What's missing in our approach to the wicked potentials of our era?
Identifying missing capacities in how we relate with hyper-objects and suggesting new developmental technology to start addressing them.
We’ve got a bunch of names for the kinds of puzzles, problems, and opportunities that we’re uniquely facing as a species in 2025: Hyperobjects,1 Wicked Problems,2 Four quadrant puzzle,3 Polycrisis,4 etc.
Examples include: social media as an unaligned super-intelligence, AI, nuclear disarmament, climate change, taking myself and the world too seriously, sustainability, housing policy, mass incarceration, police, systemic racism, overfishing, global water management, education, homelessness, traffic.
I don’t love that they’re framed as problems because the framing matters (as I’ve argued before). But neither am I a fan of bypassing, marketing spin, or vagueness, so I’ll often call them “wicked potentials.”
I’m making this all up, and it still might be useful
This is an exploration for me that will help me clarify and communicate how I’m thinking, and signal alignment to potential allies and investors. I hope you think of this exploration more like a new toy or new musical instrument, and less like a scientific claim about reality. I am also not claiming that this is well-organized or complete, but rather a good starting point as a contribution to collective sense-making about dancing with these kinds of problem-potentials.
In this series I aim to start unpacking a meta-frame of how to address these “wicked problems,” in order to thrive, using UpTrust as an example.
UpTrust is addressing the “post-truth” “social media” “information ecology” “incentive landscape” issues we’re currently facing that leads to wild polarization and seems to be undermining the foundations of civilization along with individual wellbeing. At the same time, we see this “problem” as an incredible potential—we envision a trust layer of the internet that facilitates the coordination of a planetary nervous system, allowing us to harness collective intelligence in an unprecedentedly good way.
Although we’re looking at UpTrust as an organization, I believe this rough draft applies equally well to an NGO, government, catalytic community, etc.
That said: please note that while I think this is a useful frame, it is a construct with the intention of disclosing a more beautiful and loving world. The map is not only not the territory; what map we use is a choice, how we use it is a choice, and both have something decisive to say about our experience. If you choose to use this map in whole, or even bits of it, I hope you choose to use them playfully and with love.
A list of orientations that help reveal/create the potentiality
(with links that go more in-depth, but possibly more insufferable)
OK so here’s an overview of the lenses I’m currently sensing are required for engaging these wicked potentials and moving our world and collective experience toward more of what we want:
No villains— instead we need to see unconsciousness that is itself lovable
Integration of vision and practical in every decision — it must win at the old game
Addressing the whole developmental stack (what’s good for me, we, all of us): Personal development of the leadership and team on money, power, polarity embrace
Money must be loved (and boundaried)
Power must be loved, embraced, and boundaried/made conscious
Own the black market
Synthesis — yes, and (central / decentralized)
No false dichotomies (technical v cultural, etc)
Multi-perspectival: Embrace imperfection while hitting all four quadrants
Culture addressing the problem must:
Treat adults as adults
Embrace love
Understand that working hard is part of a good life
Have listening & leadership
Mission first, but adaptive
Lots of no, yet no sacred cows
Wise metrics: Complex systems need ways to detect both intended and unintended consequences
Long term: individual actors face short-term risks or costs in making a change—even if the collective long-term benefit would be substantial.
Works with / across many orgs
Multi-Jurisdictional Complexity
Over the next week I’m going to dive in to each one and not worry too much about this being super fun to read, because that takes a bunch of time and I’ve got a company to run :)
I’m also going to eschew AI review because every time I feed my content to AI it changes how and what I think, not always for the better, and I usually think it kills some of the vibe.5 See you tomorrow!
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1 “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”
2 “problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize”
3 Puzzles that can’t be resolved without addressing the mindset, culture, behaviors, and systems all simultaneously.
4 “Complex situation where multiple, interconnected crises converge and amplify each other, resulting in a predicament that is difficult to manage or resolve”
5 Fun fact: By the fourth post I did NOT manage to stay away from AI, and besides that being its own scary commentary on the state of my psyche and our world, it did slow me down and change how I thought about stuff, and I don’t know if it got better.