There is a peculiar attitude, here at the beginning of the 21st century. On the one hand, we agree things aren’t fine. On the other hand, there’s a widespread feeling that there’s nothing to be done.

The first thing to recognize is that this is a historical anomaly. At transition points in the past, people had a sense that there was something—something huge — to be done. Essays like the Communist Manifesto give people this sense. Before that, at the dawn of modern democracy, documents like Common Sense (in the US) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (in France) gave people the same sense. There was something to be done.

I’d like to address, here, this feeling there’s nothing to be done. Despite what activists say, I believe this feeling is somewhat justified. I believe it shows where our society is stuck. It’s no simple story — not just about apathy, consumer comfort, the rise of clicktivism, or anything like that.

To start, let’s look at our institutions: elections, mass media, the global economy, representative government, public education, Facebook. Most are causing problems. Yet it’s common to think that, despite their problems, these institutions are somehow the end of the line.

Why would that be?

Some believe they can’t be changed because they’re part of a deliberately “rigged” system, fashioned by powerful people to keep themselves in charge. A quick study of history brings this into question: often these very institutions weren’t fashioned to keep powerful in charge. From public libraries to constitutional conventions, new institutions were often rebellious or non-economic and arose for idealistic reasons. Perhaps we imagine that “the system” today is more rigged, better at suppressing change than in feudal or monarchic times. But even if this were true, it wouldn’t explain the lack of vision for new institutions. It’s not just that we despair that new ideas would be suppressed—it’s that we don’t have plausible ideas in the first place.

But there’s a second kind of nothing-to-be-done view, that we must take more seriously. That’s the view that human nature is fixed, and that our current batch of institutions — including markets, democracies, and social networks — represents a kind of final, unimprovable compromise between the different aspects of human nature. On this view, our current institutions make the best possible balance of autonomy against collective responsibility, of equality against opportunity, of consumer affluence against self-expression and public participation, and so on. Broadly, they’re the best way to balance individual incentives with our ideals.

This view, too, falls apart in the light of history. We find a breathtakingly different story: Human nature, far from being fixed, is read differently from age to age. These different readings give rise to totally new ideas for institutions. And these new readings and new institutions seem to reshape us. Often, what works out in practice would have seemed impossible on the previous views. Furthermore, the traits we are supposedly balancing — autonomy, collective responsibility, equality, etc — are themselves changing. They, also, are expressions of one view of human nature or another.

Indeed, each of our present-day institutions can be traced to a vision of human nature which swept through society. Each new vision led designers to focus on different features of a desirable society, and to recognize different approaches as viable. This made new institutions attractive.

The process looked like this:

Each of these arrows represents a design culture: a group of designers who thought of people and considered human systems in a particular way. It’s this shared vision which gave birth to institutions.

So what blocks the creation of new institutions? It’s not the greed of the powerful; it’s not some physics of balancing incentives.

We’re waiting on a new vision of human nature.

Until we have it, we’re stuck recycling old models (unions, co-ops, local currencies, whatever) or, worse, grasping at tech trends (blockchains, wikipedia, the “sharing economy”).

That’s like trying to invent voting by asking “so, fellas, what can we do with pencils?”

Believe it or not, it wasn’t new technologies that led to new institutions in the past, it was changing ideas of human nature and society. [1]

But we can’t imagine how that could happen again today. We can’t even see how our current visions shape our designs, lives, organizations, and our self-conceptions.

I’ll do my best to reveal the visions of human nature which underlie our designs, and how our design cultures keep us locked inside those visions. Once we see the culture we live inside, we’re ready to step outside and see new opportunities.

What is a Design Culture?

Designers often think they have a solid understanding of who they design for. But the truth is that this understanding is fragmentary, and that designers will see the same people very differently:

The organization designer imagines a team as motivated by competition and incentives.

The recommender system designer imagines consumers searching for a perfect match for their individual tastes or preferences.

The OS designer imagines users getting out their phones with goals and tasks to perform in mind.

What designers may not realize, is that each of these ways of understanding people arose at a particular historical moment and came to dominate new designs at the time: