At The Fork in The Road
What happened to moral clarity?
Route 24 has a new schedule! All forthcoming issues of this newsletter will be published twice weekly on Tuesday and Saturday evenings given tight project deadlines in the lead up to year end. It’s my hope that adjusting to this weekday/weekend publishing cadence as the holidays approach will afford our readership the space to stay up to speed on our latest happenings.
Please be sure follow Route 24 on Notes for real-time updates.
The Route 24 Roadmap
If you’re new here, welcome! If you’ve been here since day one, thanks for showing up week after week! My name is Sam Reetz and I’m on a mission to help restore public trust. This is a space where I look closer at moments of global and national significance to show you how cycles of misinformation and disinformation disorient communities.
Probable Cause is an XR civic education gaming experience that puts you in the driver’s seat to explore issues of public safety from community-centered perspectives. Route 24 is its companion newsletter that invites you to explore our creative process on the project as we build, deconstructing the real-world impact of policies and practices in transportation infrastructure, immigration reform, environmental justice, racial equity, and more to jumpstart public awareness and, in turn, mobilize narrative change.
Driver’s Ed is a weekly column that parks in your inbox on Tuesday evenings to shift your gears on key policy debates and test drive people-powered solutions.
Every follow, share, and subscription helps to keep this work going and reach the people the mainstream media often misses. For riders in a position to financially contribute, your dollars support the creative team with the critical resources needed to iterate, travel, and scale. **Become a paid or founding subscriber during Cyber Week (until December 8) to help jumpstart the wish list for Probable Cause.**
Thank you for joining me on this road! Start your engines….
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Upgrade or gift an annual subscription to Route 24 during Cyber Week (until 11:59 PM PT on Monday, December 8) and you’ll receive 24% off individual and group (4 or more) annual subscriptions plus help to jumpstart the Probable Cause wish list.
In this issue: While in New York last month for Media Literacy Week, I listened in on a powerful keynote presentation by
. Though proximate to the dangers of media spin, Michelle offered practical solutions anyone could apply to improve their media consumption habits. Specifically, Michelle emphasized these key considerations when evaluating and assessing information sources:Who made this and why was it made?
What techniques are used to communicate the message?
How does this make me feel?
How might different people interpret this message differently?
The field of decision science offers a logic-based approach to explain why people make specific choices. It suggests who benefits from a given outcome. It intersects economics, psychology, and computer science to analyze and determine situational context and predict better standards and practices within existing systems.
If you’re wondering what a lettuce farmer in rural Arizona might have in common with an autonomous vehicle founder in urban San Francisco, I’ll spend the next few weeks deconstructing the pathways that inform media literacy and decision-making in daily life. From the history of hysteria to the bro culture of podcasts and the influence of affordability narratives, my goal is for you to reach year end with a heightened awareness of why politics, storytelling, and technology are inextricably linked and shape moral clarity.
Please consider amplifying the Dream Defenders’ C.R.E.A.M campaign and donating to Dignity and Power Now’s food assistance initiative this Giving Tuesday.
As always, thank you for joining me on this road. I’ll see you back in this space on Saturday night for the scenic route.
Stay the course,
Sam
Sam Reetz, is a filmmaker, performer, and founder at Millennial Ethics, creating narrative solutions to complex issues.
Follow her work on Bluesky, Substack and Instagram.
