Chris Anderson sat down with Elon Musk in May 2017 to talk about the future and boring, a company using the technology of Tesla and SpaceX to engineer a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate traffic congestion, I couldn’t help but think of the techne of rhetoric. It’s boring too. Rhetoric is the art to bore our way, like miners and mining engineers, to create channels of communication to develop a system of exchange to enhance diversity, difference, and inclusion.

We need to work on the techne of rhetoric so that we can build a way to the future.

In his 2017 Ted Talk Musk tantalizes us to evolve: “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it,” he told Anderson.

Let’s not forget that the ancient Greeks were able to create democracy with the techne of rhetoric but let us also follow Musk’s lead to remember that technology needs our hands and expertise to make it better for the sake of our democracy. How do we get the future we wish it to be?

 Here is a good place to start.