possibility studies

Indeed, imagination is alive and well in relation to technology: a future is being built where manufactured goods will mainly be grown rather than made, where wars may be settled in a matter of seconds thanks to AI, or where long-standing hopes for the colonisation of space may start to be realised. Technology has repeatedly expanded the space of

The book focuses on a simple question: how could we become better at imagining the society in which we might like to live a generation or two from now?

The problem is the gulf between this restless, fascinating technological imagination and the much more limited imagination that exists in relation to so much else. It’s not that alternative futures are absent.21 It’s just that the scientific side of imagination is far more prominent, far better funded and inevitably far less sensitive to the

Imagination is like thin air, cloud-like. Imagination only truly influences the world when it ceases to be imagination and mutates into repetitions, habits and cycles, becoming embedded in the rhythms of daily life, a part of people’s jobs and routines. Societies are best understood as patterns of regularity of this kind—what Pierre Bourdieu

Possibility is precious. It is also alive. How might it be to hold possibility as something that visits unexpectedly, something that whispers in foreign languages, something that is sacred?

Nora Bateson, Combining

Experiences of the possible transform the self . The fact that humans can pretend things are not what they are, reimagine the past, envision multiple futures and conceive the impossible, are all transformative experiences.

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.

(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

It is designed to be an antidote to fatalism—to remind us that other worlds are possible.