Sublime

as futurist Franco Berardi puts it, uncover ‘the future … inscribed in the present’.

And yet, imagining the future in positive ways is also, in some respects, our natural condition.

We need exponentially less of the degenerative forms of capitalism and exponentially more of the increasingly resilient and regenerative forms.

Sarah Corbett and the Craftivist Collective. Corbett’s approach, of ‘gentle activism’, focuses on ‘anything that links craft with activism’. It is, as she told me, ‘about curiosity and about questioning’.

the attempt to rebuild a national imagination would always be elbowed out of the way by an obsession with achieving economic growth, in the same way that governments who are, on paper, committed to sustainability and climate change mitigation override those values anytime new roads, airports or energy extraction are deemed ‘good for the economy’.

We live in a time where, in the words of social theorist Roberto Unger, we are governed by people who ‘confuse conformism with realism’.6

By October 2018, 480 pacts had been implemented, from community gardens to tool libraries, from murals to repurposing empty buildings as community centres.

more of us would be aware of the impacts of our actions, and way of being in the world, on those around us. Problems would feel solvable; we could turn our hand to anything.

David Fleming wrote, ‘If the mature market economy is to have a sequel … it will be the work, substantially, of imagination.’