Technology is not the future.
What people imagine they can do with technology — that’s the future.
Hi Google,
I’m Jeff. I’m writer and filmmaker at Columbia. I've written a sci-fi novel and directed films that caught the attention of President Obama.
I come to the Creative Lab because I want to help bring meaning and humanity to the technologies that will shape our future.
I want to find ways to humanize the most complex advances. I want to add the magic that transforms a product into a memory.
My story with technology is inseparable from that of the diaspora. Growing up, my family moved every three years.
The first time we moved, mom used quarters and a telephone booth to call her college roommate to pick us up from the airport.
Calling home then required an international phone card. The cards were expensive, and we couldn't afford to call home often. My grandparents, who were already sullen over our decision to leave, saw our silence as yet another sign that we wanted to run away from the family.
But when VOIP rippled through the immigrant community, that relationship changed.
Suddenly, mom spent entire afternoons on the phone, narrating everything from dramatic meetings at work to the freshness of fruits at the supermarket. She described the strawberries and raspberries in such detail that she finally convinced my grandparents to visit that summer. Here's ah-gong on the balcony of our rental home:
The first time I was asked out was over Gmail.
Her name was Milena, and she sat across from me in physics. She sent an email to my school Google Classroom account and asked if I’d want to catch a movie sometime, signing off with the declaration, “Yes, I intend for this to be a date."
It wasn’t a very good movie, but the over next two months, we spent most of our afterschools together.
She was from Argentina, and one of the things we liked to do was go on Street View in the public library and walk around the places we grew up in. That was many years ago, but even now I can tell you that Milena’s childhood home was filled with glass animals, a second-floor apartment with wooden shades and a cable car underneath.
Before college, mom and I made a deal. I’d enable location sharing and a family photo cloud, and in exchange, she wouldn't call worriedly at 3am.
What I didn't know was that she'd check our family cloud every morning. Afraid to bother me, she'd try piece together what I was up to through the photos and update our relatives awaiting in a group chat spanning five generations.
When I came home exhausted and disillusioned after my first year, mom showed me her WeChat archives. Though most of her inferences were hilariously wrong, I saw how she spoke of the most mundane parts of college life — all the things I had long taken for granted — with the utmost pride. In one post she wrote: “Breakfast on the lawns, lecture with wise English professor in beautiful classroom — this must be the American Dream.”
If I were to make it onto a magazine cover sometime,
I want it to be because I helped make sense of our messy future somehow. Maybe I helped shape the UX of social media apps to be kinder on our psychology. Maybe I helped connect NLP capabilities to bridging education gaps. Maybe because in 15 years or so, people associate tech with hope, and I had a hand in that somehow.
I write sci-fi because it promises a future where through innovation, we can change even the most obstinate parts of our condition. But it’s not enough to create the technology — we have to help people understand it so they can be empowered to leverage it.
My favorite part of the creative process is the company of people it brings together.
That moment in the very beginning, when you are surrounded by brilliant people but before you, there is nothing. A blank board. An empty stage. A set with no direction.
Then you move. In theatre and dance we have this idea of the ensemble — not just individual excellences that sum up to something great, but a mesh that shares and inspires each other’s impulse. You create not just products, but relationships. That’s my favorite part of the creative process.
the work (cv)
