Category: Futures
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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“The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society”: Levitas (2013), Utopia as method
Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as method: The imaginary reconstitution of society. Springer. (Only annotating the (brief) intro of this one for now; very much want to dig into the detail of the rest, but hahahah OMG scheduling.) Levitas opens with H G Wells’s claim that “the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism –…