Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Pay inequality is often presented as a fact of nature (and this is how it’s taught in economics courses). But the truth is that pay is highly socially determined.

Museums of the future Should every city or nation have physical spaces dedicated to exploring the future, combining experiences (using virtual reality), visualisations, games and ‘objects of the future’? We could imagine a new cadre of curators and orchestrators who become skilled in helping people to explore possible future worlds.

Society as laboratory We increasingly have the capacity to turn the whole of our society into a living laboratory in which to test new ideas of different kinds. There are thousands of local labs or testbeds worldwide, covering topics as varied as drones and care for the elderly. This idea—of taking innovation out of the classic laboratory and into

The years ahead are likely to bring ever more powerful technologies that can exploit our ways of thinking, fuelling addictive and compulsive behaviour. The world has lots of experience of trying to handle or at least contain potentially destructive addictive behaviours. Will these prompt new temperance movements, focused now on digital behaviours (

what about dual voting systems, where you have one vote for yourself as well as a second vote that you can allocate to someone else whom you trust to use it wisely?

Citizens’ assemblies, deliberative experiments and digital agora are happening in cities, in nations and even at a global level. Perhaps we may also see an extension of the jury (like in Nick Harkaway’s science-fiction novel Gnomon, in which many decisions are taken by randomly selected juries of 200 people).

The aim of all of these was to shift the culture so that citizens felt a shared responsibility for their city, while expanding their sense of what might be possible after a long period of depressed fatalism.

The most influential ideas tend to be quite simple: generative concepts that can spark multiple interpretations and adaptations.

Unfortunately, it has now become acceptable to think of the job of politician as one of the few that requires no training and no expertise. Amateurs are put into positions of immense power with only a rudimentary grasp of how governments actually work, how economies move, or how science shapes the world.