on better futures

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.

All is not lost. There is in fact a way to “save the world.” I put it in quotes, because ultimately the choice we face is not about our survival, it is about what kind of world we choose to live in. One vibrant with life? Or a gigantic strip mine / waste dump / parking lot? So let us say instead, there is a way to regenerate a world vibrant with

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

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?

Why are we futuring to find solutions to the problems created by extrapolative, exponential, and extractive systems, when we should be futuring to imagine emerging novelty and construct transformative realities that would allow us to elevate our human, planetary, and universal experience above and beyond those systems?

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

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.