Soft Power

Soft Power investigates how humans can live fully and freely in an age of intelligent machines.

Today, the most urgent yet under-considered questions concerning technology aren’t about technical capabilities, but how they change our ways of living, relating, and understanding the world.

These questions are asked far too infrequently in the tech industry. Before asking what is possible to create, we ought to ask: to what end?

Many visions of the future today conflate progress with individual convenience, flourishing with abundance. They lead us toward a world of greater material comfort, but less freedom and agency. They neglect the things that make our lives rich and meaningful and ours: the joy of learning, the satisfaction of mastery, the dignity of becoming ourselves through our own efforts.

Soft Power is a space to explore the deeper, messier questions of the human condition: of dignity, beauty, freedom, agency, meaning, belonging.

Inspired by thinkers like Dewey, Arendt, and Baldwin, we seek a tradition of thought that is American in the best sense: pragmatic yet aspirational; rooted yet radical; democratic, pluralistic, and unfinished. We are not here to critique from the sidelines, nor to cheerlead the future, but to ask enduring questions: What is in need of changing? What is worth preserving? And how do we live well together?

We value seriousness without sanctimony, imagination without utopianism, and humanism without reactionary nostalgia. We aim to publish essays, dialogues, and provocations reach across disciplines and traditions, challenge dominant narratives, and stand the test of time.

We believe the most powerful forces in the world are often quiet, relational, and difficult to measure. Hence the name: Soft Power.

About me

Soft Power is written by me, Ashley Zhang, a humanist and Storyteller at Imbue. We’re an AI startup working to empower humans by building tools for anyone to shape their digital world for themselves.

I believe that ideas trickle down to shape our reality. The dominant ideas in the AI scene today — safety, alignment, existential risk — were once seedlings planted in online forums. My wish for Soft Power is to plant different seeds: ones that help us consider not just catastrophic ends or hollow post-scarcity futures, but what it means to live well, to remain human, and to build with care — so that we might create technologies in service of a more humane world.

Soft Power is the early sketch of what I hope will grow into a publication. If you’d be interested in co-editing, writing, or just jamming on ideas, send me a note at ashleydzhang@gmail.com :)

Share Soft Power

Inspirations

A non-comprehensive list of people and orgs that inspire my work:

• Adam Robbert

• Albert Camus

• Anton Barba-Kay

• Anna Gát ✨

• Asterisk Magazine

• Brie Wolfson

• Bushra Farooqui

• Byung-Chul Han

• Celine Nguyen

• Cosmos Institute

• Hannah Arendt

• Henrik Karlsson

• Henry David Thoreau

• John Dewey

• Interact

• My colleagues at Imbue

  • Kanjun Qiu

  • Josh Albrecht

  • Matt Boulos

  • Glenn McDonald

• Ivan Illich

• James Baldwin

• James Bridle

• Jasmine Wang 🌱

• Jasmine Sun

• Joan Didion

• Joel Lehman

• Kelsey Chen

• Kevin Kelly

• L. M. Sacasas

• Liberties Journal

• Long Now Foundation

• Matthew B. Crawford

• Marshall McLuhan

• Meaning Alignment Institute

• Molly Mielke McCarthy

• Nadia Asparouhova

• Neil Postman

• The New Atlantis

• Nicholas Paul

• Nix 🕊

• On Being Project

• Rainer Maria Rilke

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Richard Rorty

• The Point
  Magazine

• Sari Azout

• Shannon Vallor

• Simone Weil

• Spencer Chang

• Steve Jobs

• Stewart Brand

• Ted Gioia

• Walt Whitman