So what’s to be done about all this? Over the coming months I’m going to both locate ways that we can try to increase ou

The thought that I was capable enough to manage a store was alien to me prior to him bringing it up. Someone seeing something in me was all it took for me to get motivated.,The smart and capable person I knew I could be was buried beneath the experiences that shaped me into becoming someone I didn’t enjoy being. I wasn’t completely devoid of hope. I had the feeling that things would turn around someday.,I accepted the job as the “manager in training.” To prepare for my new position, I started watching interviews of successful people and TED talks about leadership. I invested myself and the process I used to become a better manager led to me becoming a writer and doing what I’d always dreamed of doing.,They may not be able to do much about it, but there are mainstream politicians and elected leaders who see this vacuum for what it is — and see how it provides them with a political opportunity. Figures like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson certainly don’t believe in patching up the failures of this system — if anything, they believe in accelerating the process, deregulating, handing more power to the networks. No, for them this is a political vacuum that can be filled with blame. With finger-pointing and scapegoating. It is an opportunity to make themselves look powerful by pandering to fears, by evoking nationalism, racism, and fascism.,Ceding control to vast unaccountable networks not only risks those networks going off the rails, it also threatens democracy itself. If we are struggling to understand or influence anything more than very small parts of them, this is also increasingly true for politicians and world leaders. Like the captain of the container ship, politicians and voters have less and less control over how any of these networks run. Instead they find themselves merely managing very small parts of them — they certainly don’t seem to be able to make drastic changes to those networks (which are mainly owned by private corporate industries anyway) even though they have a very direct impact on their nations’ economies, policies, and populations. To paraphrase the filmmaker Adam Curtis, instead of electing visionary leaders, we are in fact just voting for middle managers in a complex, global system that nobody fully controls.,Had I had a different attitude about becoming a store manager of a video store, I could’ve behaved in an entirely different way. Had I looked down on the position instead of looking at it as a learning experience, perhaps I’d still be working there.,The result of this feels increasingly like a democratic vacuum. We live in an era where voters have record levels of distrust for politicians, partly because they can feel this disconnect — they see from everyday reality that, despite their claims, politicians can’t effect change. Not really. They might not understand why, exactly, but there’s this increasing sense that leaders have lost the ability to make fundamental changes to our economic and social realities. The result is a large body of mainstream voters that wants to burn down the status quo. They want change, but don’t see politicians being able to deliver it. It feels like they’re trapped in a car accelerating at full throttle, but no one is driving.,At the time, I was just looking for a job because I was broke. I happened to live by the video store so I walked in and applied. I filled out the application in persuasive detail (I was always decent with words), told the manager about myself and seemingly made a good impression.,Before landing the job as the manager of the video store, I’d been hired and fired from a string of menial jobs (while supplementing my income selling weed). I could never hold a job down for longer than 6 months.,It is imperative to acknowledge that more often than not, people are sensitive and do not want to hurt others. They end up holding on to the biases just because they haven’t been aware of it and would be careful as soon as they understand the rationale behind it. Therefore, it is not for political correctness to police them or to ban words altogether. Yes, all the nations are in Africa, and yes, geographically all of them are located below the Sahara Desert. In this light, all of them are certainly individually ‘sub-Saharan’ exactly how America can be called ‘trans-Atlantic.’ However, the problem sets at the moment we start to ascribe a common identity to them, just because they are near each other. We inadvertently associate them on the basis color of their skin because that may be a signifier of identity in the west. It is this gross generalization all of us should be extremely careful about because there are no black people in Africa.,In the process of learning to become a better leader and learn new skills, I started to share ideas and things I learned on my Facebook page. A friend took notice of my essay-like status updates and asked me to write some articles on his website he was working on.,Donald Trump has still not conceded the 2020 election despite Joe Biden’s clear victory, and is leaning in part on the fact that the United States has a complex and sometimes opaque voting system that most of the public doesn’t understand to spread conspiracy theories about glitchy or malfeasant voting machines switching or deleting millions of votes. It’s perhaps no coincidence that some of the highest-profile figures on the right — like ex-Trump-adviser Steve Bannon or Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage — have backgrounds in the financial industry. These are political players who have seen how complicated things have become and can sense the gap in public comprehension but want to fill it with chaos and conspiracies rather than explanations.,The same is also true for the global financial markets, which unblinkingly focus on creating wealth and growth, regardless how many companies and their workers might fall by the wayside, how many pensions schemes might be jeopardized, or even how many climate-wrecking carbon emissions are produced. And on the internet, streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube provide us with unlimited entertainment content whenever we desire it, but at the expense of musicians and creators who struggle to earn a living wage. And then there’s the baked-in biases and lack of transparency in algorithmic decision-making, and how that impacts everything from YouTube recommendations to student grading and predictive policing.,Clearly, a number of women who worked on the show as well and even the men who witnessed it felt compelled to speak up. This hints at a truly toxic work environment that clearly implicated Minhaj, in much the same way that Ellen was implicated in how her show treated its workers. Juggernaut writer Sarah Thankam Matthews tweeted in response to these women sharing their pain.,So what’s to be done about all this? Over the coming months I’m going to both locate ways that we can try to increase our knowledge of the seemingly unknowable, as well as find strategies to counter the powerlessness and anxiety the system produces. Along the way I’m going to be talking to a lot of experts about everything from automated shipping and algorithmic trading to financial regulation and political resistance, as well as taking deep dives into how emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing could make things better — or a lot worse. I hope you’ll join me as we explore how our systems work, how their complexities impact our lives, and how we can regain some agency within them.