It’s not every day that you have the honor of meeting a national treasure who is creating new art genres and movements to help us expand our imagination and stretch our understanding of what’s possible.
First inspired by Marvel and DC comics in his youth, Dr. Walter D. Greason is the distinguished DeWitt Wallace Professor in the Department of History at Macalester College.
Wondering why there weren’t Black people in the futures presented in classic sci-fi stories, Walter became one of the founders of Afrofuturism, a new lens to re-imagine a tomorrow that’s inclusive for all. He also gave the world the “Wakanda Syllabus” and helped bring the fictional city of Wakanda to life in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Blank Panther blockbuster films!
Named one of “Today’s Black History Makers” by The Philadelphia Daily News, Walter is an educator, historian, media ecologist, economist, and urbanist all in one who has authored eighteen books on democracy, capitalism, and digital economies in the world today. His latest book and Amazon bestseller, “The Graphic History of Hip-Hop,” is a graphic novel and scholastic experience charting the evolution of the genre Hip-Hop and its myriad impacts on culture and society.
With such a deep wealth of wisdom on the power of art, especially in today’s infinite, digital landscape, combined with his understanding of the transformations shaping our society and culture both at a macro level and down to a personal one, it’s an honor to have Walter on the show. This is a conversation to revisit often as we explore some of the most pressing topics of our time as we transition from the Information Age to the Imagination Age.
Today’s conversation spans a wide array of topics, from the mythological power of comics to Walter’s perspective on the current state of democracy and the world as we transition to digital capitalism, opening up new avenues for economic freedom. Walter also shares what co-powering is, along with a snapshot of the current media landscape in the age of GenAI, the convergence of mediums, and the counter-convergence backlash we’re seeing globally. With expertise in Black Speculative Arts, the racial wealth gap, and patterns of economic globalization, Walter shares new frameworks to help us re-imagine the future as well as our relationships with time and each other.
In a world that can be overwhelming, Walter provides answers and shows what’s possible when we break free of current narratives and give ourselves the time, love, and permission to dream about what’s possible — enjoy listening to the episode and reading the overview here.
To kick off the discussion, Helen asks Walter to set the stage regarding the perils facing democracy. Walter makes it clear that the confluence of powerful new technologies like artificial intelligence and the proliferation of anti-democratic ideologies poses a threat to the personal and collective freedoms that societies have come to enjoy through years of struggle.
Dr. Walter D. Greason
At the same time, capitalism is in transition. Not since the invention of the printing press has the global information ecosystem changed as dramatically as it has since GenAI became available. People can create and consume information, make decisions, and influence others at a speed and scale like never before.
As we navigate these unprecedented tidal shifts, Walter reminds us that powerful forces are influencing this process in real time. Tech companies release new products that change what and how humans consider work, and, Walter predicts that many of the rules of the road for the next stage of digital capitalism will be written over the next three major global election cycles.
Grassroots participation in designing that next stage is both a necessity and an opportunity. According to Walter, a new economic paradigm has to be acceptable to the people actually participating in the market, not just to the people who build it.
Walter likes to focus on the opportunities that this transition can offer. Rather than bucking against the intrusions of modern technology, he embraces the idea of the digital footprint or digital identity. For him, leaning in and optimizing what has rapidly become the most visible version of oneself has unlocked opportunities for business, outreach, and empowerment.
Especially since the COVID-19 Pandemic, Walter says he’s been paying attention to how more people are starting “side hustles” enabled by technology to both supplement and replace traditional full-time jobs. At the individual level, the digital economy empowers people to liberate their finances from the constraints of time and space through “passive income.” In the big picture, Walter says that consumers are waking up to how they can maximize their own interests in the market by also offering their own talents as producers.
Broad access to the tools and resources needed to thrive in the modern economy is the basis of “co-powering,” a term coined by the Twin Cities Innovation Alliance’s (TCIA) Aasim Shabazz and which Walter weaves extensively into his socioeconomic principles. As opposed to “empowering,” which implies a top-down granting of power from a higher authority, Walter says that co-powering is from the bottom up. (Be sure to check out our special series from the TCIA’s Data 4 Public Good 2024 conference).
Dr. Walter D. Greason
Yet as individual freedoms and mobility expand in step with the digital markets, Walter identifies an almost equal and opposite push backward to the power structures of the status quo.
As a kid, Walter loved reading Marvel and DC comics. In college, he started forming ideas about the mythical power of comics to shape people’s ideas of what they could strive for. Then in the early 2000’s, he worked with a group of Marvel writers who were working to reinvent the Black Panther character. With a background in urban planning and design, and strong feelings about the power of comics to inspire, he pushed for a broader reimagining of the iconic Black superhero’s world. Right down to the locations of roads and rivers, Walter says he wanted to create the realest-feeling Wakanda possible.
His efforts culminated in the “Wakanda Syllabus,” a blueprint for the world of Black Panther. In building the syllabus and the world of Wakanda, Walter sought to take advantage of “media convergence,” the phenomenon where content in one genre or medium transforms into an entire human experience. The Harry Potter Universe, for instance, started as a book series that inspired multiple movie franchises, video games, infinite pop culture derivatives, a real-life version of a fictional sport, and even a physical location at Universal Studios.
Media convergence is the result of centuries of expanding access to media consumption and creation. The invention of cable TV and the internet enabled more creators to share their narratives, and facilitated new monetization models which lowered the risk for producing content outside the mainstream. Together, platforms and participants often converge around themes and trends, even if they each do it through their own lens. That’s media convergence in a nutshell.
Looking back, though, Walter says that around the same time that Marvel released the Black Panther movie in 2018, the West was beginning to starting to see backlash to media convergence. Walter traces the rise of what he calls “counter convergence” from 2016’s U.S. Presidential election and the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU, also citing the response to George Floyd’s killing and more recent “anti-woke” right-wing talking points.
Dr. Walter D. Greason
Walter says that counter convergence has deep philosophical implications in the 21st century. As so many fundamental truths we’ve taken for granted about the world are in flux, such as the value of human labor, the people who push counter convergence want to standardize our imaginations of what’s possible as a means of maintaining or regaining power.
With so many conflicting narratives and splintered media environments vying for our attention, Helen asks Walter how we find the common thread of truth in a fractured media landscape, especially after her conversation with Gerfried Stocker on “manufactured realities.” He responds by acknowledging the muddied waters that is the information ecosystem right now, and how the struggle to find reliable information can lead to cynicism. He advocates for media literacy education and for being intentional about curating the media you encounter.
Bigger picture, Walter says that we need a new international consensus like the Geneva Convention on Human Rights. Instead of banning chemical warfare, though, we need to hash out a regime that protects civilians from digital and information abuse.
Describing himself as the oldest living scholar of the topic, Walter says that he couldn’t have existed without the influences that we now refer to as Afrofuturism. He’s credited for three of the five pillars that make up Afrofuturism and is considered one of the founders of the movement.
Dr. Walter D. Greason
Popularized by writers and artists like Octavia Butler, early Afrofuturist works fixed the simple yet profound issue of Black people being completely absent from the imagined futures of classic and popular sci-fi narratives. Yet, Afrofuturism isn’t just sci-fi that features Black people. It’s a continuous and iterative effort to stretch the dominant cultural perception of what it is to be a Black person.
Today, Afrofuturism has evolved into a framework for imagining freer societies regardless of ethnicity. Afrofuturism shares many of its core tenets with “speculative design,” a framework for designing freer and more socioeconomically mobile societies by eliminating or reducing hierarchy.
How do we actually overcome the hierarchies we exist in and create the more interconnected world that Afrofuturism imagines?
Walter highlights the power of art, music, and the humanities to bring souls together in ways that speeches and facts cannot, like Mary Anderson’s voice disarming an Alabama Sheriff before he could shoot Martin Luther King, Jr. — the full story in the episode is worth a listen!
The other way he suggests is by rejecting the common saying “Time is money.” Instead, he believes that time is love; that we should think about time management in terms of making time for the things and people we value rather than try to find time for them between everything else.
Invoking Rasheedah Phillips, he says there’s no limit to the amount of healing and goodness we can offer each other if we focus our time on each other rather than commercial and work demands.
Dr. Walter D. Greason
Likewise, he says that time scarcity is a false mindset. We each have the power to shape our own perception of time independently from the institutions that measure and track it for us. Walter explains that we can choose to extend or shorten our experience of time based on how we choose to experience a given moment. Time with loved ones, for example, can make moments feel like lifetimes. With a mindset of time abundance, we can prioritize time for the things that make us feel good, knowing that there is still time for the necessary distractions of life.
By shifting our perception of time to prioritize connection, Walter believes that we can co-power one another through the turbulent socioeconomic landscape to realize the freedom and mobility that we dream about.
To close the interview, Walter leaves the audience with an impossible question: What is the best Wu Tang Clan Song ever produced? Let him know on his website or socials!
Thank you, Dr. Walter, for joining us on this special episode of Creativity Squared.
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Walter: And that sheriff in hearing her sing that song was so moved that he unloaded his gun and waited until King came near him and handed King the bullets and said, “my weapons have no power. I can’t fight against the kind of beauty and the struggle for justice that you represent.” It’s like, you’ve touched my heart and I know I was wrong.
[00:00:22] Walter: I don’t think we grapple enough with those kinds of stories about the power of art, the power of music, power of faith to kind of transform. how we relate to one another.
[00:00:32] Helen: It’s not every day that you have the honor of meeting a national treasure who’s creating new art genres and movements to help us expand our imagination and stretch our understanding of what’s possible.
[00:00:47] Helen: First inspired by Marvel and DC Comics in his youth, Dr. Walter D. Greason is the Distinguished DeWitt Wallace Professor in the Department of History at Macalester College. Wondering why there weren’t Black people in the futures presented in classic sci-fi stories, Walter became one of the founders of Afrofuturism, a new lens to reimagine a tomorrow that’s inclusive for all.
[00:01:15] Helen: He also gave the world the Wakanda syllabus and helped bring the fictional city of Wakanda to life in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Black Panther blockbuster films. Named one of today’s black history makers by the Philadelphia Daily News, Walter is an educator, historian, media ecologist, economist, and urbanist, all in one who has authored 18 books on democracy, capitalism, and digital economies in the world today.
[00:01:47] Helen: His latest book and Amazon bestseller, The Graphic History of Hip Hop, is a graphic novel and scholastic experience charting the evolution of the genre hip hop and its myriad impacts on culture and society. With such a deep wealth of wisdom on the power of art, especially in today’s infinite and digital landscape, combined with its understanding of the transformations shaping our society and culture, both at a macro level and down to a personal one, it’s an honor to have Walter on the show.
[00:02:24] Helen: This is a conversation I’ll be revisiting often as we explore some of the most pressing topics of our time as we transition from the Information Age to the Imagination Age. Today’s conversation spans a wide array of topics, from the mythological power of comics to Walter’s perspective on the current state on democracy and the world, as we transition to digital capitalism, opening up new avenues for economic freedom.
[00:02:55] Helen: Walter also shares what co-powering is, along with a snapshot of the current media landscape in the age of gen AI, the convergence of mediums and the counter convergence backlash we’re seeing globally with expertise in black speculative arts, the racial wealth gap and patterns of economic globalization, Walter shares new frameworks to help us reimagine the future, as well as our relationships with time and each other.
[00:03:27] Helen: In a world that can be overwhelming, listen in as Walter provides answers and shows what’s possible when we break free of current narratives and give ourselves the time, love, and permission to dream about what’s possible. Enjoy.
[00:03:54] Helen: Welcome to Creativity Squared. Discover how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox, on YouTube, and on your preferred podcast platform. Hi, I’m Helen Todd, your host, and I’m so excited to have you join the weekly conversations I’m having with amazing pioneers in the space.
[00:04:13] Helen: The intention of these conversations is to ignite our collective imagination at the intersection of AI and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.
[00:04:30] Helen: Walter, welcome to Creativity Squared.
[00:04:33] Walter: Joy to be here with you.
[00:04:35] Helen: It’s so good to have you technically back on the show, cause we did a special series for the Data 4 Public Good, where you are a speaker and it was such like a great sampling and I know we have so much to talk about. So really excited, to dive in. For those who are meeting you for the first time, can you share who you are, what you do and a bit of your origin story with us?
[00:04:57] Walter: I’ll do my best. My name is Walter Greason. I am a professor of history. Currently, I am the DeWitt Wallace professor of history, which is an endowed chair, just a lifelong achievement award. So still adjusting, clearly, to the fact that I’ve done some good work and folks at the college value it, but that’s just a small piece of my life.
[00:05:23] Walter: I do a lot of work connecting history to education theory, connecting that to macroeconomic analysis. And then on top of those two things, building out how to use digital media and analyze emergent media platforms going forward in the 21st century. So, yeah, I have lots of pots full of different kinds of elements cooking all the time.
[00:05:50] Walter: The most recent piece following or during the time that we met is, The Graphic History of Hip Hop, which has completely changed my life. That around the world, people are writing to me, calling me every day, demanding more copies of the graphic novel. It’s invented a field, a very profitable field of graphic history, that we can teach factual material using graphic formats in ways that weren’t possible two years, five years, 10 years ago.
[00:06:26] Walter: And so this has become the hottest field in the world for scholars is can you produce art that speaks to your research? And so that’s a lot of what I’m doing right now is showing people how to convert texts into images and into sounds in ways that help people learn more effectively.
[00:06:47] Helen: Congratulations first and foremost on the success of The Graphic History Of Hip Hop. What did you say in our last conversation that it was like on the Amazon bestseller for how long?
[00:06:59] Walter: At the debut, it was number one for over two months and we just got back. We had our all time peak on Amazon, I think a week ago, we were at New York City for New York Comic Con.
[00:07:11] Walter: And that blew us right back up to the top of the chart again. So it’s just been unbelievable.
[00:07:15] Helen: Congratulations, and one reason that I’m so excited to have you on the show is part of Creativity Squared is to help envision a future where artists not only coexist with AI, but thrive.
[00:07:30] Helen: And it’s, you know, it’s a platform I use artists as, you know, the vehicle, but it’s really if artists are thriving, everyone’s thriving in society, you know, and so much of your life’s work has been about envisioning a different future. And I’m so excited to have you on the show to dive more into these concepts as we’re all the listeners and viewers are trying to wrap our heads around, what’s here and what’s happening.
[00:07:57] Helen: And so much of your work centers around the intersection of democracy, c apitalism and digital markets. So to start with, can you give us a snapshot or a time capsule of sorts of the current state of these three and what you’re seeing from like a bird’s eye view of the patterns, to the big topic of economic globalization, where they’re currently headed and what’s possible when we embrace a co-powered future, and I know we introduced co-powering with Aasim and in your previous interview, but we might need a refresher for our audience what that means too.
[00:08:32] Walter: Absolutely. So I’ll be a little succinct with the big concepts and then tie it all back together through the frame of co-powering and what we see Twin Cities Innovation Alliance doing with Aasim and Marika. So, democracy is in crisis.
[00:08:51] Walter: One of the biggest areas of concern for me is, the consensus that emerged from World War II around an international order that protects human rights is actively under assault. And there is a large international coalition, led by conservatives in North America, by autocrats in Asia and Europe and Russia, that want to reinstate a world of empires and dictatorships that existed in the 19th and the early 20th century.
[00:09:20] Walter: And it’s a massive danger to billions of people now and untold billions going forward. So democracy requires defense at this minute, not just within any single country, but around the world.
[00:09:33] Walter: Then when we come to capitalism, capitalism is in transition. And this is probably the most enduring piece of my research that will outlive me the longest, is that we’re in the midst of an information technology revolution. There has not been a similar transition in human experience since the invention of the printing press.
[00:09:56] Walter: And so I teach constantly about the need to understand what capitalism is, what it was to have agricultural capitalism versus industrial capitalism. And now what we are developing is digital capitalism. And we have people from Jeff Bezos to, the founders at Google to Steve Ballmer and, Elon Musk that are actively trying to shape what the next stage of digital capitalism will be, but it’s got to be embraced by people at the grassroots.
[00:10:29] Walter: It’s got to be understood by people who will labor in these new marketplaces. And so the debates around large language models or AI, that is deciding what kind of lives people will live for the rest of this century. And those questions are unsettled. And a lot of what comes out of the next three global election cycles will set the rules for what kind of lives people will live based in a digital economy.
[00:10:57] Walter: So that’s the thing I work on a lot is giving people the tools to make informed choices. So that’s democracy and then capitalism. Digital markets are the kind of subset of this question that, I remember when I started teaching students about digital markets more than a decade ago. We would talk about the way their devices would listen to them.
[00:11:19] Walter: And they couldn’t imagine that their phone would track their behavior or their laptop might focus and kind of tune in and be under someone else’s control to pick up what’s on their camera or what’s on their microphone. And I remember it was groups of students who were like, “is that why they keep trying to sell me socks after I Googled socks?”
[00:11:42] Walter: And so whatever topic, they just were unfamiliar with how cookies could be used and the way people would aggressively data mine and sell their information to further stimulate the marketplace. And the idea of having a digital footprint was completely foreign. And we’re just at the initial stages of that becoming part of everyone’s lives.
[00:12:02] Walter: But I’ll be very frank for me, from the first moment I saw what Facebook was, I was like, “Oh, this means all of us are now compiling a digital profile and everything we do online will be visible to people that we’ll never meet.” And so all of my online behavior has been through that lens of assuming I’m always on camera.
[00:12:24] Walter: I am always visible to someone who may not have my best interests at heart and that has helped me build a variety of different initiatives and programs and businesses and helps people figure out how to interact in the digital marketplace in a way that empowers them. And the things that I’ve seen that have been the most impactful, are things that I teach around passive income.
[00:12:48] Walter: That people don’t have to rely on a single job or even a set of part time jobs in order to maintain quality of life. And so during COVID, what was really apparent to me is that when people could not go into work in the same way that they had to manage their time at home differently. All of a sudden, these people were starting up small businesses and quote unquote side hustles and extra gigs that were making them much more financially free.
[00:13:14] Walter: And so there’s just, I could spend the rest of my career studying the economy in 2020, 2021, 2022, because it enables people to have a higher standard of living, that’s not as dependent on having a single full time employer. And so that’s part of the shifts of what’s happening in digital markets is that if we just allow ourselves to be consumers, we’re losing out on the ways that we can be producers and distributors and people who maximize the commercial digital market space, for our own interests.
[00:13:48] Helen: Thank you. Could you also mention co-powering and what that means and how it all plays into all of this as well?
[00:13:56] Walter: Yeah. So the concept of empowerment had gained enormous traction over the last 30 years of the way people who are in authority can share authority or share resources and allow people to have more say about what they can accomplish.
[00:14:12] Walter: But co-powering moves us beyond the empowerment paradigm. And it’s very much what I was talking about with digital markets is that when people have the ability to use tools and resources that they have access to on their own terms, there isn’t someone with vastly more money or more education dictating the way someone can improve their lives and the range of options they have.
[00:14:36] Walter: Co-powering allows us to define the options for ourselves and to find paths that really someone in authority might not see, or they might be threatened by, and that’s the piece that actually lets us achieve human freedom in a deeper, more profound, and more enduring way that, like I said, it’s not just relying on a single employer or even a group of employers, that you can be anything within the society within the economy that you hope to achieve and that co-powering principle… Aasim is a genius for really kind of inventing the phrase and then teaching people how to embrace it.
[00:15:14] Walter: And that’s what the Twin Cities Innovation Alliance has developed, and I take it on the road in any number of places in the US and around the world to talk about, in fact, in the last hour, I did a workshop that was like, if you’re in authority, the best thing you can do is kind of share what you have to share, but then step back and don’t dictate the way that people will engage with it or put it to use.
[00:15:37] Walter: Take that as an opportunity for you to learn outside of the frame of reference that, that you inherited when you came to be quote unquote empowered. There has to be a kind of humility in co-powering that allows everyone to participate and to shape directions that no one anticipated before they entered into the process.
[00:15:56] Helen: Yeah, I love that it comes from more of a community based approach to sharing, power and influence versus the empowerment and the more hyper individualistic approach that has been so embedded in at least, the US ethos, for so long, but it seems like a lot of these ethos, like hyper individualism is all being challenged too. One thing I’d love for you to speak about as well is to the media landscape, the current one and then the counter convergence that’s now powered by AI because that’s all really related to these topics too
[00:16:36] Walter: Yeah so, for me, I took my initial training in this area as a media ecologist, which is a field invented by Marshall McLuhan out of Toronto and, really popularized by Neil Postman out of New York city in the 1970s and 1980s, and they were confronting the reality that broadcast television was giving way to cable and satellite television.
[00:17:04] Walter: So we all live in a world now where there are thousands of channels and all kinds of streaming options. But what Postman and McLuhan were envisioning was a way to be critical, a way to be knowledgeable about how complicated the media environment was becoming, that fewer and fewer people would read newspapers or magazines, that the website landscape would be infinite.
[00:17:27] Walter: And that’s no way to find as a human being, all of the data that you have access to. Process of learning, how to assess your presence and your interactions in a media landscape. That’s what we see through the first two decades of the 20th century. And the example I teach students about it is Harry Potter.
[00:17:47] Walter: That with the creation of those novels, they were then used by corporations to open up all kinds of new platforms for content creation. Harry Potter wasn’t just the books, it was also the movie series and this generational experience of growing up watching those stories. It was also creating Hogwarts as a physical place for people to visit.
[00:18:11] Walter: And to have these kinds of costumes and we now have Quidditch teams all over the world that actually participate in this fictional sport, it’s become real. And so that’s what convergence media is. Media scholars began to talk about how did content in one genre transform into an entire human experience.
[00:18:33] Walter: The piece that I’ve done the most with in this area of convergence media is the, Marvel Cinematic Universe. So my entire approach to literacy was grounded in reading Marvel and DC comics as a really young person. And by the time I was in undergraduate and graduate school, I was theorizing around the mythological power of comics to shape people’s sense of what they could strive for.
[00:19:00] Walter: But in the first seven years of the 21st century, I worked with writers at Marvel comics, Christopher Priest, and, Reginald Hudlund when they reinvented the Black Panther character. And because I was studying urban design and urban planning, what I brought to them was, well, if you’re going to talk about this character and his family and the people involved in his nation, it’s like, you need to have a really specific idea of how the country is designed, like, where are the roads?
[00:19:28] Walter: Where are the rivers? What’s the telecommunication system? You have this weird metal called vibranium. What does that mean for the ongoing technological development of the entire society? And this completely revolutionized the way people wrote about the character. I think last time I looked over, 60,000 people working for Marvel had studied the kind of encyclopedia that I put online about, okay, this is how you make Wakanda real.
[00:19:54] Walter: And that became the blueprint for what was used in the Black Panther movie. And then Wakanda Forever, both for Wakanda itself, as well as for, Telecom, which is where, Namor or, Cuckoo Con is from. They just made much more realistic places that became fantasy environments. But that was happening just at the moment when people started to want to shut down convergence as a media phenomenon.
[00:20:21] Walter: So 2016 is Brexit. It’s the emergence of the Trump campaign and billionaires were afraid, whether it was on Netflix or Amazon, any number of different emergent media platforms that there were too many people getting too many voices, a chance. And so it, for me as an Afrofuturist, there were stories like a Lovecraft Country or, the Watchmen series on HBO, that were pushing the edges of what Afrofuturism could do, but they were considered as threats to the social order.
[00:20:53] Walter: Jordan Peele and the series of films he’s done, Get Out, and Us, and Nope. These stories all are pressing and trying to break open the dam of who gets to control narrative in the world. And so by the time we get to 2020, there’s a real sense that, and I call it counter convergence, that only a few people should be in charge of these media landscapes. We can’t allow but so many people to craft the stories that people have access to.
[00:21:25] Walter: The global protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd here in Minneapolis, drove a lot of that. The worry that what we’ve seen, Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk call “woke,” or they call it “the woke mind virus” is explicitly about using counter convergence to shut down the avenues for people to express themselves.
[00:21:48] Walter: And so counter convergence in our media landscape is about narrowing the possibilities of our imaginations. And so this has deep philosophical implications in the 21st century. The people who are pushing counter convergence want us to move towards empire where, if you’re not shown something is possible, you’ll never dream of an alternate possibility and that they want to standardize, in the way that industrialists used factories to kind of manufacture cars and spark plugs and every other kind of physical technology of the 20th century, they want to use counter convergence to standardize our imaginations and what we think is possible and what kinds of languages we can speak and that’s to me is impermissible.
[00:22:33] Walter: It’s a massive violation of our human rights, but unless we stand up and fight for it as individuals, as communities, we will lose the access to this vast frontier that can really create a much freer world over the next 50, 60, 70 years.
[00:22:54] Helen: There’s so much in all of your answers and different ways to go, but one thing that came to mind as you were speaking is in terms of like controlling the narrative. Scott Galloway has said in some of his presentations that, you know, when we see journalists like getting laid off left and right from major media publications, some of our institutions failing. You have companies like Facebook and Meta that have a massive PR department that’s shaping the narrative and spending a ton of money.
[00:23:28] Helen: So that’s one thing. I did a paper a couple of years ago with a brilliant, legal friend of mine that’s, as we re imagine the future, we’re right now, we’ve got Mark Zuckerberg, one person with so much power that controls and making corner office decisions for what, 8 billion people, like that’s so much power in a single hand.
[00:23:49] Helen: So that came to mind. One thing though, that I was thinking about last night ahead of this interview is the control of the narrative through our current media and the fracturing of how we consume content. Like if we all are content, which I think we are, and that’s where we’re moving to, we’re all content creators.
[00:24:09] Helen: And to your point, in this new economy, we’ll all be producers, distributors, creators, and all of this. And at the same time, if we’re so fractured, and this is an episode with Gerfried Stocker of like manufacturing our own realities and universes, where is the overarching story of commonality and common truth across these worlds?
[00:24:34] Helen: I mean, I was like, think about this of like, you know, there’s, great to have so many voices, but how do you find the commonality over them? So curious your thoughts on that.
[00:24:44] Walter: Whew, there are a lot of ways to answer that. I’m trying to think of the most constructive way. So like there’s, clearly my students, we had an experiment with large language models earlier this year, where for me in preparation for a keynote, I developed eight small language models based on different academic disciplines where those, they’re essentially web crawlers and chat bots, that would then learn from the best of religious studies scholarship, the best of philosophical scholarship, and then would teach each other.
[00:25:23] Walter: And the ultimate web bot, my eighth iteration of it, was able to apply its own sense of humility and say, well, we’re not really sure there’s a lot of ambiguity around the most difficult questions. And it was just encouraging to me to see that the bot could learn to restrain itself and not assume it can distribute truth the way that some of the more sophisticated large language models claim that this is the best way to answer a question.
[00:25:47] Walter: So I’m hopeful about that because that lets us screen information in a way that still is somewhat open ended. At the same time, one of my one of my students that spring did a smaller scale project for about a month where her small language model was explicitly about media literacy and how do you actually discern, disinformation and misinformation in an environment where you’re bombarded with content.
[00:26:18] Walter: And it’s a really powerful project, but at the same time, as soon as people see it, they’re able to detect kind of the falsity of the way it’s been packaged. And so it just, it reinforces an uncertainty that people like, “there’s nothing I can rely on.
[00:26:36] Walter: I’m disillusioned. I’m skeptical. I don’t know what to actually use as a solid foundation and moving forward.” And that’s an extraordinarily dangerous place for us to be. And in an information economy, as we see, there are demagogues everywhere. I see them every day, frankly, online. They’re like pirates.
[00:26:55] Walter: They attempt to steer people’s attention so that they can make a short term profit. And so it’s within that, that we come to your question about if you are simultaneously a content producer, a content distributor, someone who is actually also, consuming vast amounts of content, how thoughtful are you about those discrete processes? What you produce, what you distribute and what you consume? That to me is, I use a lot of library science in that context about just organizing kind of the menu of what you’re encountering and then discerning your priorities about which things you do in which area, but it takes time and energy.
[00:27:36] Walter: It’s slow and it’s exhausting. Like, just as someone who is a scholar and I have enormous resources at my disposal to help me do it, I still have to really narrow down to three to five areas of how I interact with the information multiverse and then attempt to construct what I put out, what I allowed across my path, and then what do I actually take in and base my sense of what’s true on.
[00:28:05] Walter: And I just know, like my middle school, high school, college students can’t do that. All I can do is practice with them in small bites, how to start to move down that path. The most comparable thing that I’ve had the most success with is showing people how to decode commercials and figuring out like when people are selling you something or attempting to manipulate your feeling about something, a service or a product that’s being shown to you.
[00:28:33] Walter: And I have students who write me back years later and be like, “I’m so glad I took that class. I can’t believe how people try to steer my perspective all the time.” And I wish I could get that to the place that everybody. is equipped with that by the time you leave second or third grade, that you’re not inclined to just trust what you encounter in the media.
[00:28:54] Walter: But at the same time, you can be discerning enough to find the things that are reliable and begin to use those to find your way forward in the world. But we’re not there yet. We are so far removed. I think of where we were in the 1940s and 1950s as television was in its infancy. And we made a choice about it being primarily a commercial tool, that we wanted massive amounts of advertisers selling us Ajax soap in order to underwrite the programs that we produce.
[00:29:27] Walter: And that’s all just, you know, the ancestor of the kinds of pharmaceutical ads that I see all over American media. We’re trying to steer people to imagine problems that they have so that they will pay more money for treatment that they may or may not need. And so as we get more genetic science, that’s going to get worse and people don’t understand.
[00:29:48] Walter: Biology, neuroscience, genetics, epigenetics, there’s just so much information for us to sort through that it’s difficult for people to start to screen down. What I’m trying to do is reinvent what we do as education from the time you’re two or three years old, like we can’t continue to use 19th century ideas in the 21st century.
[00:30:10] Walter: And that process, it’s always about screening and prioritizing. And you have to kind of know yourself if you’re going to then enter into that, is kind of how much do I want to give to this process about who I am and what my digital footprint is and how it connects to any other number of people. I haven’t even gotten to the point about choosing community and starting to figure out who you’re connected to and how does that influence what you’re going to have access to and what you share to kind of create common meaning.
[00:30:41] Walter: All those things are possible, but they require real careful thought. and right now, you know, the first step for me is not even at the federal level within the United States, but really internationally, how do we have an information regime that screens for the most truthful information without allowing state abuse to kind of manipulate and propagandize people.
[00:31:07] Walter: So, I’m sympathetic to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and these folks who don’t trust government to oversee and regulate what they can produce and distribute. At the same time, I am more sympathetic to the masses of population, the 8 billion people you mentioned, who I don’t trust them. I don’t trust the information managers to choose in the interests of most of humanity.
[00:31:31] Walter: And that’s the lesson that strikes me coming out of World War II, is that we had a series of medical protections that came in to protect people from medical and human rights abuse. We need a similar international regime to protect people from digital and information abuse. And it’s not going to be a one or two year process.
[00:31:53] Walter: Like I fully expect it’s going to take us 25, 30, 50 years to generate those agreements, but that’s the process we need to start right now.
[00:32:03] Helen: I couldn’t support, media literacy, which I feel like we’re already behind. And then there’s a whole nother layer of AI literacy. And I know this is coming out, right before the elections in the US.
[00:32:17] Helen: Don’t believe anything that you see online, especially between, now and the election and definitely get out and vote. Walter, is there anything that you would add to this?
[00:32:30] Walter: Be a highly informed voter. Who understands both intellectually what you want to have access to, what kind of media world you want to be in, but also materially.
[00:32:41] Walter: Do you want more people to have success or are you more comfortable with only a few people being more successful? There are two really different versions at the presidential level and really at the level of the Congress and the Senate, and even in the state government. Some people want there to be more people who have middle class lifestyles.
[00:33:00] Walter: Others feel like more people should probably struggle and aren’t equipped to really maintain a middle class or wealthy lifestyle. And so, whatever vision you choose, know which candidate represents you. And that’s the vision where you should cast your ballot. Do you want prosperity for more or prosperity for fewer? And that fundamentally is the choice, not just in the US, but around the world.
[00:33:22] Helen: So well said. Thank you. and I will include links to media and AI literacy resources, in the accompanying dedicated blog post. So, one thing that you mentioned, kind of casually is, as an Afrofuturist, but you’re actually one of the founders of Afrofuturism and I’d love for you to share what it is, because it’s such a great way, because you mentioned, you know, the powers that be want to limit imagination and there’s so many things that, you know, we just accept as normalized and that, we’re so stressed all the time and so many distractions with dings and notifications and texts that we live in this like stressed state.
[00:34:08] Helen: And I’ve said this in my presentation, farewell, information age, welcome to the imagination age. Like when we’re stressed and distracted, we’re not even calm enough to think expansively because like when you’re stressed, you’re in like the freeze, flight, or fight mode and you can only do one thing in that survival.
[00:34:35] Helen: And we’ve all been in such survival mode with our media landscape, not tigers and lions and bears and all those things. And it’s hard because we’ve hyper normalized that this is somehow normal and accepted this. And yeah, I don’t think a lot of us give us permission to dream bigger and dream differently, but Afrofuturism is a vehicle to do that.
[00:34:58] Helen: So I’d love for you to share more about Afrofuturism.
[00:35:01] Walter: Yeah, this is a area that’s dear to my heart. I know I couldn’t have existed without the influences that are now referred to as Afrofuturism, but shaped my entire life. So as a historian, I’m one of the few, I am probably the oldest, I’ll say it like that, the oldest professional historian, who has been studying and engaged with Afrofuturism. Professional history for most of the 20th century asserted as a field that there was no African or African diaspora history.
[00:35:40] Walter: Just in the last three years, the largest professional association, the American Historical Association has taken action to repair the damage it did to women historians, to black historians, to historians of the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa by ignoring their work and not allowing it to be taught in undergraduate or graduate education.
[00:36:04] Walter: The flagship example of this is, W.E.B. Du Bois. His work established what it was to do empirical historical research, in the late 19th century. And he was not recognized as part of historical discourse and study until 30 years after his death in the early 1990s. And so the denial of black history was one battle that people of the African diaspora had to fight and win.
[00:36:33] Walter: And in the midst of that, as that battle was being won in the years following the Brown versus Board decision, it was really literary scholars, black literary figures who began to challenge the idea of is there a future for black people because writers like Isaac Asimov, focus on future studies. Robert Heinlein, the greats of science fiction, they couldn’t imagine substantial roles for black people in the future.
[00:37:02] Walter: The futures were filled with white people and there was no one else besides that. And it’s a profoundly kind of genocidal assumption to assume whatever post apocalyptic event happens, it just wipes out anybody who is not from Europe.
[00:37:17] Walter: And you look at things, even in cinema, like, Mad Max, where you get this sense that everything is Australia. And it’s primarily white Australia, no aboriginal people. And so there’s this extraordinary set of assumptions between 1955 and really the rise of Octavia Butler in the mid 1990s, to then interrogate, okay well, humanity is not just from Europe.
[00:37:45] Walter: Where are the futures for all of the different kind of people who have existed in this world? And so that black science fiction exploration was then named by Mark Derry, Afrofuturism, in a conversation with Columbia students, most notably Alondra Nelson. But that then still didn’t become common language.
[00:38:07] Walter: Basically, a decade later, 2005 with Black Lives Matter, people started to say, “well, we’ve got to imagine futures for people or else we’re kind of consigning them that their deaths and their marginalization is perpetual.” And it was a decade after the emergence of Black Lives Matter that basically you started having large conferences of people coming together, calling themselves Afrofuturists and it was primarily artists.
[00:38:35] Walter: It was folks who were novelists, graphic artists, musicians, hip hop has a huge role in Afrofuturism with artists like Andre 3000 or Busta Rhymes or Missy Elliott. That they’re using different kinds of fashion and style, that they’re showing different ways to be black that are not constrained by the traditions of the 20th century.
[00:38:58] Walter: Sun Ra as an experimental jazz musician was a forerunner of a lot of that work. And so Afrofuturism is really at its root about imagining the futures of the people of the African diaspora. One of the great phrases that came out of this period is an Octavia Butler quote: “There may be nothing new under the sun, but there are other suns.”
[00:39:18] Walter: And so this notion that, yeah, maybe not on this planet, there isn’t going to be freedom, but we’ll go somewhere and there’ll be a more free society somewhere in the future for us that couldn’t exist here. And so, this then influenced the work of the journalists is, she wrote cast Isabel Wilkerson, whose first book was about the great migration and the title is The Warmth Of Other Suns.
[00:39:43] Walter: And so that frame of reference, after the Ferguson, incidents with Mike Brown and then the community uprising, the protests that even stretched forward to George Floyd in 2020, was it’s possible to build a world where law enforcement and criminal justice is not so deeply racialized. And so Afrofuturism gained an enormous endorsement at that point, but it was also Octavia Butler again, with her, my favorite two books from her are Parable Of The Sower and Parable Of The Talents, which basically in the 1990s scripted out what happened with the Trump presidency and what happened with the COVID pandemic and it’s, it was actually terrifying to go back and reread those novels and see how accurately she predicted the world we lived in 2020 and 2021.
[00:40:34] Walter: And so those kinds of just evolutions of human society have made it that Afrofuturism has become a driving international force for a different kind of human civilization. My colleague, Ronaldo Anderson has built a global network of over 50,000 Afrofuturists, mostly in the Western hemisphere, but also in Europe and in Africa, and we’re going to be getting together in Amsterdam for a major event in early, December.
[00:41:08] Walter: So about a little over a month from now, and that work of Afrofuturism is not just about people of the African diaspora. It’s saying, how do we create freer human civilizations? And so, because I do it a lot with economics and creating less hierarchical economic systems, my work has morphed into what I call speculative design, which looks at different kinds of architecture and urbanization.
[00:41:36] Walter: And moves us back towards the pre modern, looking at a world that’s based on mobility, especially in the context of climate change. And so how do we use less electricity? How do we produce less waste? How do we actually have A less hierarchical society that allows for all of us to live lives of dignity?
[00:41:54] Walter: And so my students study Maroon communities in the Western hemisphere, in the Caribbean and Latin America, that we need to build places like this in order for all of us to have greater freedom where it’s not so extractive. It’s not so capitalistic. Scholars at UC Berkeley have pioneered the field of black geography and this is all built around sustainable environmental design.
[00:42:20] Walter: And that’s what Afrofuturism pushes us towards is a freer world where all of us, we can’t go through days hungry and unclothed and unsheltered and without care. It’s a world where we’re not just the money that we make and the status we achieve. We’re fed by our relationships with each other.
[00:42:42] Helen: That’s such a great line about feeding each other. One thing that I really appreciate about Afrofuturism as well, that it’s been kind of a theme on the show and kind of to your point about Octavia Butler is that there’s so many narratives out there now that, are more dystopian and the negative about what’s to come.
[00:43:04] Helen: So it’s like that whole thing of where our attention goes, energy flows. It’s like we’re all putting our energy towards these dystopian outcomes versus a more utopian leaning, like the Afrofuturism, like Wakanda and Black Panther. I think that highlights a more positive vision of the future. And one thing too, in just our discussions, I really appreciate how you’d like to challenge like assumptions that are embedded into society.
[00:43:33] Helen: And I think one that sits kind of in the middle of this is from this activist that I follow. I’m going to have to get her name, but in some of her Instagram videos, she has said that if we really want a different future, we have to not just keep climbing up the ladder because you’re always going to be above or below someone, but break the ladder and have a more circular community connectedness and linking instead of ranking, which, you know, Gloria Steinem’s does all the time.
[00:44:05] Helen: But one thing that she said that really stuck to me as a white person is that we have such a lack of imagination when it comes to, you know, real social justice, because we can’t imagine that what we’ve done to others won’t be done to us.
[00:44:24] Helen: And that just struck me to the core. And when we talk about challenging assumptions, you know, world without conflict, where there can be different futures, I’d love to kind of hear your reaction to that and anything that you want to add about how we limit our imaginations.
[00:44:43] Walter: Yeah. So there’s a lot in what you’re connecting and tapping into there.
[00:44:47] Walter: And I would say there, a body of colleagues of mine who do educational counseling. They train school counselors about creating healing environments for people who experienced trauma and how do you recover? How do you move towards a whole or fuller version of ourselves, just emotionally, not even always physically.
[00:45:07] Walter: And so there’s that kind of work that is just endless. There’s thousands of resources to share there. But I also think about, a story I teach about Martin Luther King, where he had gone into Alabama. He was doing a revival meeting, and a sheriff, a white Southern sheriff who favored segregation went into the meeting with his revolver loaded and intended to catch King unawares and shoot him and kill him that night.
[00:45:32] Walter: And in the course of waiting at the back of the service, he heard Marian Anderson sing Amazing Grace. And Marian Anderson has one of these great voices on par with anyone we see today. You know, the Mariah Carey’s, the Whitney Houston’s. She is the legendary singer of the middle of the 20th century. And that sheriff in hearing her sing that song was so moved that he unloaded his gun and waited until King came near him and handed King the bullets and said, “My weapons have no power.
[00:46:04] Walter: I can’t fight against the kind of beauty and the struggle for justice that you represent. It’s like, you’ve touched my heart and I know I was wrong.” I don’t think we grapple enough with those kinds of stories about the power of art, the power of music, power of faith to kind of transform how we relate to one another.
[00:46:22] Walter: And that’s something that is, is beyond the idea of vibranium and Wakanda, although, they make a gesture towards it in the films about, you know, in T’Challa being upset that a cousin forces him to kill him and he wants to give him some grace or try to heal him before he passes, the way that you see Shuri as Black Panther forgive Namor for killing her mother.
[00:46:49] Walter: Urged by her mother from the beyond to say, no, this is not who we are. We are not people who kill out of vengeance. These are profound human lessons that Afrofuturism brings us to about how do we stop seeing ourselves as black and white and Latino and Asian? How do we affirm our humanity first and foremost, when we are in contact with each other?
[00:47:13] Walter: And so, that does require breaking the ladder in the way that you described. And I think of, Adrian Marie Brown on Instagram is spectacular in the work that she does to heal and recognize our fullness as humans. Back to where we started with the questions of, time and its fluidity and time is love.
[00:47:35] Walter: I think of Rashida Phillips as someone I’ve worked with for many years on that question. She has a new book coming out on the nature of time and how we must reinvent it. That work in terms of time and not being about the next alarm and the next email we have to send and the urgency of every single moment to be productive.
[00:47:57] Walter: That if we reclaim time, in the way that we joke about with some memes about the way Congress can operate. When we reclaim our time and we connect to each other and care for each other with our time, there’s no limit to the amount of goodness, the amount of healing we can offer each other. And, I know I just met a theologian that, was at Stanford.
[00:48:18] Walter: His name is, Bayo Akomolafe. And he just did an extraordinary talk at Macalester about reinventing our sense of time as humanity and to not allow our time to be consumed with our commercial and our labor practices and reserving time for each other to actually live extraordinary lives together.
[00:48:40] Walter: The movement is growing. And I’m very confident that we’ll move to a day where the kinds of weight and pain that we’ve carried and inflicted on each other can actually end and we’ll have a more humane existence here.
[00:48:56] Helen: Thank you. I think just one of the takeaways is healing just needs to happen across the board and for all of our nervous systems to calm down so that we can even be more expansive.
[00:49:10] Helen: There’s so much that we could keep going. And I know that we’re going to dive into a lot more of the concepts because we’re really just scratching the surface with everything. But since you already kind of segued a little bit into time, but one thing, that you shared in an earlier conversation is, you know, the assumptions of where we’re all at is like that time, scarcity mindset.
[00:49:34] Helen: There’s never enough time, we have FOMO, you know, all these things, but really we can reframe that and challenge that notion of time is abundance. And I asked you what would be your answer to, or opposite of, time is money. So I’ll let you answer that for the audience.
[00:49:54] Walter: Yeah. So it was, I love the question that as you posed it, it was really, like I said, it’s something I teach a lot, but, you know, the moment that I got to share it with Rashida Phillips and the work that she’s done with it in the years since then, it’s it’s really time is love.
[00:50:12] Walter: It’s what we choose to give to each other. I actually think of one of my college roommates, a guy named Simon Tiffin. He and I, went to Villanova together and, he was very harried and I was very harried, frankly, you know, like we were always trying to do things and get things done. And he literally said to me, like, “how do you make time or why is there so much school and squeezed into the time that you have?”
[00:50:37] Walter: And I was like, “well, Simon, it’s not a question of finding time. It’s a question of making time for the things that you value.” And he had never come across a phrase like that, that he could make the time for the things that were most important to him. And, he and I are still really tight and talk with each other on a regular basis.
[00:50:55] Walter: And that is just a different orientation and, you know, I can’t say that was me saying that in that moment. That was something beyond this world kind of speaking through me, but that whole piece, I think they tried to show it in one of the Star Trek films. I think it was Insurrection where one of the aliens that Picard is trying to help is showing him that he can slow down time when he’s with someone that he cares about.
[00:51:22] Walter: And those moments can feel like entire lifetimes that you do pack into this time that the subjective experience just goes on and on. And in that way, you can do extraordinary things because you’re escaping from the way time is measured by all of our institutional authorities.
[00:51:40] Walter: That’s what I mean with the abundance of time, is that within any given moment, we can stop. And I actually do this a lot with my classes where I’m watching time very intently, but I’m trying to cultivate for the students, the fact that it seems like the time will never end, there’s so much, it’s passing quickly for them. But it also feels like they never want it to end and so that kind of effect, it shouldn’t just be in schools. It shouldn’t just be in the homes when we’re coping with some of our kind of deepest emotional connections. There are ways we can choose to extend time or to abbreviate time based on where we’re at. That again, it’s teachable, but we don’t teach it very often.
[00:52:26] Helen: Oh, that is such a good teaser for our next conversation. We can kick off with time. I know from our last conversation, I’ve just been more aware of my relationship to time and, you know, I’ve actually paid for a course a couple of years ago of like how to get into flow state, but we’ve all experienced it, like, when time kind of disappears and we’re in the zone, whether of athletes or business leaders or artists.
[00:52:58] Helen: So I find this very fascinating because we’re being called to use our imaginations, And we need to give ourselves permission and the calm relaxedness to be able to think expansively too. So all of this works hand in hand as we’re imagining our future.
[00:53:16] Walter: One little thing to add, is just this morning, I watched the most recent episode on Disney+ of Agatha All Along.
[00:53:24] Walter: Which is this extraordinary piece of art that they’ve done. But the episode they just posted was about one of the women in the coven with the main characters experiencing time slippage, where she was moving in one second from hundreds of years ago to the present, to weeks ago, to moments and days ahead.
[00:53:45] Walter: And it ends with what looks like is her death, but it’s actually the very beginning of her life. And so like, there’s just extraordinary exploration of how rich and textured and deep and unending our human experience is. And so like this conversation is happening all around us when you see it on a Disney program, like it’s just the consciousness is changing. And so, there’s a lot we can accomplish together.
[00:54:11] Helen: Well, and one of my favorite films, that explores this in a different way is Arrival, which was based on a Ted Chiang novel, which I’d love to have him on the show if anyone knows Ted Chiang, and then, Denis Villaneuve, who’s like such an amazing filmmaker.
[00:54:30] Helen: But it’s like a show about aliens, but it’s actually about the importance of language and connection and our relationship to time. And some review on YouTube I watched, so these aren’t my words, but it was like the way that Denny uses the language of film to reinforce our relationship to time is just, it’s a masterpiece of filmmaking.
[00:54:54] Walter: The mother daughter relationship in that film. I’ve watched that film hundreds of times just because I love the way it’s crafted. And, some of the most important people in my life pointed it out to me because they knew the kind of work I was doing. And yes, I, you are now gold star kind of in my life. We shared a moment talking about Arrival, I love it.
[00:55:18] Helen: I recommend it. It’s a very slow movie, especially compared to, you know, TikTok attention spans, but it’s beautiful in every aspect. So, I could geek out about it, Arrival, all day with you.
[00:55:31] Walter: Anytime. Anytime.
[00:55:34] Helen: Well, Walter, before I let you go, one question I ask all of my guests is, if you want our listeners and viewers, to remember one thing, what’s that one thing that you want them to walk away with today?
[00:55:46] Walter: Today, I posed a question online a couple of weeks ago, and I would love it if viewers would share their opinions with me, particularly on social media, or even just on their own streams that I might stumble across. It’s an impossible question. What is the best Wu Tang clan song ever produced?
[00:56:08] Helen: I love it. I’ll try to add polls to our social content when we publish this interview and get the, get the feedback. It is such a pleasure and I know we’re just scratching the surface. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your energy, your presence and so much of your life’s work and what you’re passionate about. It really means the world to me. So thank you.
[00:56:32] Walter: Honored to work with you. Anytime, thank you.
[00:56:37] Helen: Thank you for spending some time with us today. We’re just getting started and would love your support. Subscribe to Creativity Squared on your preferred podcast platform and leave a review. It really helps. And I’d love to hear your feedback. What topics are you thinking about and want to dive into more?
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[00:57:33] Helen: And a big, big thank you to everyone who’s offered their time, energy, and encouragement and support so far. I really appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. This show is produced and made possible by the team at Play Audio Agency. Until next week, keep creating.