The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking a Head of Content to manage our content operations, to grow our online audience, and to tell that audience about everything we're saying and doing.

RPI is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. We are part of the broader progress movement that was kicked off in The Atlantic and has been profiled by BBC and Vox. Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, is quoted as a spokesman for progress in those stories, and we are known as a central organization in that movement. Our annual Progress Conference is the main event for the community, with headliners including founders of billion-dollar companies, Nobel laureates in physics and economics, and heads of government agencies like DARPA and OSTP; the conference is sold out every year with hundreds on the waitlist. Our Substack has 60,000 subscribers, and Jason has over 43,000 Twitter followers.

You will also have a lot of great material to work with: regular essays and threads from Jason and our fellows; dozens of hours of recorded talks coming out of every conference; and announcements from our fellowship, conference, and university and high school programs. Biggest of all, next year, we'll be launching Jason's book, The Progress Manifesto.

You'll report directly to Jason, and will work closely with him and with the program leads. We're a small team with Silicon Valley DNA; we operate with high autonomy and minimal process. You will amplify the work of this fantastic team.

You will uphold the highest standards for taste and quality. No slop, no clickbait, no feeding the outrage machine. We write the kind of posts we want to read. We don't pollute the epistemic commons—we clean it up.

You will own:

• all our online audiences across Substack and other social media

• all communications about our programs

• the launch of The Progress Manifesto, forthcoming from MIT Press in Spring 2027

Your key metrics will be audience growth, engagement, and book sales.

You will have broad latitude to devise comms strategies and tactics. At the same time, you must own execution: you will have a budget for contractors like video production, but otherwise you will be a one-person comms team.

This is not a PR role: it's about managing our own audience, not about getting external media mentions or interviews. However, when we have a major media campaign, like the book launch, you will work with an external PR firm who does those things.

Examples of day-to-day tasks you might perform include:

• Creating a launch plan for The Progress Manifesto, each year’s Progress Conference, each cohort of the Blog-Building Intensive, etc.

• Drafting announcements, updates, and retrospectives for all our programs (or editing drafts written by the program leads) and publishing them

• Drafting and publishing the links digest (which we would like to put out more regularly!)

• Publishing essays and turning them into social posts and threads

• Managing production for promotional videos, like this one for our fellowship

• Publishing the talks from the Progress Conference, including creating short clips for social media

• And much more that you will figure out!

Among other qualifications, you should:

• Be very online: you don't have to post a lot or have a large audience yourself, but you should read a lot of social media and blogs/newsletters

• Be familiar with the progress community and its writers

• Have good taste in essays and talks

• Be a good copy-writer (but not necessarily an essayist)

• Have backbone: we touch on controversial topics

No prior experience in communications roles is strictly required, although experience in relevant roles is valued!

The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. Our programs this year include:

• Progress Conference, the main annual gathering for the progress community

• The Blog-Building Intensive, a fellowship program for progress writers

• Progress in Medicine, a summer program for high school students

• Teaching Progress, a workshop for university professors who want to teach ideas of progress

Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, writes and speaks about the history and philosophy of progress, including in his forthcoming book The Progress Manifesto.

Why care about progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.

In order to make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and beyond.

Read more about our mission and the bios of our team.

Application process

We’ll review applications on a rolling basis. Promising applications will get an intro call from Jason. To get an offer, expect that you will interview with several members of the team, and possibly do a small amount of prep or writing offline.

This role can start immediately. We aim to fill it by mid-October at the latest.