on better futures

How do we spot ‘glimmers’ of the futures we all dream of? What forms of knowledge, and whose voices do we need to be attuned to, to ensure we are seeing these possibilities for what they are?

There isn’t only one kind of person that can imagine what a better world could look like, whether it’s fictional or not

It might seem that the close coupling of digital innovation with the market was inevitable, but our present reality is only one possible digital world — creating others is still possible, and there is little time to waste.

And basically, my gripe is, we collectively generally treat every transition the way I used to treat “time for recess”: This is just going to happen, so let’s not focus on how it’s going to happen, or whether the getting there is hard. Let’s just get from here to there, OK? And then we can be there and forget about here.

People tend to talk very casually about how kids are the future, how they will save the rest of us from climate catastrophe or whatever. This is so lazy. We must be right alongside them, and right alongside our elders too. Harry, the angel who connects us, said to me once how we’ll be ancestors too, how we gotta live for our future generations.

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A world that’s upside down cannot and should not be treated and measured as if it holds the key to creating a world that’s right side up. A new vision and world requires a new way of thinking, measuring, acting, and being

Bringing about the world we want to live in, the world we want to leave to our children is, substantially, the work of the imagination, or what educational reformer John Dewey describes as ‘the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’.18