imagination deficit

If we lose faith in the future, we are likely to do less to make a better future happen. In this way, fatalism can, indeed, become fate.

Information doesn’t consume, it is conserved. A wealth of information is a wealth of potentiality. And attention cannot be impoverished by potentiality. Attention and information come together to create new realities. Which is why techlords and Christian Nationalists want limit our access to information while also extracting our attention.

the world’s most visible public intellectuals today more often revive or reassert old ideas, rather than generating new ones. The result is that old zombie orthodoxies survive far longer than they should.

Countries that used to define themselves through creating bold new institutions no longer do so—there are no recent equivalents to the NHS or the BBC in Britain; no equivalents of NASA or DARPA in the US. In much of academic life, too, you are more likely to succeed by slightly tweaking an established idea than creating a novel one.18

I’m convinced that we’re suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’. By this, I don’t mean that the various crises around us aren’t real, but rather that there’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political.

This prompted me to review many of the hundreds of books published each year on society, economics and politics. While many offer a striking diagnosis, most offer little in the way of prescription, which is usually left to a final chapter.

‘the results indicate creative thinking is declining over time among Americans of all ages, especially in kindergarten through third grade. The decline is steady and persistent’.11

I’ve found a strikingly similar pattern among political leaders, academics, NGO workers, businesspeople and young high-fliers, and not just in Europe and North America. Young people that I met in Africa were generally quite optimistic, but here too, despite burgeoning science-fiction scenes, dynamic hubs of digital innovation and lively political m