Category: Futures
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The language of Smart City is always Global Business English
… the cities of the future won’t be “smart,” or well-engineered, cleverly designed, just, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy, affordable, or resilient. They won’t have any particularly higher ethical values of liberty, equality, or fraternity, either. The future smart city will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on gadgetry, deployed…
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How does the rabbit end up in the hat? (Or: what transhumanism doesn’t want you to know about infrastructure)
Talk delivered at the Munich Volkstheater on 14th October 2017 for Bayerischer Rundfunk’s annual Zundfunk-Netkongress.