ways-forward

WAYS FORWARD

As our tools become more powerful,

how do we become more human?

Ways Forward is a documentary-led research project about positive, human-centered futures for technology.

Each episode connects three layers:

1 - A signal from the present: a cultural anxiety, resistance movement, technological shift, or question people are currently already feeling

2 - A future-facing idea: speculative, historical, philosophical, spiritual, ecological, or sci-fi reference that expands the frame

3 - A real person, community, tool, or practice that is building towards that future-facing idea concretely today

Rather than arguing for one perfect vision for the future, the project surfaces a plurality of perspectives - ideas, individuals, and communities that make better futures feel imaginable and actionable.

It demonstrates a path to reclaiming a sense of agency: how technology can be something individuals and communities can co-author, not just inherit, especially as access to building and authoring tools becomes increasingly democratized.

Ways Forward is designed for YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The tone is researched but intimate, hopeful but not naive, handmade, whimsical, and useful.

Public imagination around AI and technology has been thrashing between two dominant narratives: Silicon Valley’s smooth corporate podcast-friendly optimism and mainstream media’s apocalyptic fear. At the same time, students, artists, technologists, and communities are openly resisting technological futures being built at them, instead of with them.

I see a lot of language for what people do not want: extraction, acceleration, replacement, surveillance, alienation, and inevitability. What I have been personally searching for is stronger language for what we do want and for concrete examples of how I can build technology that deepens human values.

In search of answers, I hosted a discussion at NYU ITP Camp called Positive Futures for Technology: Sci-Fi, Soft Values, and What We Build Next. 

The bulk of the conversation was intentionally centered on sources of hope: concrete examples of visions, people, projects, media, and communities helped us move from critique and exhaustion into imagination and agency.

What kind of futures do we actually want to build?

What are examples of technology being used to deepen human values?

And how do we start building towards positive futures today?

Ways Forward is a continuation of that conversation with a broader audience. People are hungry for actionable, scientifically grounded optimism. Ways Forward is an act of optimistic hyperstition: broadcasting positive futures so clearly that people naturally begin inventing the pieces to make it real.

1 - Built for everyone

Ways Forward treats technology as something ordinary people can understand, question, reshape, and author. The series will be deeply researched, but shaped for people who spend more time with social media than with podcasts, long form, documentary, and more formally dressed scientific content. While most optimistic technology content focuses on the Goliaths of our industry, Ways Forward focuses on the Davids, showing how individuals and smaller groups are taking action towards positive futures as creating with technology becomes easier.

2 - Personality-drenched

Each video will be made to feel like a cozy gift made by a storybook animal living in a tree: interviews that feel more like conversations between friends, visual storytelling, archival references, field research, and handmade metaphors - using paper, yarn, sketches, objects, animation, and physical materials to make abstract ideas feel understandable and human-designed.

3 - Turning Anxiety into Agency

The tone of the project is important. I do not want to dismiss people’s anxiety about technology. I want to begin from that anxiety and move toward examples of agency. The gesture of each film is - yes, something feels broken, and here are examples of how we can build another way forward.

• Solarpunk and livable futures: technology as ecological, local, communal, and human-scaled.

• The new Luddites: reframing Luddism as a demand for agency, dignity, and technological authorship rather than a rejection of technology.

• The handmade internet: revisiting personal websites, forums, webrings, digital gardens, and early online communities as clues for more expressive + community centric and less extractive digital spaces.

• Collective intelligence: tools and practices that help groups think, imagine, decide, and coordinate together.

• Tools that feel like toys: creative technologies designed for creative play and new forms of expression.

• Technology for gathering: installations, rituals, events, and social tools that bring people into shared physical presence.

Ways Forward grows from questions and a search for answers I am personally living through after moving from Pixar’s deeply integrated art-centered technology ecosystem to founding an AI-media startup and feeling the limits of a tech culture too often driven by speed, scale, and extraction.

My background brings together all of the skills this project needs. I have a deep technical foundation as an engineer and former technical lead at Pixar, where I worked on graphics pipelines for animated feature films. I later co-founded an AI-media startup, building creative tools, interactive fiction games, and generative animation systems. Alongside that, I have years of experience as a photographer, cinematographer, writer, short-form content creator, and internet-native storyteller.

I understand the technical systems well enough to explain them accurately, and I understand the emotional landscape well enough to translate them humanely. I am embedded in the creative technology communities this project is about: artists, makers, designers, engineers, and builders trying to work with care rather than inevitability.

Ways Forward intersects the parts of me that have often operated in parallel: the technical director, the founder, the filmmaker, the artist, the writer, the content creator, and a person looking for more hopeful ways to build.