Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

This week I speak with author, futurist, and strategist Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio. Jessica has honed her skills for decades on a path that’s carried her from AAAS to The Library of Congress to The Encyclopedia Britannica to the Center for Media and Social Impact to The New America Foundation to The Association of Independents in Radio and beyond, and now she oversees a refuge for social innovators working at the intersections of philanthropy, media, arts and culture, and futurism. We need dot connectors more than ever if we are to trace the shape of what’s emerging, and I look to Jessica as an example of how to weave research, experience design, production, strategy, and culture-building into something like the raft we need to make our way through vast uncertainty to thriving futures just over the horizon. In this episode we discuss the ideas shared in her book with Kamal Sinclair, Making A New Reality: A Toolkit for Inclusive Futures and how to rethink storytelling in new media.

Project Links

Pitch and planning document Hire me to help you make senseMake tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server + Bluesky List + X Community

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:40 - Intro0:07:51 - Who is Jessica Clark?0:10:42 - “New Media” Means New Kinds of “Reality”0:15:18 - Storytelling & Social Power0:25:07 - Overcoming Groupthink / Problems in The Creative Economy0:32:39 - Fairness in New Media0:40:38 - What Do We Measure While Incubating Creativity?0:48:32 - Post-Institutional Credentials0:55:01 - How Do We Support “The Interstitionaries”?1:02:14 - Intergenerational Wisdom & The Value of Conflict to Truth1:08:59 - What Biases Do We Want?1:14:29 - The Future Voice of Fandom1:18:03 - Acknowledgements & Next Guest

(Most) Mentions

Making A New Reality’s Toolkit for Change Resources Kamal Sinclair & Jessica Clark discuss Making A New Reality Victor Pickard’s “We Need a Media System That Serves People’s Needs, Not Corporations’”William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur”Ward Shelley’s Who Invented The Avant Garde Redux, 2020Michael Garfield’s “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”Doug Rushkoff Sep Kamvar Julie Ann Crommett Stephanie Lepp Ari Kuschnir Maureen Fan Eugene Chung Zebras Unite Metalabel Maureen Giovannini Shannon Gilmartin Nicole Anand Ed Catmull Leslie Fields Cruz David Jay Center for Humane Technology William Irwin Thompson’s The American Replacement of Nature C Thi Nguyen Thomas Frank Jennifer Brandel Brian Eno Tracy Van Slyke The Center for Media & Social Impact MIT Open Documentary Lab Trista Harris Patricia Aufderheide Internet Archive Wikimedia Foundation Malka Older Global Voices Dark Trek

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

September 26th, 2025: SHOWDOWN: American Fighter Jets Intercept Russian Bombers & Beijing’s Drone Support for Moscow

The President's Daily Brief

Outro

The AI-powered Podcast Player