Category: Futures

  • La sagesse de l’Oncle Bruno

    Bruno Latour [BL] and Nickolaj Schultz [NS], in conversation with Jakob Stein in late 2018, from a transcript (sadly not open-access) at Theory, Culture & Society: BL: … we are inheriting a history of 200 years of euphemizing and making invisible the material conditions of existence on which we rely. When we see the ecological…

  • Alter the biogeochemical organism on the fly

    Robinson Meyer on the latest IPCC report; climate change is an existential issue in both senses of the term. More than 30 years after climate change first became a political issue, it feels like we are still figuring it out. This report gets us closer. It makes clear that climate change isn’t only about coal-fired…

  • an appropriately unheroic spirit

    Nice chewy essay by John Farrell at LARB, on the long-running philosophical ding-dong between utopianism and what he calls the “literary-heroic worldview”. … the transition to modernity, with its focus on economic rationality, has only changed the terms upon which status is distributed without assuaging the basic competitive drive that animated the literary culture of…

  • Past futures / participatory panopticon revisited

    It’s a head-spinning experience to think back and recall how I started the journey to where I’m at now, in terms of what I do for a living, not least because I had no idea where I was going. Well, that’s not strictly true – I decided circa 2004 that I was going to have…

  • Weird futurings in the academic hinterlands

    Vibrations in the web suggest that folk I don’t yet know are trying in various ways to force a bit of weirdness into the academic futures literature. I’m particularly taken with this title and abstract: Sport hunting and tourism in the twenty-second century: humans as the ultimate trophy / Wright, Daniel W M (2019) This…