Collectively, we also need pictures of societal futures that go beyond today’s status quo. They complement but do not replace the necessary work of activism that fights against the injustices of the present. We also need new answers to new problems—the vulnerabilities caused by a more connected world, or by potentially lethal artificial intelligenc

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In each field we can deliberately try to push the boundaries, developing sketches of alternative routes to see if they make sense, if they would work and if anyone would feel at home in a world where they were implemented. By multiplying these ideas across different fields, we create larger ‘possibility spaces’, a bigger menu of options for our soc

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(2) Our sense of the possible is inextricably tied with our view of reality. My hypothesis is that possibility at present is held back from imagining different, and better, futures by an incredibly complex civilizational process known as European modernity that has been around for the past 521 years (since 1492), and which ever since has aimed to b

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The world into which we are born was shaped by a capacity to generate the new through billions of years of evolution. Now, for us, a comparable capacity to imagine, together, is a vital aspect of what it means to be free and alive. Imagination liberates us from the illusion that the way the world is now is the only way it can be. In this sense, ima

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