Reimagining Connection, Agency, and the Future of Digital Creative Work | Online & IRL
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The work was not suffering from a lack of insight or creativity—it was suffering from a deeper tension: pressure versus agency. Traditional upskilling, futurist reports, and trend forecasting felt hollow to the audience because they focused on tactics rather than helping people intentionally design their relationship with technology.
Online & IRL needed a clearer mission and strategic frame that could:
Hold both personal and systemic change
Support creative expression without becoming performative
Articulate a future-facing position grounded in resilience, agency, and connection
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I worked as a strategy and futures-thinking collaborator, supporting Online & IRL in clarifying its mission, theory of change, and market positioning—then translating that strategic clarity into a creative, narrative-based output.
My role focused on aligning:
Mission and values
A futures-oriented, social–ecological understanding of digital life
Writing and creative outputs (zine / MetaLabel–style formats) as strategic infrastructure
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Mission and values articulation grounded in agency, reciprocity, and non-linear growth
A futures-oriented narrative framework for a long-form digital report / zine
Strategic language and concepts connecting:
relationship to self (agency, identity, presence)
relationship to others (reciprocity, community, feedback)
relationship to the future (imagination, stewardship, resilience)
Positioning Online & IRL as a regenerative, social–ecological approach to the creator economy
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Metalabel
Conscious Stack Methodology
Slack
Google Drive
Miro
Quick Project Overview
Title: Online & IRL: Reimagining Connection, Agency, and the Future of Digital Creative Work
Status: December 2025, Ongoing
Online & IRL is a creative research and cultural platform exploring how creators, entrepreneurs, and cultural operators relate to the Internet at a moment of increasing algorithmic pressure, visibility demands, and extractive design. As the creator economy continues to scale, many people feel caught between participation and depletion—seeking ways to engage meaningfully with digital life without losing agency, identity, or long-term sustainability.
Impact
This work helped Online & IRL:
Move from diffuse insight to a coherent strategic identity
Ground creative experimentation in a clear mission and theory of change
Name what many creators feel but lack language for: the need to redesign how they participate in digital systems
Establish a futures-facing, resilience-based lens on the creator economy that resists extraction and short-term optimization
Why This Work Matters
This project reflects my broader practice of helping organizations translate complexity into coherence—using futures thinking, narrative strategy, and social–ecological frameworks to design work that supports human agency inside evolving systems.
Rather than asking how to win within existing platforms, this work asks:
How do we stay intact, connected, and future-oriented while participating in them?
