Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.

In 2003 and early 2004, I wrote a book to make the case for hope. Hope in the Dark was, in many ways, of its moment – it was written against the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq. That moment passed long ago, but despair, defeatism, cynicism and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed, even as the most wildly, unimaginably magnificent things came to pass. There is a lot of evidence for the defence.

Coming back to the text more than a dozen tumultuous years later, I believe its premises hold up. Progressive, populist and grassroots constituencies have had many victories. Popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. And the changes we have undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are astonishing.

Read more.

Four boats approach the small harbor of Skala on the Greek island of Lesbos. The first vessel is occupied by agents of Frontex, the European Union border-control unit. The men are dressed in black, from helmets to combat boots. They tow the second boat, an inflatable dinghy with flimsy plywood baseboards that’s crammed from pontoon to pontoon with extremely cold people. Earlier this morning a smuggler in Izmir, Turkey, filled the raft with refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, handed the throttle to a young man who’d never driven a boat, and pointed toward Greece. Like so many of the thousands of vessels provided by human-smuggling mafias, this one didn’t have enough fuel and ran out of gas somewhere in the middle of the Aegean.

The third boat, a gray Zodiac, found them. It’s manned by two young men—one an out-of-work Greek, the other a Norwegian bored with his stultifying Oslo desk job. Neither of them possesses an organizational affiliation. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have come through Lesbos in the past year, as of my visit on December 18, neither Frontex nor the Greek coast guard has established much of a presence. Instead, the job of offering aid falls largely to international volunteers who have flocked to the island. A throng of them, their experience ranging from extensive to none, waits onshore with reflective survival blankets. The emergencies director of Human Rights Watch is here, as is a fashion model from Manhattan who brought perfume samples for the refugees. As the Zodiac approaches the dock, the Norwegian hurls himself into the water and ties the boat up to a mooring.

Behind the scene trails the fourth boat, a wooden vessel owned by a local fisherman. On the bow, a bearded American named David Darg holds up a small virtual-reality camera called a Ricoh Theta. Thirty-seven years old, with a reddish-brown beard, tight black jeans, and the thick build of a logger, Darg occupies a unique and peculiar role within the fast-moving world of new media.1 On the one hand he’s a crisis responder and vice president of international operations at Operation Blessing, a faith-based nonprofit. But he’s also cofounder of Ryot, a Los Angeles for-profit company that specializes in hopeful video content from developing and disaster-affected nations. He has come to Lesbos to bring the reality of the migrant crisis to the wider world. Darg calls the VR camera in his hand a “transportation device,” one capable of essentially bringing Western viewers to the world’s strife-ridden places. “You register VR as an experience you had,” he says, “rather than something you see”—a common boast about VR.

Read more.