Metamodern Futures: Prescriptions for Metamodern Foresight

(6) This worldview of a single reality and a single world is profoundly defuturing, to invoke Australian design theorist Fry’s (1999) concept. To recover the ability to imagine other possible futures requires going beyond the modernist ontology of separation and toward an ontology that acknowledges the interdependence of everything that exists. Int

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As experience has shown, the world – life itself – is cloudy, contingent and defined by change. As horrifying as the surveillance capitalists’ view of a totally controlled, perfectly articulated and error-free future might be, the inevitable failure of its vision, and the resultant violence – already evident in our fractured worldviews, competing f

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The metamodern orientation towards meaning in that context is more soulful than propositional because it involves juxtaposing and reanimating concepts that have their own ambiguities, and it therefore relies on the dignity of paradox in which several things that are not mutually consistent appear to be true at once.

The future depict­ed here is one where Euro­pean cit­i­zens reclaim agency through intro­spec­tion. As pre­vail­ing nar­ra­tives of per­pet­u­al eco­nom­ic growth and tech­no­log­i­cal fix­es fal­ter, more and more indi­vid­u­als believe that chang­ing the world begins with per­son­al trans­for­ma­tion.

The futurists of the world struggle to convey positive and optimistic scenarios that encourage humane action.