possibility studies

Collectively, we also need pictures of societal futures that go beyond today’s status quo. They complement but do not replace the necessary work of activism that fights against the injustices of the present. We also need new answers to new problems—the vulnerabilities caused by a more connected world, or by potentially lethal artificial

Given the inherent emergence of futures — both imaginary and realised — imagination infrastructures need to be understood as verbs, not nouns, actions, not things — processes of creation in a constant process of becoming.

Old attitudes and ideas simply aren’t adequate to help us navigate what lies ahead. And pervasive gloom about the future risks being self-fulfilling.

Most germane for our purposes, knowledge, too, can be analyzed as a network. In this case, nodes can be pieces of information, or experiences, or words, or knowers themselves, while the edges can be the relationships between those pieces of information, those experiences, words, or knowers.

(3) Historically and ontologically, modernity is characterized by the separation between humans and nature (anthropocentrism), mind and body (rationalism and mechanicism), observer and observed (representationalism), us and them (colonialism, supremacy ideologies), and so forth. This dualist ontology was fundamental for the development of

Thanks to digital technology, we can all become film directors, musicians and game-makers. Mass creativity is possible as never before. But this isn’t quite the imaginative golden age it should be. Instead, powerful forces seem to be stunting creativity and promoting conformism, complacency, institutional inertia and a fear of being too different.

In the words of speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin: ‘As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.’

Germans talk about the phenomenon of das Verschwinden der Zukunft, the disappearance of the future, and a widening gulf between what people hope for and what they think is likely to happen.