In these atomized futures where large-scale actors are working overtime to convince us we should alienate our neighbors and focus only on our own worlds—preferably with VR headsets and always-on surveillance monitoring us to sell us more stuff—we’re ignoring that we’ve been in transition for decades. The machinery is already broken. The question is whether we’re going to fix it or let other people fix it for us in ways we definitely won’t like.

Here in Portland, this plays out in real time. The same logic that killed the AAA Portland Beavers is alive and well in debates about public investments.

Most people don’t remember how we lost the Beavers, or why. Back in 2009, when the Portland Timbers were heading to MLS, owner Merritt Paulson needed to make PGE Park soccer-only. The Beavers—who’d been playing in Portland for nearly a century—needed a new home. The obvious solution was Memorial Coliseum, which could have been retrofitted as a baseball stadium and later expanded for MLB if we ever got a major league team.

But a vocal coalition of preservationists and architecture buffs rallied to save the Coliseum, a beautiful but underused building that mostly hosted “assemblies”—events with a few hundred people rattling around in a 12,000-seat arena. The anti-stadium crowd insisted we couldn’t tear down this architectural gem, this veterans memorial, this irreplaceable piece of midcentury modernism. Most of those prattlers are off being silent or might have been radicalized by the moment and finding new topics to complain about and progress to block.

Fair enough. Except they offered no alternative. When Paulson tried to find another site—Beaverton, Clackamas, Lents, Vancouver—every single suburb backed out. Nobody wanted the team. The preservationists got their building, the Beavers got run out of town. People argue that “well nobody cared about AAA baseball,” but the A-ball team in the suburbs draws pretty well and is about to get a very expensive new stadium to keep that team planted there.

The stadium debate isn’t really “stadium vs. all the stuff we need.” It’s “do nothing vs. do something flawed but catalytic.” If we’d had more foresight when the Beavers left, we might not be scrambling now for hundred-year assets while maintaining redundant arena.

The mantra “we can just do things” hits because it cuts through all the bullshit about waiting for permission, perfect conditions, someone else to fix what’s broken right in front of us. But where we completely miss the mark is thinking that DOING THINGS means volunteering to pick up trash because municipal departments are trapped in some Spider-Man pointing meme about whose job it actually is.

That’s not doing things. That’s enabling dysfunction.

Whether it’s complaining about new schools being build or parks being retrofit, we’re constantly stepping on rakes. This isn’t even about the difficulty of doing stuff or the ways that progress sometimes takes time to get stuff done. And I am very much aware of the issues with spending, cost overruns, and the slow march to progress that makes these projects require better stewardship. But that’s a problem we could solve in any number of ways, it does not mean we should be shutting down efforts to do things when our moment hits.

Every day we waste ignoring problems that could be solved today is a future we’re stealing from someone who could be living their best life right now. This is how we have to think about problems at scale—that every time we shrug and walk past something fixable, we’re blocking someone else from being who they’re meant to be.

Here’s what I’ve been trying to dig into with all this civic imagination stuff: proving we can solve smaller problems, and people VISIBLY SEEING those improvements happen, creates the momentum for tackling the bigger, scarier, more complex shit that feels impossible.

When neighbors see a dangerous intersection finally get a crosswalk because someone organized and pushed, when a vacant lot becomes something useful because people showed up with shovels, when a government form gets unfucked because someone cared enough to make noise—those wins compound. They remind people that the world is malleable, that institutions can be made to respond, that effort actually matters. This is building the muscle memory of collective efficacy so when the really hard stuff comes, we remember: oh right, we can just do things.

We’re living through what feels like a decades-long transition epoch where all the old affordances—the social cues that told people where they were welcome, how systems worked, what to expect—have been rendered completely opaque.

Someone joked on BlueSky about a person walking into their business with a paper resume and wearing a suit. Everyone at his job laughed because we all felt the discomfort of how fast the ground shifted. But that person wasn’t wrong—they were operating with information that used to be reliable.

Now you need to understand ATS to get your resume past the first robot. You need deep software literacy just to buy basic things or reach government services that should be accessible to anyone with citizenship and a pulse. The machinery that used to help people navigate a potentially hostile world has been made deliberately opaque.

We’re operating in the shadow of what I wrote about in April—the coming collapse of AI hype won’t free us, it’ll bury us. When the bubble pops, the infrastructure won’t be democratically reclaimed. It will flow straight to the carceral state, surveillance systems, predictive profiling operations. The cloud won’t fall into our hands; it will land on us. This makes building civic alternatives more urgent, not less.

Every day we choose inaction on solvable problems is another day we defer someone else’s potential. The student who gives up on college because they can’t navigate financial aid systems. The entrepreneur whose great idea dies in regulatory quicksand. The community that accepts a dangerous intersection because “that’s how it’s always been.”

Jaron Lanier (in “You Are Not A Gadget”) talks about how we’ve handed over most of the control points in our systems to algorithms that optimize for engagement and profit instead of human agency. The civic imagination is about taking back some of that control, starting with the stuff closest to home.

But we’re running out of time for purely incremental approaches to fundamental problems.

Photo credit: PGE Park in Portland, 2010. Photo by Robert Britt on Flickr.*