Hello everyone!
Excited to announce a new spin-off podcast series we are doing. It’s called Yankee Dynamism, and will be focused on New England’s tech sector.
Here I want to provide context for why I am doing this and where it fits into Granite Goodness more widely.
I’m a lifelong New Englander and New Hampshire native who spent 10 years as a career environmentalist. In that time I came to believe that our biggest problem wasn’t actually a lack of progress on important issues, but rather, that much of the public just had no idea about the solutions and progress we had made. Put another way, I think our biggest problem is too many of us are too pessimistic about the prospect of making the world better.
So, I became a solutions journalist and started a media brand called Granite Goodness, devoted to sharing optimistic local good news that actually matters across New England.
In the two years I’ve been doing Granite Goodness, I have mostly avoided technology as a topic. I did this because I felt like most of the time when people encounter this idea that we should be excited and optimistic about the future, it’s almost always about technology.
I first wanted to show audiences that you could be optimistic about the future, not just because computers get faster, but because people themselves are actually pretty good, our society solves problems all the time, and the news media tends to over-inform us about everything going wrong.
And while I feel that mission is realized, technology is an ever more important part of how the world gets shaped, for better and for worse. So I wanted to give it its own unique focus within Granite Goodness in the form of this spin-off podcast series.
Many people today have a cynical view of technology, seeing the industry as rife with out of touch billionaires obsessed with power, channeling America’s brightest minds toward figuring out how to addict us to screens and amplify our worst qualities. And while I think some of those views are justified, my job is to help tell a different story about what’s possible in the world.
The goal of this show is not to deny that tech can be used to make the world worse. Like any tool, it can be channeled towards negative or positive ends. Tech also helps spread culture and ideas across the globe. It helps people learn languages, recipes, make friends and discover art. It helps us power society with more renewable energy and raise living standards for the world’s poorest.
I believe the stories we tell literally shape the future we envision and build, and that too often we’re over-exposed to narratives of pessimism and decline. We need a different story, and a better one, that isn’t just based on hype and yet another delivery app.
It’s also personal for me. My brother, a type one diabetic, has his very life sustained by an insulin pump. My sister, born with a painful jaw condition, is now being healed through advancements in medical treatment. My wife and I live in rural New Hampshire on a farm powered by solar panels, with internet access beamed in from the sky.
I’ve made the conscious choice to stay and build a life in rural New England because I think this place and its people are unique, and have a lot to offer the world as it navigates a blistering pace of change.
The American Revolution began in New England 250 years ago, and while the region has remained at the frontier of much social and democratic progress, it remains one of the few places where at a café or hiking trail, there is a pretty good chance the humans you run into could be congresspeople, chicken farmers, CEOs, volunteer firemen, or all of the above. I often remark to people that the executive director of New Hampshire’s leading tech consortium, is also actually a chicken farmer, and I don’t think this is an accident.
Tradition and progress are often experienced as conflicting forces, but in New England, more often they are mutually reinforcing ideals. Nowhere else in the world is there such a combination of farmers markets, local direct democracy, world class universities and science, reverence for history, and liberal values blended with rural character.
New England’s unique embrace of authenticity, independence, community, and progress is not a coincidence, or a fluke. It’s actually just who we are. I call this spirit: Yankee Dynamism.
I actually wrote an essay about this nearly a year ago celebrating these qualities and expressing some surprise that there wasn’t more of a tech / progress-oriented movement here given I thought we had all the right ingredients.
Not long after that, I met Rae and Ryan Lambert, who told me about this absolutely crazy project they dreamt of pursuing: an intentional community for tech enthusiasts and founders, based in NH (codenamed: Freedom Village).
If you’ve met Rae & Ryan, you know that once they decide to do anything, they don’t wait, they move fast! Before long, Freedom Village became an actual project more than an idea.
Parallel to this, I had been mulling over the concept of Yankee Dynamism in my mind, seeing all the while how crazy and fast the world of tech was moving. Given the unique attributes my corner of the world has, I felt there was an opportunity to have a bunch of cool local conversations just focused on this question of what do we want our relationship to technology to look like?
I share more about this in the podcast, but basically I think it’s not a good thing for hugely consequential industries to be led by small groups of people representing a narrow set of values and perspectives. My vision for a better future imagines a much wider diversity and flourishing of innovation hubs, across the country and the world, and less overwhelming influence from Silicon Valley.
Anyway as luck would have it, Ryan and Rae felt ready to announce their project just as I was wanting to launch this spinoff podcast, and I thought it would be the perfect way to kick it off.
Just to be super clear, Yankee Dynamism is secondary to everything else Granite Goodness already is. It is a separate podcast that anyone can opt-into listening to. Our regular programming will continue as usual, and the flagship podcast, Granite Goodness, is returning in the fall with a more inclusive, standard format. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, here is episode one. I hope you enjoy it!