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Putting this here for me; maybe you need it too.
The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.
So when they dehumanize, you humanize.
When they try to fracture and divide people, you connect with people.
When they try to curtail the freedom to associate, you gather.
When they try to make it harder to speak your mind, you find your voice.
When they try to make you cynical, you double down on hope.
In summary, “The best revenge… is to live well, richly, [and] together”.
Interact
With my ties to Southwest Colorado (that naturally extend into Southeast Utah) Bears Ears is a very special place to me. It’s hard to communicate the beauty and historical significance in those lands if you haven’t visited and it’s so vast that even to say you have “visited” is a bit of a misnomer: what part? Mountains? Canyons? River? You could spend a lifetime visiting and barely scratch the surface.
This beautiful, interactive piece came across my radar in the first Trump administration and it’s excellent. If nothing else, it will help you understand the scale of the Monument.
Bears Ears is the first national monument created at the request of and with input from Native American governments. A coalition of the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes initially sought protection for an area covering 1.9 million acres, bounded to the west and south by the Colorado and San Juan rivers.
“We knew exactly what was within that geographical boundary,” said Shaun Chapoose, a tribal councilman for the Uncompahgre band of the Ute Tribe. “We knew the gravesites, we knew where the artifacts were, we knew where certain plants and herbs grew.”
Considering the sheer acreage of nationalized/public land in the U.S. and the indigenous peoples that were shoved out of it by colonialism, it’s important to underscore their involvement in the creation of this monument. It took real work and compromise amongst many different groups of people and competing priorities to get here. The first Trump admin axed about 80% of it. Biden’s administration restored it, and now it’s again “under review” by the new Trump administration, with an indeterminate fate.
The Atlantic has a more recent piece (published in January, pre-inauguration) that does a good job of relaying the local tensions over the Monument.
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The cynicism our current moment inspires appears to be, regrettably, universal. For millennials, who watched the better-world-by-design ship go down in real time, it’s hard-earned. We saw the idealist fantasy of creative autonomy, social impact, and purpose-driven work slowly unravel over the past decade, and are now left holding the bag. Gen Z designers have the same pessimism, but arrived at it from a different angle. They’re entering the field already skeptical, shaped by a job market in freefall and constant warnings of their own obsolescence. But the result is the same: an industry full of people who care deeply, but feel let down.
I still believe in good design. Everything is designed (intentionally or not), but little is designed well. I have a soft spot in particular for graphic design since that is where I started my career.
I hope what we’re seeing is a fallow period leading into a regroup where graphic designers, in particular, can re-propose their economic worth in a world where AI has trended visual design to the mean. But it’s hard to say that will happen because culture has gone through long periods of accepting mediocre design before. It may happen again and AI, while enabling it, won’t be the core reason it happens.