imagination deficit

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.

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 m

We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were

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.

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.

The overwhelming threat of climate change has amplified the sense that global capitalism is out of control or that the best we can hope for is to avert catastrophe.

‘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

whereas the activism I’d been raised on was fuelled by hope, what struck me most about these young people was their profound pessimism. They wanted humanity to avert disaster, but, despite politicians announcing Green Deals of many kinds, they had little hope that their societies could become much better.