TBT, my Global Niche journey in my TEDU talk pitch for TED GLOBAL 2010

Stumbled on this long ago pitch - to speak at a side event of TED Global conference in Oxford in 2010. To talk about our global self that can be found through online social networking.

I was having a great time with it, and early, as an expatriate! Those sure were golden days of wide open online life and exploration, glad I got to experience them. Nothing like today’s terrordome of trolls and info ops.

Posting this as a Throwback Thursday, to a time when I was thinking about our potential to connect globally (and yet refusing to use a common tongue to do it?! 😅), when in November 2024 my attention has been turning more and more to offline local community.

“We’re born global citizens, even if that knowledge is trained out of us by family and culture and nation. ”

— Me in 2010

A MOST DIFFICULT NO-BRAINER: global citizens still need to find a place in the world

We’re born global citizens, even if that knowledge is trained out of us by family and culture and nation.

A global identity can seem nebulous and ungrounded, while something concrete and localized makes more sense. Problem with concrete though: it cracks over time, in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

There’s good news in this era of globalization. I believe we’re entering a permanent state of psychic limbo, a place where our concrete center won’t hold. Too many of us know the bittersweet liminality of living between multiple worlds, and the soul-sprung righteousness of refusing to settle on just one. 

This 600-word talk is synthesized from ~six months of my blogposts at Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation and includes revelations from my 13 years of identity struggle as an expatriate in 4 countries, the virtual community of cultural peers I created with the book Tales from the Expat Harem and the current online neoculture community expat+HAREM, and my work as a cultural producer and host of the hybrid identity discussion series Dialogue2010,  two years in-depth experience in social media with a focus on location independence and self actualization.

I’ll cover our changing sense of peers, the exquisite pull of online social networking -- as opposed to the usual blunt force push of social circumstance -- and how that demands more value and relevance from our connections, and us, and how fashioning a hybrid lifestyle to honor all the worlds we live in taps into our own global being. I call it finding your global niche, a psychic solution to a global identity crisis. 

I end with a metaphor for this kind of fluid identity (bobbing buoy tied to a point deep below surface of changing options, existing in a wider orbit around the inner me so I can be more versions of myself) and extrapolate that to the issue of global citizenship. Putting distance between yourself and your global citizenship offers more fluid points of connection, as well as an anchor. I suggest creating ‘psychic location independence’ to truly be a citizen of the world. 

The bigger picture, in your words

With my KIP project to make sense in the social age and surface the best civic participators - or members of “the Fifth Estate”, - I’ve been collecting the contributions on Twitter.

For a couple years I made graphic images of quotes I spied. I put some of them together into a larger narrative of our time, and this moment. Take a look!

Below is a short version of the narrative in the video. See the video for quote credits or read the transcript with credits here.

“The Bigger Picture” In Snippets From Emergent News Contributors Curated By KIP

"Social media has held politics and media to account"

Journalism & Backsliding Democracy was a good journalism-democracy-disinformation panel with Jay Rosen at New York University School of Journalism for the Cambridge Disinformation Summit last week.

From my live notes: “Social media has held politics and media to account,” said former director of BBC News Richard Sambrook, hitting the nail on the head!

Social media is not just part of the #disinformation problem, it’s part of the solution as I’ve been contending with my Fifth Estate-holding-power-to-account project: KIP! (Read about it here.)

The hitch: knowing which are the good actors on social media and which are the bad actors.

My live notes: Jay said we need smart practices to solve the hardest problems in news coverage, like if you had a “Category of bad actors” you could put a source in you’d be better prepared. 🤔

That sounds very much like the categorization I’ve been structuring with KIP.

Fleet Week is a jobs fair and experiential museum

Substantial exhibits just strolling through the humanitarian center at Marina Green this Fleet Week, where I was tabling at the San Francisco Fire Depot’s Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) table.

It’s a jobs fair and experiential museum. You can learn how the US Army intubates a patient, and what an earthquake feels like.

I met a Navy diver who dives into wrecks in seas and rivers to retrieve the sunken remains of MIA service people all over the world. 😳

UC Berkeley is #1 in the world for creating venture-funded startups

This week it was announced by Pitchbook 2023 University Rankings that University of California, Berkeley is #1 in the world for creating venture-funded startups.

In PitchBook's overall rankings in 2023, Berkeley is the top public university for producing startup founders for the sixth straight year.

I’ve loved being an entrepreneurship mentor to university students at both these institutions - the European Innovation Academy, the world’s largest extreme accelerator, and UC Berkeley’s School of Engineering Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology - and their entrepreneur programs!

Special shout out to Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship program director Gigi Wang for bringing me to Cal as a mentor and a venture judge.

I’ve been consistently impressed with the problems UCB student entrepreneurs have chosen to address, and the fast work they achieve in these accelerated entrepreneurship environments. You can read about student ventures I worked with here and here and here and here.

Berkeley Method gets students thinking like entrepreneurs, click the image to read a 2018 article about it

Congrats to all!

Is your foot on the brake at the same time you're trying to accelerate? It’s your brain science

New read for Fogust...

I was fortunate to read an early manuscript of this new book release by ☀️ Jessica J.J. Lutz ☀️ and look forward to diving into the final version now making its way around the world!

I see Barbie gets a mention on p 110 - she was Jessica's favored doll because she wasn't a baby, she was a grown woman who knew what she wanted - Jessica and I were among the (how many, uncounted?) girls whose parents wouldn't allow us to play with the toy. Before Barbie director Greta Gerwig was even born, Barbie was a subversive force in our lives!

“A war correspondent facing burnout wonders why she suddenly feels fear when a bomb goes off at her Baghdad hotel: a clue comes when she realizes she is 4 months pregnant. To understand how her coping mechanisms no longer work, she applied her journalistic research skills to the inner conflict she experienced, and her upbringing. What comes out of it is a deep dive into the gender-based sociology, and the brain science, a review of the literature parsing it all, and a way forward, through simple exercises that anyone can do to start using our dual-sided human brain to succeed in life and work, and stay healthy and feel good about it too.”

— How I encapsulated the book on an early read.

Here’s where you can get the book in the USA: Amazon.