imagination deficit
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.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
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
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
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.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
we are losing our capacity to “conceptualize a tomorrow that [is] radically different from our present.
walkerart.org • The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
While we know that our imaginations shape our sociocultural experience through the creation of worlds, modernity thrives by throwing tight constraints around it, degenerating our ability and capacity to imagine radically new futures into being. This ontological war against possibility is ‘defuturing’ — there are less futures available to us; or put... See more
Will Bull • Building the Infrastructure of Possibility
Modernity’s coloniality is the elephant in the room.
At the core of modernity lies the belief that ‘there is no alternative’, that there is just one reality, one world — a singular, external world that pre-exists, and is separate from, our interactions with it. There is the world and then there is us — a fictitious notion that masquerades within... See more
At the core of modernity lies the belief that ‘there is no alternative’, that there is just one reality, one world — a singular, external world that pre-exists, and is separate from, our interactions with it. There is the world and then there is us — a fictitious notion that masquerades within... See more
Will Bull • Building the Infrastructure of Possibility
Confessional art can be beautiful, and it can be terrible; either way, to love it only as a representation of what we already know is to deny it, and ourselves, a much richer complexity. Pop music is where fantasies are played out, turned into mansions and lived in, where five hundred people can tumble out of a clown car and every dream comes true.
... See moreDirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
Are there examples from recent or distant history, when the public imagination has felt really alive? Not just for an elite clique of poets and artists, like the Romantics, or powerful leaders who commission imaginative and artistic people in service of their regimes (think Venice), but when for large swathes of ordinary people it has felt like a
... See more