NOT THEO! Why We Must Capture the Now

If I had a dollar for every time I said my life could be a sitcom, I would have enough to hire Stephen Colbert and the South Park guys. Growing up in the 80s, the TV was more than background noise. It was a storyteller, babysitter, debate host, historian, educator and so much more. My family would gather in the living room on (especially) Thursday and Sunday evenings like it was a sacred theater, laughing, crying, even dreaming together. And of all the shows, The Cosby Show was for sure a fan favorite.

Photo Credit: NBCU/NBC Universal/ Getty Images Malcolm-Jamal Warner played Theo Huxtable from 1984 to 1992.

When I was 11, my mom took me to attend a live taping of that famous show in New York City. I remember the laughter, the lights, and most of all being so nervous I couldn't hold it and went to the bathroom during a scene and ran right into Theo, Malcolm-Jamal Warner himself. When this moment happened in my fantasies I was going to be the coolest, prettiest girl he had ever seen. What actually happened was.....nothing. I stared, he excused himself and went back to the green room or wherever the rest of the Crosby family was hanging out. Completely uneventful. It was a shame, not just because of my preteen hormones but because he was more than just a character to me. Theo was the missing teen in my world who made being middle class, weird and clumsy cool and Blackness multidimensional. His recent passing hit me like a crack in the time-space continuum. It also reinforced my recent thinking: Who is recording the stories of our humanity today? Right now, we’re living through a strange paradox. AI startups are spending millions resurrecting the past from digitizing ancient texts, reviving voices long gone, to building chatbots of dead celebrities. Meanwhile, we are missing the most urgent data stream: the present.

Where is the strategic infrastructure for archiving the soul of our time?

The laughter over shared meals, the awkward Zoom family reunions, the TikTok dances that double as cultural archives, the undocumented brilliance of everyday folks doing everyday things. These are data sets, too. They are the soul files of civilization. And if we don't start capturing them with care, consent, and creativity, we risk becoming ghosts to the future.

So because this blog has become my place to prompt all of us to ask bigger questions that double as invitations, I've got a new one for us all. How do you want our civilization to be remembered? My answer is easy, I want us to be remembered by jokes, music, awkward hugs and silences (sorry Theo) and transcendent kindness and tenderness not just by our wars or algorithms. What if we treated storytelling as infrastructure? What if data stewardship included nuance and numbers?

Our AI mirror is also a time capsule. What we choose to put into it now determines how we’ll be seen and felt by generations to come.

Let’s not let the future inherit a void.