To What End?
Humans have acquired the power to radically change the world. Great power should ideally be wielded only by those capable of great responsibility.
Future Scenarios
The Good Ancestor: Review
A book that inspires reading is a good book. A book that inspires thought is a better book. A book that inspires action is the best book of all. The Good Ancestor is the best book of all.
Graphic Novel Review: 10 Billion is a sci-fi tale of astonishing scope and visual imagination
10 Billion vividly reimagines Greer’s blog post as a graphic novel. Told and illustrated in an immersive comic book style, it gives potent visual form to the original text.
The risk of a progressive reversal
Thinking about the post-pandemic future and the scenarios that could emerge is as challenging as it is important. One cannot conceive of a more pressing issue for a progressive movement. Finding a workable response is thus of critical importance.
Re-Reading Future Shock 50 Years On
Future Shock skates across the surfaces of the world that it describes, piling up anecdote and data, playing fast and loose with timescales. This may be the reason for its success; the single idea about “future shock” morphs endlessly, shape-shifting as we go through the book. Does it have a theory of change? Arguably, it is that everything is accelerating, and that this will then have deep and drastic social consequences.
Manifesto for the Future
I do not look forward to the future like I used to. I do not sit and dream about the life I will lead or the things I will do. In fact, these days, I have to force myself to think about it. Dreaming is effort. Imagination is work. Hope is complicated.
Why I Spent Christmas on the Moon
I returned from my time there with some thoughts, some reflections, which I hope will prove useful in the battles that lie ahead, in the ongoing uphill push to wrestle our future back from insane men who feel it is OK to dash headlong into creating the conditions in which we no longer have one. And a future that could be so, so beautiful.
Your Money or your Life? Putting Wellbeing before GDP
The work on progress indicators is all well and good, especially in challenging the political priority given to GDP. However, over the years I have grown more sceptical of the possibility of measuring, accurately and fully, the state of nations and the wellbeing of their people.
Bicyclopolis
Doomer porn has limited appeal and shelf life; you can only get so miserable before there’s nowhere to go and no point. One of the most appealing subsets of speculative fiction, then, is what we might call the “good old future,” where our descendants have come through a crisis and created a better world that looks a lot like the past.
Nine Futures
My aim in this post is to use Frase’s book as a cue to discuss some issues of interest to me, rather than reviewing or précising it as such – but I’d certainly recommend taking a look at it. Like many left-futurologists, Frase in my opinion gets a little too excited about the prospect of an automated and jobless future but at least the insights he generates from these new-old chestnuts are subtler than most.
2016: Toward the Deep Future
One of the oddest features of contemporary industrial society, it seems to me, is the profound ambivalence it displays toward the future. It’s hard to think of any society in human history that has made so much noise about the future, or used images and ideas of the future so relentlessly as rhetorical ammunition in its political and cultural controversies.
Journey to Earthland: Branching Scenarios
Whither Earthland? The only certainty about the future is surprise, the one constant change.