Hi!

I’m still buzzing from my first SXSW, not just because of the sheer sensory overload of it all—panels and parties and conversations that stretch late into the night—but because of the questions that linger long after the events wrap. The ones that wedge themselves into your brain and refuse to leave. The ones that make you rethink what you thought you knew.

One of those moments came during a conversation with Molly DeWolf Swenson and Ev Williams about Mozi, my favorite new app and one of the only social platforms I actually enjoy using. Their goal is deceptively simple: to make social networks social again. But what struck me was how they’re approaching it—not through a relentless feed or the extractive logic of engagement metrics, but through privacy by design. Mozi isn’t about broadcasting your location for an audience; it’s about quietly letting your people know where you are so you can actually see each other in real life. The end goal isn’t attention—it’s connection. And in an era where social platforms have done everything in their power to turn presence into performance, that feels borderline radical.

That same thread—technology as a force for real-world connection versus an extractive tool that keeps us perpetually online—was woven throughout the week. One of my biggest highlights was listening to Doug Rushkoff, who, as always, was equal parts brilliant and urgent in his call for us to reclaim the internet as a place of actual human connection. He spoke about the ways we’ve slowly ceded our agency, how we’ve let billionaires algorithm us out of our own humanity, and how easy it is to mistake passive participation for meaningful engagement. The question he left hanging in the air was one I can’t stop thinking about: Are we just going to sit back and let this happen? Or do we still believe in the possibility of something better?

And of course, there was the panel I had the privilege of joining, alongside Baratunde Thurston, Matt Klineman, and our AI co-host Blair, where we tackled Solar Punk Futures—a phrase that still fills me with a deep, necessary hope. If there was a single thread that tied together all my conversations at SXSW, it was this: the stories we tell about the future shape the futures we get. And right now, tech culture has spent decades conditioning us to expect corporate surveillance, AI overlords, and algorithmic oppression as the inevitable outcome of progress. But what if we refused to settle for that? What if, instead of resigning ourselves to a cyberpunk dystopia, we actively worked toward something else—something regenerative, sustainable, and deeply human?

These are the kinds of questions that stay with you long after the conference lanyards are discarded.

Right now, I’m in Dallas, about to speak at a conference for Tech and Innovation professionals, then I’m off to San Francisco, back to Dallas, and finally heading home to Europe. If we’re connected on Mozi, update your locations—let’s actually make those in-person hangouts happen. Because if SXSW reaffirmed anything for me, it’s that real connection—the kind that doesn’t live in a feed or a notification—is worth prioritizing.

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How To Move Towards A Different Future: The Five Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom

Before we can change the world, we have to change ourselves. It sounds cliché, but the more I sit with it, the more I realize how deeply our personal beliefs shape the systems we participate in. As Ijeoma Oluo writes in Be a Revolution, systemic change starts at the level of individual consciousness. The way we think about success, worth, power, and security is conditioned by the very structures we seek to challenge. We talk about dismantling harmful systems, but what about the systems running inside us? Our own internal Operating System—the sum of beliefs, habits, and assumptions that guide our daily decisions—needs an upgrade if we want to build something better.

One of the clearest ways to examine this conditioning? Looking at our relationship with money.

I’m not going to tell you that money doesn’t matter—because it absolutely does. But after a certain point, it is not the only thing that matters. And yet, we live in a world that continuously reinforces the idea that financial accumulation is the sole marker of success. The internet, in particular, has gamified wealth, turning financial milestones into social capital and pushing an always-on culture where productivity is the only acceptable form of existence. The more money we make, the more we chase. And while the dream of financial independence is valid, so many of us get stuck in the loop of optimizing only for this one kind of wealth, often at the expense of everything else.

That’s why I love the premise of my friend Sahil’s new book, The 5 Types of Wealth. He expands the definition beyond financial success to include Time, Social, Mental, and Physical well-being—pillars that are just as essential to a fulfilling life but are often neglected in favor of work, hustle, and endless optimization. Sahil also created a quiz to help people assess where they stand across these five areas, and unsurprisingly, my weakest scores were in time wealth and physical health—both direct consequences of my relentless travel schedule.

I already take August and December off as “no-travel” months, but looking at my results made me realize I need a better approach for the rest of the year. Do I actually need to be on the road this much? How much of my time is being spent in alignment with what I truly value versus what I’ve been conditioned to prioritize? It’s a tricky balance—travel is essential for my work, but at what cost?

The physical health piece also wasn’t a shock. The inconsistency of bouncing between time zones and two home bases makes maintaining routines difficult. But at least here, I feel like I have built-in solutions: a workout for every travel scenario. Long layover? Walk 10,000 steps through the airport. Quick trip? Hotel room workout with mini-bands. Weird hotel floor? Standing-only exercises. Exhausted after a long-haul flight? Bed stretches. It’s a patchwork system, but it works.

Still, it makes me think about how radical it can feel to step away from a culture that treats time as something to be monetized rather than lived. The internet constantly pushes us toward hyper-productivity—turning rest into recovery (so we can work more), friendships into networking (so they remain useful), and personal growth into branding (so it’s monetizable). It’s exhausting. And it makes me wonder: What happens when we reclaim time for connection, for care, for the parts of life that don’t scale?

For me, that reclamation starts with action. Thanks to the quiz, I’ve decided to take a major step—I’m heading to Turkey in April for some medical tourism, a VIP health screening to get a clear baseline and build a plan for longevity. Because if I want to be healthy, strong, and flexible into my 70s, I need to start making those investments now.

A Social Future We Actually Own

I had the chance to chat with the BlueSky team while in Austin, and I left fired up about what they’re building. If you’re not familiar, BlueSky is often described as a Twitter alternative, but that sells it short. At its core, it’s an experiment in building a better internet—one that isn’t owned by a handful of billionaires but by all of us.

The backbone of BlueSky is something called the AT Protocol (yes, that’s the right name), an open-source, decentralized social networking framework. In simple terms, it means that instead of one company controlling the entire ecosystem—your feed, your followers, your data—you get to choose how you experience social media. Different platforms can plug into the same network, users can move between services without losing their communities, and most importantly, we’re no longer trapped in walled gardens where corporate algorithms decide what we see and who we engage with. Imagine if you could take your audience with you from one platform to another, or choose your own moderation settings instead of being at the mercy of whatever content policies a single CEO dreams up on a whim. That’s the future they’re building.

But here’s the thing: decentralization only works if people actually use it. The internet is shaped by where we put our attention, our content, and our communities. If we want a social future that isn’t locked down by four companies deciding what we can see, we need to actively participate in small but mighty alternatives like BlueSky. That means creating accounts, posting, engaging, and most importantly, inviting others to join. We can’t wait for these spaces to feel fully formed before making the jump—we are the ones who build them.

And this extends beyond social media. Maybe we also need to rethink how we engage with digital infrastructure in general. Less defaulting to Amazon Prime, more walking into town and buying from a local bookstore. Less passively accepting that Google, Apple, and Meta own our digital lives, more exploring tools that let us co-own our spaces. If Solar Punk Futures are about resisting dystopia and creating regenerative alternatives, then they don’t start with some grand, utopian leap—they start with us choosing, today, to participate in the future we want to see.

So if you’re ready to start, you can find me on BlueSky at rahaf.bsky.social and on Flashes (a new Instagram competitor) at foushy.bsky.social. Let’s build something better together.