Saved by Lien De Ruyck
Polytopias: The Missing Speculative Genre
They tend to be more comfortable in the role of jeremiad—warning of lost humanity, warmth and wisdom—or playfully pulling apart the strange dynamics of networked relationships, rather than offering even a fuzzy route to a better future. But that is probably exactly what we should want and expect of art.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
The science-fiction writer William Gibson suggested that in his lifetime, the future ‘has been a cult, if not a religion’, but that this has waned.4 Future fatigue has set in instead.5 The Brazilian polymath Roberto Unger put the problem starkly: we suffer from a dictatorship of no alternatives.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
While we know that our imaginations shape our sociocultural experience through the creation of worlds, modernity thrives by throwing tight constraints around it, degenerating our ability and capacity to imagine radically new futures into being. This ontological war against possibility is ‘defuturing’ — there are less futures available to us; or put... See more
Will Bull • Building the Infrastructure of Possibility
Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century “destroy it all and build something completely different” modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and ... See more