David Pennington

Today’s Young People Need to Learn How to Be Punk

You can do anything!

That’s the mantra, and you hear it everywhere. All the messages circulating in our society seem to converge on that same imperative.

But this soon turns into: You must do everything . The symptoms are everywhere—fitness programs, self-help podcasts, inspirational quotes on social media, vitamins and nutritional supplements,... See more

“if your new software no longer runs on old hardware, it is worse than the old software.”

the follow-up questions are:

• WHAT are my creative superpowers??


• WHO am I meant to serve?


• HOW do I give extraordinary value to them?


• WHAT is my philosophy/ethos/vision?

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Allen points out that “people often start diaries in times of upheaval,”

If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.

Instantaneous access to everything obviously comes at a cost. The cost being that we all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.

What does it tell us about progress if the most influential technological innovation of the century is clearly destroying lives on a massive scale?