At a speech in Paris in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt delivered the eternal words in Citizenship in a Republic, 

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” 

Seven years prior to Roosevelt’s speech, the New York Times published an editorial, titled “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly,” which gloated over professor Samuel Langley’s failed attempt to build a flying machine. Langley, the 3rd secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, built an aircraft with two sets of wings; it was structurally unsound and never flew successfully. The Times mocked the machine’s first crash into the Potomac River (“…plunk”) and then predicted how long mechanical flight would actually take to develop: “one million to ten million years…” The Langley Aerodrome’s final (failed) flight was on December 8, 1903—after which Langley never attempted flying again. The critics had beaten his spirit.

Eleven days later, on December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers took to the air for the first time in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. 

The unqualified pessimism of the Times was something that no child — no dreamer reading a comic book, or sci-fi novel on a bedroom floor —  could have come up with. It required a very sophisticated, adult, journalistic cynicism to look at someone trying to build a flying machine and roll your eyes, not to mention a delusional belief that one’s editorial commentary is more valuable than the professor’s flying machine (it isn’t). The former dynamic is one that that Anton Ego, the vampyric Parisian food critic in Ratatouille, dissects at the end of the film: 

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

The New Needs Friends. Criticism is easy — and cheap. It is, in fact, among one of the many things that technology has recently made easier, and cheaper. In 1903, it was quite complicated, not to mention expensive, for the New York Times to make such a pessimistic prediction about technology. Their editors would have had to write out the pessimism by hand, load the printing plates with individual letters and ink, and distribute individual newspapers with horses and carts. Imagine if they knew how easy it would be to complain about entrepreneurs today — just open your iPhone!

From 1820 to 1970, the pace of technological and human progress was psychotically, unprecedentedly fast. In the 150 years since the first Industrial Revolution, we went from horse-and-buggies, to mechanized vehicles, to the jet engine, to finally landing the first man on the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. We went from harnessing wind to harnessing steam and electricity—and then the atom itself. I am become death, destroyer of worlds. Humans have not been back to the moon since 1972, but in the interim, computers have upended life on Earth. Go off and do something wonderful. The Internet was born in the 1990s as the world of the Cold War started falling away. The world was coming together online. Think Different. The American machine whirred away into the new millennium. Never bet against America.

In the 2000s, the Internet made innovation and growth seem easy and inevitable. The Dot-Com Bubble interrupted those plans, but not for long. In the 2010s, falling interest rates created a euphoric moment in the technology industry. Journalists began to wonder whether innovation might be happening “too fast.” Even the tech industry imbibed this idea. Don’t Be Evil. We started holding phones in our hands, and the Internet became dominated by social media. Move Fast and Break Things. The pace of innovation in computers was… astounding. Software is eating the world.

In 2020, the physical world reasserted itself — as well as our own mortality. We remembered slowly, and then suddenly, that physical systems can atrophy without proper attention, and that the luxury of computers has distracted us from maintaining our built environment. It’s Time to Build. Not all political systems are equal, and innovation is a necessity for a free society. The post-Cold War reverie is over. American Dynamism.

Now, nearing the midpoint of the 2020s, we find ourselves in a predicament. Our civilization is extremely prosperous. We have a reasonable shot at becoming multi-planetary in the next 100 years. Wonder and opportunity abound. We are finally beginning to crack the mysteries of age and biology — humans could soon start regularly living past the 100 year mark. Developments in artificial intelligence are fast –– alternatively delightful, confusing, and sometimes ridiculous. 

It is an astonishing time to be alive, but there are serious roadblocks to further progress.

Much of the low-hanging technological fruit has been picked. Bad public policy has led to record debt and regulation across the Western world — some of our leaders are asleep at the wheel, while others are very much awake, and trying to drive us off the road . Misunderstandings and misrepresentations of new things are used to make the public fear innovation, and to hate innovators. Our mainstream media is  hell-bent on tearing down the future before we can get too good a glimpse. 

At Arena, we don’t cover “the news.” We cover The New. We want to know who is building, and what, and what that might mean for the future. We embrace the ideas that have made America the greatest country on Earth (just look at how many people want to move here). We don’t hate, or look down upon, people who fail while trying.Our mission at Arena is to cheer on the people who are, slowly but surely — and sometimes very quickly! — bringing the future into the present. 

Our publication motto, The New Needs Friends, is a reminder that to be a constant critic is the easiest, lamest mode of all. If we have a bias, it is that capitalism and innovation lift us up, and that entrepreneurship is a hugely positive force for human progress — in the United States and beyond. And because we admire those who do difficult things, we pledge to do the difficult thing ourselves: to find the greatest stories on Earth worth telling, not the easiest ones.

Our Editorial Vision 

The problem with mainstream journalists — especially those that cover tech and entrepreneurs — is that they are looking for negative stories. The promotion and attention structure for journalists is based on finding the “inside scoop,” writing viral hit pieces, and revealing previously unknown corruption to the public. Of course, some technologies or companies really are scams, and some people really are willfully unequipped to run the organizations they claim to be chartering. But the occasional grifter  is such a tiny portion of the story of human progress  — and yet they take up so much space on the printed page, and in our minds. 

We have a media defined by cynicism. The default attitude among the professional classes towards technology, and business as a whole, is an eye-rolling “here we go again”; a distinct lack of hope, wonder, and joy. 

How did we get here? Part of the problem is malaise: a discontent with abundance that leads people to criticize it and point out the downsides of their personal Eden. Run-of-the-mill fear also plays a role: getting to “the future” requires change, and change can be scary. There is the journalistic libido for takedowns, a healthy drive for greatness which unfortunately leads writers to turn every story into Watergate and every subject into Nixon.  And then there is the eternal role of envy: entrepreneurship and capitalism produce uneven results, and journalists (who tend to have fallen closer to the losing side) are sometimes bitter about their lot. 

Whatever the reasons, the message, from our mainstream media, to would-be entrepreneurs is clear: never fail. One need only look at the headlines to see the various traps laid for entrepreneurs. If you start an ambitious company, and then struggle to ship a product in good time, you will be ruthlessly mocked. If you hire imperfectly, disappoint a customer, or otherwise display public flaws, a journalist is ready to turn you into a national laughingstock (“Look at this loser who tried to do something! He made a mistake!”). We can’t win, so why try?

Certainly, innovation can have downsides, even when it is well executed, and not all CEOs are forces for good, nor moral exemplars. But we ought to encourage the next generation to do something, not nothing. If what you are doing can’t be criticized, from any angle, it probably isn’t worth very much. 

At Arena, when we cover failures, we want to hear about what worked. We want to hear about the good ideas, the small wins, the management trick that kept a bad idea afloat for years, and which might someday be deployed to save a good idea in a moment of need. Most large-scale, public failures contain the seeds of excellence otherwise they would have never grown large enough for their collapse to justify a spread in the New York Times (remember, “All the News That’s Fit to Print!”). Was a charismatic leader deployed for the wrong cause? A good idea executed poorly? Poor economies of scale, solvable with a government grant? How many “failures” might be better tried again in the future?  

Here is what you can expect from us at Arena:

• A publication that straddles a yearbook and farmer’s almanac for capitalism: a guide to the best of what’s happening in entrepreneurship, who’s doing it, and what might happen next. 
• Stories about inspiring entrepreneurs: their lives, work, challenges, dreams. We will cover the founders you know and introduce you to those you don’t, expanding far beyond the borders of the traditional “tech” ecosystem. We will cover the companies you know and those you don’t, the places you know, and those whose contributions to innovation often go unrecognized.
• Excellent writing and excellent editing: the level of quality that was typical in the heyday of media, but is now scarce. 
• Printed products that you’ll want to keep on your coffee table, give as gifts, or display on your vanity Zoom bookshelf (we won’t tell).

If you are a writer and have a story to tell about how innovation has made the world a better place, please reach out.. If you’re building something new, we want to hear from you — with the promise of honest coverage, with no drive-by shots. If you are a teacher or school librarian, then we would love to send you copies of Arena — on us. And in exchange, we want to hear what your students are excited about. What type of future do they dream about? What do they want to build? And no matter who you are, if you believe that The New Needs Friends then we hope you will subscribe today (and get a launch discount). Because while we’re new, we need you, too.

Friends of the New can always reach us at editors@arenamag.com