Recent Written Stories in Online Series
The Transformation is a series of stories about the future history of America & the world from 2020 to 2050 as told by a Gen Z character in 2100. The popular series with more than 50,000 followers in Medium is a positive yet plausible narrative about how we can solve the many challenges of our time & build a much better future. Through this page you can get oriented and see an overview in order of all 6 stories linked to Medium (click on the images below). Or you can go directly to Medium but they display the stories in reverse order (blog-style) with the most recent one first: medium.reinvent.net
Introduction to The Transformation Series
The Introduction explains the whole project in Leyden’s voice from 2020 and lays out its roots dating back 25 years to the early Wired Magazine. He also explains why a positive narrative for America and the world is so important right now.
Leyden also makes the case that most people are underestimating the positive potential of a dozen driving forces he calls The Inexorables that will play out in the coming decades and could help solve our biggest challenges. He ends with acknowledgments for the 25 world-class experts and innovators who he interviewed for this ambitious project.
The History of America & the World From 2000 to 2050
This is the key overview story for the series that introduces a character from Generation Z who looks back at the end of his life in 2100 and tells how the big challenges of the world were largely solved in the first half of the century.
If there is one story you are going to read in the entire series — this overview is it. This is the best piece to give you the overarching narrative of an unexpectedly positive future that still lies ahead for us.
The Technology Long Booms that Remade the World from 2020 to 2050
This story lays out the remarkable advance of Infotech and Biotech during those three decades that provided the foundation for The Transformation as seen from the year 2100. It goes deep into the technologies that were needed to solve our era’s many challenges, including laying the groundwork for the next story on how we could largely solve climate change.
This tech boom story is more concrete about the many inexorable tech trends that will shape our future under any scenario. And the narrator makes the case that coming advancements in AI, like simultaneous language translation, will bring about an explosion of innovation that will surprise us all.
How We Turned the Corner on Climate Change by 2050
This is the epic story of how America made the shift to clean energies, electric transportation & sustainable everything as seen from 2100. It shows how we can dramatically scale up clean energies to supersede almost all carbon energies by the year 2050. We can realign the global economy to incentivize everyone toward building and buying sustainable everything in the next 30 years.
We humans in the early 21st century have the scientific know-how, the array of technologies, the financial resources, and the organizational ability to pull this off. Read this climate story to see how it can be done.
The Watershed Election of 2020 in the Long View of American History
This story describes the end of the conservative era, the beginning of the dominance of progressive Blue America and the economic consequences to follow from 2020 to 2050. It makes the controversial case that the 2020 election will be seen as a watershed in American history and join the ranks of other iconic years like 1932 or 1980 that mark the beginning of a new political era.
The narrator from 2100 of this political story explains how the ascendent political coalition grew in strength over the 2020s and took on the daunting challenges of economic inequality and racial inequity.
The Civilizational Changes of The Transformation
This story lays out how the profound changes from 2020 to 2050 laid the foundation for a new civilization to emerge by 2100 that superseded that of The Enlightenment. It makes the case that over the entire life of Generation Z we will go through a transformation that will end in a new and better civilization.
All the mega-inventions of The Enlightenment will be superseded by parallel mega-inventions over the course of The Transformation: digital computers, clean energies, biological production, sustainable capitalism, digital democracy and global governance. This civilization story will stretch your mind.
