this online course, get rich, then you'll be able to relax and explore". But even the drunk, rich people lack spaces.

So, that’s a very big problem.

When I first saw this problem clearly, years ago…

Well, sometimes I wish I’d ignored it. Moved on. I was not really equipped: I didn’t have an academic appointment, or an institution, backing me up.

From time to time, I asked for support—from people and institutions that seemed to be about this stuff. Experts on “tech ethics” or “new economies” or the “meaning crisis”. People who run various nonprofits with aligned missions. Foundations focused on crises in democracy, the social fabric, social capital, trust.

There are so many people and groups where, from their mission statements, it seems like their job should be to solve these problems, or to support people like me, trying to solve them.

But… I didn't get much support. Instead, I spent years in poverty, and living a kind of a small and stressful life. It was really hard.

But somehow, I couldn't let go of the problem. I got obsessed with it.

And I did make some progress, and I’ll go through it in the rest of this talk.

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A saying in business is “you make what you measure”. What it means is, as businesses grow, they have to summarize information into metrics or reports to make decisions. The CEO gets summarized information like “how many sales did we make in Europe?” or “how many people returned our new product and asked for their money back?”

The larger the business, the more things need to be summarized, like this.

For that reason, the particular numbers that get measured very important.

We want to make spaces. Good spaces. Meaningful space. If we want to do this in a scalable way, we need to be able to measure meaning.

This, it turns out, is currently impossible. That’s why things tend to get meaningless as they scale. This is one way that business methods are biased towards funnels and tubes.

Say you run a bar. You want it to be a good space for people to relax, and connect with friends.

So, you try to measure whether the bar is a good space for that.

The situation gets even worse, if it becomes a network of bars. If you have to run it like people run startups or cities, using a metrics dashboard.

How can you monitor, remotely which bars are good spaces?

Here’s an idea:

People often smile when they’re relaxed and connecting with friends. You could put up cameras, get a machine learning algorithm doing sentiment analysis, and measure smiles per hour. But the most efficient way to ramp smiles is a funnel that gets people smiling. The local franchise might bring in a comedian to up their score.

Does that make it better for connecting with friends?

The situation gets even worse when bars in the network compete with one another for smiles.

The core problem here is that “being a good space for people to relax, to connect with friends” is vague. Because it’s vague, we end up finding clearer proxy measures like smiles, or beers, or monthly active visitors. Those new measures are clear, but they don’t correspond exactly to what we really care about. And these proxy measures, since they don’t line up exactly with “being a good space for people to relax, to connect with friends”, end up being manipulable.

Actually, it’s easier to explain this as two kinds of manipulation:

So we have behavioral manipulation on one hand; psychological manipulation, on the other.

The fact that we call these things manipulation, I believe, indicates that there is something deeper that we really care about, something deeper, that these manipulations pull us away from.

And that that deeper thing must not be behavioral. And it also cannot be a desire, goal, or feeling, since these are manipulable too.

But what could there be, besides behaviors, desires, goals, or feelings?

I struggled with this question for many years.

It’s quite deep!

It took years of reading to solve it.

Here's some papers that helped me figure them out.

These are by Amartya Sen, an economist who won the Nobel prize.

These are by philosophy professors—Ruth Chang, Charles Taylor, and David Velleman.

In the the end, based on this reading, I came up with these values cards.

Imagine you're making a space for vulnerability, or an exploratory app for creativity. Or maybe you are expanding a network of farmers markets, and you want them to be good spaces for people to explore localism in food systems.

The cards drill down on a vague word like vulnerability, creativity, or localism. People care about distinct kinds of vulnerability, and you'll pick one or two to focus on in your project.

The values cards aren’t exactly about behavior. That’s good, because behavior can be forced, or manipulated. Because behavior isn’t what we really care about, it’s just a proxy for what we care about.

They’re about what comes right before behavior — what we do internally, during a choice. What we pay attention to. See, one key idea, that I got from my reading, is that values show up when we make choices. They show up in our attention. If you care about something, you’ll pay attention to it during a choice.

So, the center of each card tries to capture what a person pays attention to, and chooses by, when they have a source of meaning.

What we care about, is being able to make decisions in a certain way. We care about what we can attend to, and choose by, in an environment.

The idea of freedom, or choice, is a key part of what we care about. It’s kind of the opposite of manipulation. But the freedom we care about isn’t abstract — it’s the specific freedom, the freedom to attend to and choose along specific dimensions. The middle part of the values card lists those dimensions, that are part of a value.

That’s the central part of the values cards. And it deals with behavioral manipulation. But it’s not the whole story.

We still have the other problem, psychological manipulation. Psychological manipulation might still cause us to attend to things and choose in ways that wouldn’t otherwise matter to us. So, the values cards need to address this problem, too.

So, to review: You can use values cards to measure the meaningfulness of a space, while reducing the danger of manipulation. You can do this by checking three things.

If you do all three, your metric is much harder to manipulate.

So, that’s values cards. They define “a value” or “a sources of meaning” (we use these terms inter-changably) in these two parts, and give it a name.

To show the power of this, consider these two kinds of creativity.

Even though these are both kinds of creativity, they call for different designs.

Put Florencia in environment A, and she won't be able to pay attention to those long lasting curiosities, she won’t have a chance to do deep work.

And vice versa: put Bilal in environment B, and he won't be able to find someone to brainstorm with and do creative riffing.

That’s an important fact. The attentional paths that are written on these values cards let us differentiate one kind of creativity from another; one kind of vulnerability from another, and one kind of localism from another.

And they let us be rigorous about whether a kind of creativity (or whatever) is happening in our designs. It’s simple: for a value to really be happening, people must be attending to what’s on the card, and choosing by it.

If, in your design, people can attend to these particular types of things, and make their choices by them, congratulations—people are able to live by their value within the space you made.

So—having these cards helps you avoid fooling yourself, as you design.

It’s eye opening to find out the sources of meaning for the people around you.

One way you can do that is by asking about the spaces they need in their lives: which spaces are responsible for their most meaningful experiences? What were those spaces good at?

Another way to learn about them is to look into people's emotions. Emotions point to values that are working out, or not working out.

See:

Similarly:

In each case, the way I want to live can be written as values card.

Whatever I'm feeling, whether it's a positive or negative emotion, will point to something important to me, something that can written as a values card.

Making these cards, and finding values in feelings—these are two of the best ways I know to get clear on your own values and the values of the people you love.

Once you connect emotions and values, you see clearly how your own sources of meaning get expressed, or suppressed, in your own life. Your understanding of meaning sharpens right up.

You can also do this with the people around you—talk to them about their feelings, and what's meaningful. You’ll start to glimpse what I call “the universe of meaning”. The space of all values. Everyone's sources of meaning, together.

A key fact, is the collection of all values is smaller than some other collections—like the collection of all goals, or the collection of all preferences. Let me show you what I mean:

Consider the collection of all goals. It includes many far-off goals. Goals like “get rich like Elon Musk”. Or goals people only have because they hope they’ll lead to something good later. Goals like “impress so-and-so at the bar.”

Values aren’t like that. Values cards refer to things you’ve actually paid attention to in choices, and which you found meaning to pay attention to. You’ve already had the experience.

Far-off goals may relate to our values. Maybe we think accomplishing them will bring us closer to our values. For instance, that if you got rich you could finally spend time playing music.

Goals may also provide a context for values. Someone who finds meaning in visual creativity, might set a goal to publish a weekly comic with a friend.

The goal is something they haven’t done yet, and there are infinitely many of them. But the value is something they already know.

Preferences also vastly outnumber values, but for a different reason.

Actually, for two reasons.

First, there are many preferences that are about pleasure but not about about life meaning. Perhaps you loooove chocolate cake, but a life filled with chocolate cake wouldn’t be a meaningful one for you.

Second, you’ll have many preferences that are related to your values, but only connected via a long train of inferences. Maybe you love walking in forests, the way the forest light opens your heart, and you think that, if Trump is elected, the forests will be cut down. So, you prefer Biden to Trump. Your Biden preference is connected to your walking-in-forests heart-open source of meaning, but so are a million other preferences.

So, we can save a ton of time by collecting a person’s sources of meaning instead of their goals or preferences. We cut right to what’s precious and immediate, for them, about being alive. The basic ways of living, choosing, and attending, which they find meaningful. The things they need spaces for.

I’ve found that learning all of this—seeing the universe of meaning, making values cards from your emotions—it changes a person.

It changed me! Not long ago, I was focused on my goals and fears—including fears of being unloved, or worthless, or bad. Developing this language of meaning made it clear when these other things pulled me away from doing what’s meaningful to me. I started to put meaning at the center.

I’ve watched many people go through this, at the School for Social Design.

I get to watch all this happen when people go through our course.

But I think the most important change is that, when you put meaning at the center of your own life, it protects you from many of the mindset problems I mentioned in chapter 1.

For one, you hustle a bit less. When you prioritize meaning, it means exploration and curiosity go first. You’re also less drawn in by the attention economy

—the doomscrolling, polarization, and internet outrage. You’re less drawn in by the “consumption economy” or by ideological battles. You return to the core social glue of meaning and shared space.

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So, we are surrounded by funnel and tube entrepreneur and designers.

I believe it’s fundamentally different to be a spacemaker.

Let's say you want to make a retreat for scientists. You want your retreat to be meaningful for this value: deep work.

Now, this is one of my values. Working for many years to make something—something which may not even be successful in the end.

The middle of the values card covers what people attend to, when they live by this value. Let’s take a look. They attend to

Now, once you’ve picked a value like this, and a context, like making a retreat, there's three types of thinking you can do, to make your retreat meaningful on purpose, for the value that you picked.

First, you can analyze your retreat out into funnels, tubes and spaces.

Let’s follow an individual participant through the retreat.

Once you have a diagram like this one, you can be much clearer about what you’re making.

So, just dividing things clearly like this can help a lot. It’s especially good to match spaces and sources of meaning. Once you do this, your participants can help you shape each space. You can ask them: is the space good for attending to, and choosing by, what’s on the values card? If not (you can ask) how could it be better?

That’s the heart of the design method I teach.

But there’s more you can do.

People can’t do what’s meaningful to them all the time. They have to balance things that are deeply meaningful with other things that are important.

In general, you want to ask: what kinds of goals and norms might crowd out the sources of meaning?

So, that’s two kinds of thinking you can do, to make something meaningful on purpose. Break things into funnels, tubes and spaces. Look for goals and norms that could crowd out values in the spaces.

Using these two kinds of thinking, people can get pretty far. But the real win is from a third kind of thinking. To show it, I have to go deeper into what a value is.

Look closely at this values card, at the middle part. You can see that living by a value doesn’t happen at one moment. Instead, it’s spread out over time. You probably found the curiosities before you found the research methods or colleagues, for instance.

Meaning is not something we experience in an instant—meaning is a realization, an assessment that we have, when we look at our lives, that we were able to attend to what was important to us. Meaning is many moments of choice, woven together through time.

And at each of these points in time, you had to attend to and choose certain things. Some of that attention is meaningful — that’s what goes on the values card. But at each point in time, there are other kinds of, less meaningful attention and choices to make.

I like to use a grid to picture this. In the grid, time goes from left to right. And vertically, we have the different states of attention and choice. In order to attend to something, you need options to attend to, information about each option, and some kind of skill at discerning how to choose. In order to choose something, you often need to finesse an environment or setup to make the choice possible, then take some kind of bold action.

All this, is what it takes to do deep work. The stuff we put on the values card is the meaningful stuff to attend to and choose by, but behind every meaningful moment is a rich backstory.

Now, any of these things might be hard to do. But if you can’t do them, you won’t be able to do deep work.

For that reason, we call them “hard steps”.

Now, if somebody would find meaning in deep work, but they're not doing deep work, it could be that any of these hard steps were blockers for them.

This is one of two reasons that someone might not be able to do deep work.

The mark of a good space, is that—first, goals and expectations don’t get in the way of the value—and second, a good space makes the hard steps easier to take.

Let’s think again about the deep work retreat we want to organize.

These ideas may seem obvious—but my experience is that they’re only obvious once you’ve thought through the hard steps!

And here’s the best part: once you figure out the hard steps for a source of meaning, they can be applied across contexts.

These same hard steps—the ones that improved our retreat—can be used to improve anything for deep work!

To prove this, I’ll use them to improve Twitter.

This may sound like a joke: Twitter’s short posts and feeds are kind of the opposite of deep work. But it’s not entirely a joke: I actually have found deep work colleagues on Twitter.

And I think Twitter could be better for that.

Here I’ve highlighted some of the relevant hard steps.

So, imagine you’re Andy Matuschak, and you’re using Twitter. You see one of your own tweets, but is has this extra box at the bottom asking—“Hey, has you're thinking evolved on this topic?”

You think, “yeah, it has” so you click the “capture” button and choose some earlier tweets on the same topic. These tweets are precursors to the more recent one. Together, they show a timeline of how your thinking has evolved.

You also pick some twitter users who helped you evolve your thinking, maybe based on who replied to the earlier tweets. Maybe you also type something, about how your thinking changed, and post it!

If Twitter had this, you’d see these “evolution threads” as you scrolled.

I think it would help with all these things:

If twitter had that feature, probably more deep work would happen. Because it addresses some of the hard steps of connecting with colleagues and communities for deep work.

So in this chapter, I've walked through three ways you can make things meaningful, on purpose.

I've made them into a kind of “bento box”, which can guide you, as you design.

If you use the bento box as you design, you’ll make a space where people can live by their source of meaning. A meaningful space, for the value you picked.

Many people are using this bento box to make more deeply meaningful things.

And there are new stories like this all the time.

These people are making spacemaking into a craft. They are spacemakers.

I believe spacemakers will soon be quite a prestigious group.

Just as neurosurgeons need to take great care while operating on their patient’s brains, spacemakers take a similar care with what gives us meaning in life.

Those who can be trusted to do this—to keep things meaningful—will be honored. They will be put in positions of great responsibility. They will be trusted to repair the institutions that have been destroyed by funnel thinking—trusted to fix the problems with research, with democracy, with education, and so on.

I call forth the spacemakers. It’s your time to shine.

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So, onto the last chapter!

With values cards, in chapter 2, I showed how we can be more intentional about meaning in our own lives. With hard steps in chapter 3, I showed how we can make meaningful spaces for others.

Imagine if many individuals articulated their values, and many spacemakers made beautiful spaces for them. Imagine a kind of a renaissance of spaces.

Such a renaissance would only go so far, because large-scale systems—like social media, markets, and recommender systems—act by piling up strangers. And because they suffer from what I called “recommender disdain”—the problem where social media recommenders don’t recommend spaces as much we’d benefit from them.

So, at large scales, funnel and tube entrepreneurs will remain more successful than space makers.

That's not my goal. I don't want space makers to be niche. I want them to be the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. I want the latent demand for meaning and togetherness to be completely unlocked.

So, in this last chapter, I want to sketch out an alternative vision for those large scale systems—for social media, for markets, and for recommenders. I want to show that they could be deeply changed.

I should say up front that I don’t have a plan to actually get them changed. To do that, would, I think, require a vast cultural shift. Like, if it became common sense that sources of meaning are what we should organize our lives around, and if the public was demanding a reorganization of economic, political, and technological systems to suit this. Demanding to return spaces to their rightful place.

I know, that might be wishful thinking. But if it were true, we’d have a question, which is, what should those new systems look like. In this chapter, I want to sketch an answer. At least the beginning of one.

My hope is just to convince you that such systems could be made.

So, imagine if the app store on your phone knew the kinds of spaces you were missing in your life.

For me, what if it knew I’m looking for physical exploration spaces, or intellectual community spaces? What if it could sort apps to help me be more fulfilled?

To pull this off, you’d want a database of the most common sources of meaning that go unfilled in people's lives. Even just a few hundred of them.

And you’d want to know a bit about my relationship to each source of meaning:

At first, you’d want to train this system with explicit feedback

Let's say I had such a recommender built into my phone. Earlier, it recommended this app—Matter—to me, because I wanted intellectual community. Later, it could ask for feedback about how that recommendation went.

It could ask: “oh, are you finding companions to share your interest? Are you finding research questions you're deeply curious about?” It checks in with me about whether Matter’s actually good for the source of meaning I have, based on what’s in the middle of the values card.

So, Apple can use this data to rank Matter, and to decide whether to recommend Matter or not. But it doesn’t have to stop there. We can use the same data to rank Apple’s recommender!

Here’s a kind of report card about how the App Store is doing for me, including all the time I’ve spend in recommended apps and whether they were meaningful. I can use this report to compare Apple’s recommender with others, for my sources of meaning. Is Apple better or worse than Facebook, at bring people meaningful lives?

What’s great about this, is the incentives it creates.

Once this stuff is measured, there’s a chance to align so much with human values.

If governments, tech stacks like iOS and Android, and markets were all accountable to life meaning, that would be a civilizational shift.

The centerpiece would be this review. At first it would need to be explicit. People would need to understand what this data is all about. Later, software will guess our sources of meaning and just have us confirm. Software will find evidence of us living our values, as we message and interact, rather than with an explicit review.

That’s all pretty exciting. But I think we can do even better. To get into it, let’s go back to chapter 1, when I talked about piling up strangers.

What we need is something in the middle.

I cannot stress enough how important this is.

So many structures in our society pile up strangers:

If we can come up with an alternative structure—that means all of these things get reinvented. A profound societal shift.

So let’s see what we can do.

When I have a problem like this, I often try thinking of something that’s not scalable, but meets the other criteria.

So, we need a social structure where there's lasting relationships, deep possibilities are surfaced, and the roles of creator and consumer are blurred. But it also should be open to strangers, and surface excellence.

Can you think of something like that?

There's more than one answer, but here’s my favorite one.

A breakdance circle.

Also called a “cypher”, this just a circle of breakdancers where one at a time someone goes into the circle and shows off, and everyone cheers them on.

Thinking about what makes a cypher work, I think it's three things.

We can compare the collaborative production in a cypher, with what’d happen if these people were just dancing with their closest friends.

So cyphers have some of the advantages we’re looking for.

But at cyphers, the “consumption” isn’t separate from creation. Everyone’s there together, with the same group mission, and deep possibilities are discovered and pursued: new aesthetic values, new styles, new ways of relating, new ways of jamming.

I’ll show another example. Something more scalable.

Science! Science has a lot in common with breakdance. Look at writing a scientific paper. It travels through a sequence of spaces, each of them is a bit like a breakdance cypher. There are shared values, non-transactional relationships, and a group mission.

This as a series of groups. which cover a continuum between production and consumption. Everyone kind of does both, but there’s more production on the left side and more consumption on the right.

As something moves from group to group it's produced, refined, discussed, assessed, annotated, etc. My favorite word for this is—it’s being legitimated. By the time it gets all the way to the right it’s a full-fledged, legitimate, published, scientific paper.

It gets this way by accumulating little labels. Labels like grounded claims! and field redefining!. They are assessments of quality, and they have to do with the sources of meaning of scientists.

This whole system scales in an interesting way. It scales in three directions.

Also like breakdance,

I want to call this kind of structure — where people in a series of spaces collaborate to get something co-produced, refined, annotated, and discussed — where production and consumption are mingled and social — and where work, proceeding forwards, accumulates these kinds of values-aligned social assessments of excellence. I want to call that structure a space train. Because when I zoom out, to me it looks a bit like a train. A train made of spaces.

And also because. Well. SPACE TRAIN.

Space trains are a third path, between friends-only structures and piling up strangers. In space trains, you’ve got lasting relationships, deep possibilities get surfaced, and roles stay flexible. Plus, they’re open to strangers, excellence-surfacing, and scalable.

If Sandra, William and Margaret, our spacemakers from chapter 1, had scaled their operations inside space trains, they could have all these advantages.

Sandra likes to throw events. She’d be part of a collective of event designers, and would refine her event structure, together with others in that group. When her event is ready for prime time, it wouldn't be Sandra alone who signs off on it. The other members of her group would make some assertions about her event. They’d attest that it creates a vulnerable environment, or it opens up creativity, or that it’s a good space for localism and food. These tags would be based on what Sandra's event refining collective specializes in. The tags would propel the event structure or description forward into another space of values-aligned event curators. Maybe one of them would come to experience Sandra’s event in person. They’d discuss it, provide some more tags, more related to their specialty. That would propel the event into friend groups who like to experience these kinds of events together. They’d become aware of the event structure, and could attend Sandra's event together.

Note:

We can imagine something similar with William’s poetry—using a train of tags and of spaces of poetry appreciation, his poems will find their way to whomever’s hearts they will set a fire.

Space trains can be used in many places.

Social media like TikTok has the piles of strangers, creator and fans type of structure.

Let’s redesign it.

First, I’m going to make it clear that I’m in a group. I do the standard up and down swipe to swipe videos. And I can swipe left and right to change groups.

Here, I’m in this “Solace and Wisdom” group, together with this guy, John Green.

In this group, we stitch-respond to people having a hard time.

Before posting, we pass around our drafts. John’s just passed us a draft of his. He talks to a woman who's crying, about the Emily Dickinson poem “Hope”.

I love how John’s done it. So, I select some tags we use in the group to mark out the kinds of excellence we look for in solace and wisdom.

Alternatively, I could have made some suggestions for John, to help him achieve the excellences we’re going for.

But he knocked it out of the park on his first try.

Those tags will make the video appear in other groups. It might even be seen by the woman he stitched with.

OK, now I'm caught up on solace and wisdom.

I want to post something. Let me move the post button over here so we can tell it posts into the group.

Now I can swipe right, to see another group. This is the programming languages and interfaces group, where we demo new programming languages and interface ideas. Oh, Adam Wiggins has something new!

I’ll watch that later. I've got something to share.

I hope the other members will refine it with me! Or tag it with the excellences that we care about, here in programming languages and interfaces.

That’s my TikTok redesign. In it, I focused on two of my interests. But the same tagging and sharing interface could work for dance videos, comedy, etc. So long as each group can sync up on values.

I doubt TikTok will make a big change like this. But someone will.

All I want to show here, right now, is that it’s possible to make a social media structure that doesn’t pile up strangers. That creates space trains instead.

Stories pass through groups and accumulate labels. Consumption also takes place in groups. In fact, the distinction between creation and consumption is blurred, just like in a breakdance circle.

So you might be thinking:

If space trains are so great, why aren’t they already the default way that things get done? Why is the default structure of social media, markets, and recommenders one that piles up strangers?

I think there are three main reasons.

First, space trains require that the group inside each space, that they sync up on values. On which types of excellence they want to co-produce, and curate.

Historically, this has been quite hard. It takes communication and introspection. And I said in chapter 1, we’ve lacked a common vocabulary with which to do it.

My hope, is that new technology—like values cards, from chapter 2, and like large language models—can make it much easier to sync up on values.

The second reason, is that space trains are made of spaces. Recently, spaces have been hard to make, so space trains have also been hard to make.

Maybe the bento box, from chapter 3, can help. It made it easier to make that “deep work” science retreat. It can also make it easier to make the spaces in a space train.

Take, collaborators, working on a paper. Ideally, this would be a space for deep work. We can use the middle part of the bento box and look for goals that crowd out deep work.

So, one thing we’d want in the space train is alternate funding structures, institutional roles, or career trajectories, to reduce these pressures

Ok, let’s look at the hard steps.

One can imagine addressing both the crowding out and these hard steps together. What if prestigious awards or positions could come just from asking questions or proposing methods. That could be an alternative to racking up citations, or to pursuing safe, incremental publications.

These changes would be hard to make across all of science, but they’d be pretty easy to attach to one collaborator group, as software infrastructure. And if it was common knowledge that deep work was important for science, and these hard steps were blocking it, there’d be a reason to scale that software, attach funding to it, and so on.

So, that’s two reasons why space trains haven’t already become the default. And with both of them, I see some reason to hope they’ll change.

The third reason I’m a little more stuck on, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable.

So, that’s space trains. Space trains are my deeper proposal to repair markets, recommenders, and social media. Currently, they see you mostly alone, mostly interacting with funnels and tubes, and they’re unlikely to learn your sources of meaning. I think space trains would change that.

Space trains are, I hope, also how we can fix democracy, education, science, and art.

In each of those categories, certain values or sources of meaning make the whole system work. One of those values, in science, is deep work. Big advances in science usually involve deep work.

Science has gotten worse for deep work. And for other important values of scientists. A similar decay happened in education, in democracy, and art. In each case, we can draw out the field as a space train, then make each space meaningful for those key values.

That makes things more meaningful for scientists, for politicians, for artists, for educators.

But it also makes those fields more productive.

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So, that’s what I’ve got.

I guess that’s enough for one video.

One thing you might find implausible, is, how short this video is, and how big the social problems are. How could a few new ideas (values cards, hard steps, spaces…) solve so many social problems?

That might seem weird. But something like this happens every few hundred years. A new literacy transforms society.

One factor that limits social organization is the information people can pass around. And this changes over time.

In medieval society, few were articulate about goals and preferences. What mattered about someone was not whether they had goal X or Y, but whether they were a king, a peasant, a priest, a woman, or a slave.

The transition to modern society was a transition from articulacy about roles, to articulacy about goals.

Goals and preferences were themselves a breakthrough! When people became articulate about goals, they started to make contracts with each other, to transact, to form temporary coalitions and vote or fight together, to advance their goals.

Nowadays, people have a clear enough sense of their goals that they can use large scale systems like Google search, and to do lists, and project management to make them happen.

Similarly, the transition from modern to postmodern society was a transition from articulacy about goals, to articulacy about consumer tastes, subcultures, and so on.

Here’s some of these transitions. On the right, you see the new institutions that emerged, and in the middle, the new kind of information people became aware of inside themselves, that they were able to talk about and build relationships around. This made them see how society should be changed, and led to these new institutions.

In each case, a new way of understanding ourselves spreads, and creates a new vocabulary. Then large-scale systems get built on that new vocabulary.

It’s the great clock of history, ticking along.

Each tick of this clock involves tremendous effort. People need to learn new ways of interacting, and new systems need to be built.

This only happens when the previous systems and ways of talking are breaking down.

Well, guess what?

That's what's happening now. The vocabularies we have—about goals and preferences—have gotten us a long way, but they’re straining at the seams. It's time for the big clock to strike a new hour.

When this happens, potential new vocabularies get proposed.

Right now, one proposal is feelings-articulacy. Another is oppressions-articulacy. Neither of those is working out. They don’t show us how to rebuild big things.

In this talk, I’ve tried to show how—with meaning articulacy—we can rebuild things, big and small.

That means we’re at a pivotal moment. Like, right before the American and French revolutions, when new ideas about private households, goals, markets, and voting were spreading through the population.

What we're talking about, is a massive transformation of nearly every aspect of society. We're talking about billions of people changing the vocabulary they use, their ways of relating. We're talking about the redesign of institutions all the way from local businesses to nation states, around meaning and values.

So, this is not a thing that a small group can do.

But every change starts with a small group.

What could a small group do?

Okay, so now we’re entering the realm of strategy. Strategy is hard! Without an absolutely inspired strategy, this project is doomed.

To defend an idealistic movement against forces like these is really, really hard.

I can’t tell you, yet, how we’ll do it. But there are some plans in the works, and we’re gathering the best strategic thinkers in the world to make those plans better.

Here, in the last few minutes of this talk, I just want to give a little taste of those plans.

So, phase 1 involves building prototypes, and a community with a common vision. This talk begins to sketch that vision. But much more is needed:

To sketch these things out, we’ll need conferences, meetups, online forums, full of advocates and researchers, working to rebuild society on meaning.

And there’s prototyping to be done:

The next phase is one of rapid expansion.

We want to help a million people identify their sources of meaning. To discover which kinds of meaning they’re yearning for. I believe this can be an incredible experience, and that it will unlock tremendous demand. Once people understand what makes their life meaningful, they’ll want to drop the bullshit and focus on the meaning.

By unlocking that demand, we can link those million people into an ecosystem to help them do just that.

What would such an ecosystem include?

So, meaning profiles, and an ecosystem. You can view this as a technical shift. But you can also view it as a cultural transformation.

This is a new mythical structure for society. A new story to tell ourselves, about who we are, where we belong, and how we can get along.

My colleague, Ellie Hain, is all about articulating that new myth. She has a talk about that you can watch on our website, rebuildingmeaning.org.

At some point, as this expands, we're going to run into conflicts with business as usual:

Here, that new social vision will be important. The more people take to it, the harder it is to fake. Also important will be robust metrics and auditing structures, so people can see where the real meaning economy is happening, and where it's being faked. Report cards—like the one I showed in chapter four.

By then, we’ll have in-roads in academia, continuing work I started here to redesign systems like voting and markets around meaning. There will be renowned professors, think tanks, and policy people.

To support this, we will have amassed some economic power. There’s already a school for training spacemakers—the school for social design, and an open source textbook. The school can partner with bootcamps, accelerators and funds. There can be incubators for space-based startups, and a kind of meaning mafia.

This will eventually translate to a broad social and political movement. But… such a movement will need to be more robust against co-option than, say, effective altruism or social justice has been. How can we do that? We don’t have a concrete plan, but there are some unusual techniques for managing status and power in the community, that we’re excited to try.

I have just sketched a hard road ahead. But I believe it’s the hot path to restoring social trust, repairing democracy, science, and education, reducing hustle and ideological warfare, to creating corporations and recommenders and other structures that people can trust with their lives and data. And to creating a society that has less trauma, less manipulation, more meaning and togetherness.

But… can we do it?

You might be the difference between this happening or not.

We need to rapidly build a support network, advisory network, and team.

Here’s two ways you can help:

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Alright, time for some credits.

So, the centerpiece of all this, is the conception of “sources of meaning” or “values”.

Here, my work descends very clearly from that of two philosophers:

So that's values—which is also where I got the related ideas of spaces and hard steps.

Moving to my critique of capitalism, that I focused on in chapter one, I think it owes a lot to these three men.

Okay. Now, let's move over to the left side of this page. These are people I worked with, developing all this.

That was a short credits page. I recommend reading the work of everyone mentioned. Once this talk has been out for a few months, I’ll make a further reading document that gives pointers, and maybe even run a book club.

In the meantime, I do have a textbook online at textbook.sfsd.io, and that has a bibliography.

You can also go through the course that Ben, Anne, and I run together, at the school for social design .

In any case, I hope to meet you, and see you soon.