Month: March 2018
-
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…
-
There are no valid futurisms or futurologies
The science fictional project is mainly a historical project, and to the extent there is any such thing as a futurological project, that would also be a historical project, so this isn’t a good distinction to try to make. I don’t think there are any valid futurisms or futurologies. I think most people who describe…
-
Brownout
I’m not sure what they’re calling it these days. In my time you were “gouching”, “nodding out”; there’ll be some other name for it, no doubt, as language shifts its shape. But this malaise remains unchanged: that head-down slump betrays the use of morphine (or her daughters) like a shout for help in silence. Mud-caked…
-
A new narrative for narratives
A few days back a colleague linked me to this editorial at Nature about the use of full narrative forms in critical/speculative foresight work, which they link back to the establishing work of Brian David Johnson, who was at Intel at the time but now splits his labour between Arizona State U, consulting, and a…
-
One discipline seeps into another
Rejecting the traditional Marxist idea that the working classes were the seedbed of change, [Deleuze and Guattari] wanted a broader umbrella under which to unite all marginalised groups. They claimed that those oppressed by patriarchy (women), racism (people of colour) and heteronormativity (what we’d now call the LGBT community) were all suffering thanks to the…