Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: foresight

  • the slowdown papers

    Those among you with a more futures-y orientation may already have noticed Dan Hill publishing last week a collection of work that he’s calling “The Slowdown Papers”; this is the header post that bundles them and links them all. I’ve been following Dan’s work for quite some time now. He was always an interesting and…

  • The mainstreaming of worldbuilding

    Looks like some ideation-futures concepts and methodologies are leaking out of the Valley and into the entertainment industry: [The artist formerly known as Grimes] plans to eventually take up the name of the main character in her book series, an elaborate mythology comparable to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. It sounds like the books will…

  • A putative reality that does not (yet) exist

    The goal of the process is to put people in circumstances whereby they’re invited and enabled to think and feel into the potential and implications of a putative reality that does not (yet) exist. They do not have to buy it hook, line and sinker; the point is more commonly to invite them to test…

  • Kahneman’s pre-mortems: dystopia as clusterfuck avoidance strategy

    I’m not much of one for citing economists approvingly, but in this QZ piece devoted to distinguishing a clusterfuck situation from a mere SNAFU or shitshow, there’s an interesting note on Daniel Kahneman’s approach to forward planning: Before a big decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the group in two. One is…

  • Seven billion spiders

    Here, then, is what makes all members of the species Homo sapiens cultural animals. They come into the world quite incomplete, and pick up what they need to know, and more, by learning from life, and in very large part from one another. As at the same time social animals (and for them the social…