HW#5 Thematic Tribes - Zackary Russell

• What are your favorite movies?

  • The Empire Strikes Back

  • Terminator 2

  • The Matrix

  • Inception

  • Interstellar

• What theme do you see running through all of them?

  • Working together as a team to accomplish something incredible

  • Freeing others from tyranny

  • Rising to the challenge and facing overwhelming odds

  • Bravely venturing into the unknown

  • The peril and promise of technology

  • Redemption and reunion

• Post to the group a subject you’re thinking of engaging with your tribe on and get feedback.

My target reader is a Gen X’er who had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood, all before Big Tech took over. He works in the tech sector but doesn’t have social media. He has a smart home but maintains analog practices with his family.  Therefore, a big part of my branding is exploring the complexity of humanity’s relationship with technology, even artificial intelligence.

It was the T-1000 who came back to kill John Connor, but the (reprogrammed) T-101 who saved him. Dream sharing technology doomed Cobb and tore him away from his children, but it also gave him a way to be reunited with them. Isaac Asimov said something to the effect of, “Humanity has never encountered a problem with technology that it did not try to solve with technology.”

What I want to ask my target reader / tribe is threefold:

1. What are your most optimistic hopes for how AI and other advanced technologies will help humanity solve our problems?

2. What problems do you think will get worse?

3. In what ways are you returning to analog?