The Belligerent Optimist presents a collection of essays, articles, short stories, images, prose and projects, in varying shapes, sizes and formats the effective purpose of all of which is basically to say...
"Look, there's no doubt things are pretty bleak right now. Problems seem complex and intractable. And there's no shortage of horror and bullshit. But the world can be beautiful. The universe can be bonkers. Anything can happen. And we absolutely, positively cannot let the bastards get us down!"
Belligerent Optimism
The world is rife with suffering and abuse, fear and oppression, corruption and contradiction. But while I don't want to try and 'silver lining' the plainly terrible, I do think it's important for our sanity to recognise that awareness of that fact is the first step towards addressing it. It's also worth bearing in mind that this confrontation with reality has come on fast in recent years. It's reasonable to assume that if we don't let it destroy us, the reaction will come on quickly too.
The result will change the world. I think for the better.
All problems are solvable. All obstacles can be overcome. Not just in spite of all the terrible things in the world. But because of them. The more people become aware of challenges, the more people there are working on them. I don't believe that everything is going to be fine. It isn't. But I do believe in the capacity of humanity to react to adversity in a net positive way over time and at scale.
Regardless of what doom fetishizing film and TV might have us believe, people, more often than not, work together.
It may sound paradoxical (and perhaps even a little delusional), but I genuinely believe the more bad news there is, the more progress there will be. The bad stuff was always there. We just weren't aware of it. Or we pretended it wasn't. And while it's true there is an acceleration of scale and complexity, and that not everyone will go out and change the world for the better, that's not actually the way the world changes anyway.
It changes based on the cumulative and cascading impact of multitudes. The big changes are just the highlights. The apparent leaders are just the self-satisfied crest of the wave. As painfully oversimplified as it sounds, all that is required for a better world to emerge is for positive change to scale and spread faster than negative.
As hopeless as it can sometimes seem with all of the horrible shit going on, just imagine the reaction going on unseen in the world around you right now. Unseen, because quite simply, despite a massively interconnected world, we still have no idea about what the vast majority of those around us are really thinking, feeling and doing.
Yet it IS a world where billions of people are all thinking and feeling and acting. Not just online. Not just in ways that get noticed and reported or talked about in the media or workplace. But individually and collectively in innumerable ways that matter deeply as part of a larger tapestry.
That bigger picture is impossible to see. But the plain fact is that if it tended more towards bad than good, we never would have made it this far.
That's why I'm a 'belligerent optimist'.
Working Backwards Towards Better
I believe with all my soul that the future can be a bright and wonderful place. I also believe that we're an exceedingly long way off and that getting there requires a balanced approach of looking both at the ground in front of us, as well as the distant horizon.
There's always critical groundwork to be done, but it's easy to get lost reacting and infighting and lose sight of the goal. Building a better future requires envisaging the ideal and describing it in detail. Something that motivates and inspires and allows us to contextualise the steps taken in the present, including the squabbles.
It also requires, in a sense, working backwards.
That means looking at that end goal, however ridiculous or far-fetched, and asking "What would that require?" What institutions, laws, norms, practices, technologies and so forth? These new goals don't need to be immediately achievable either. They just need to be a practical, reasonable step backwards. Do the same again and again and enough times and eventually you will arrive at the present.
Then you have what you need to do first. Then you have a plan and a roadmap to seemingly impossible goals - whether it's reversing climate change, ending a geopolitical conflict, creating an equitable economy or new forms of democratic governance, exploring the stars or building a post-scarcity Star Trek-esque utopia.
My goal has always been to identify those steps and contribute to advancing them.
I believe, for example, that humanised process transparency is the chief solution to distrust in media and politics. I believe citizen participation and liquid forms of democracy are the future of decision-making. I believe that people need to care about issues in order to incentivise leaders and develop effective policy and I believe that space (like any area of epoch-shaping innovation) needs effective citizen engagement in order to serve the public interest and not wildly exacerbate existing socio-economic and political problems.
I also believe that sharing is the foundation of a peaceful and sustainable world. Information, culture, opinions, resources, infrastructure, physical space, power and decision-making - every inch of progress and every epochal change in history, from the formation of the first social groups to writing, democracy and the internet, has ultimately consisted of improvements in our capacity to share. Our future depends on improving it further - freely, equitably and transparently.
That's why I do stuff.
About Me
My name is Daniel, and I'm a sci-fi nerd and prospective 'IT guy' who turned international development and refugee support worker out of Uni, moving to the Middle East and Africa to work and study languages, before shifting to democratic development.
I spent 5 years based in Cairo through the Arab Spring undertaking dual MAs in Sociology and Comparative Politics (both with a focus on democratic systems and processes), interviewed loads of people for my research - mapping the shifting geometry of social trust networks under authoritarianism and amidst democratic revolutions - and tried (unsuccessfully) to stay out of trouble.
During this time I also spent 6 months reviewing infrastructure development projects across South Asia for the UN and World Bank; helped research for a book on global trade development and its impact on developing economies; and founded an organisation that ran team-building workshops across three continents by gamifying decisions using different collective decision-making methodologies.
From 2015 to 2018, I served as a Policy Officer and Diplomat, before returning to continue my democracy research in the Middle East and then moving again to the US and Europe - co-founding a company that built research transparency software for journalists and others to fight disinformation and distrust.
In 2021 I became a dad, took time off and started writing science fiction.
In 2022 I took a role as an editor for a publication focussed on democratic innovation and technology and founded a public interest advocacy group called Celestial Commons, which provides strategic communications support to human interest space initiatives and runs a participatory citizens' space policy platform to get people directly involved in policy conversations that affect all of our lives.
In 2024 I became Head of Product at the Vienna-based Innovation in Politics Institute and these days I am a Senior Advisor, generally doing a bunch of democracy, policy, transparency, participation and space things.
Occasionally at the same time.