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

Imagination is like thin air, cloud-like. Imagination only truly influences the world when it ceases to be imagination and mutates into repetitions, habits and cycles, becoming embedded in the rhythms of daily life, a part of people’s jobs and routines. Societies are best understood as patterns of regularity of this kind—what Pierre Bourdieu descri

Our world is shaped by dominant political imaginaries of which there are relatively few at any point in history.

In a densely interdependent world, our imagination must be shared as well as individual, and it must reach out into the deep future, not just the immediate future. Freedom in the moment is not a true freedom. Without alternative options, we cannot plan or choose. We become slaves to the ideas of others.

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

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?