I realised just the other day that I’d somehow managed not to do a serious wrap-up–or even an unserious and/or cursory wrap-up—on the Futures Brought to Life symposium in Vienna that I attended back in May. I’m not going to do one now, either*, but I thought I might at the very least point at the collected videos from the symposium—unusually well-produced and professional, I might add—and shamelessly embed my own contribution for them as might be interested:

I will take the time to note that this talk represents my first extended public attempt at smashing together ideas from (inductive) futuring and media ecology/archaeology—a direction which I think I will continue to drive in for a while, should the opportunity for theoretical work arise in whatever I end up doing next.

As I note in this talk, media ecology is not without its flaws, perhaps the most fundamental of which is the chip on its collective shoulder, and a related (and somewhat embarrassing) thing whereby its constant attempts to point out that it’s about more than just McLuhan just ends up making it sound even more like a McLuhan cult. Nonetheless, there are some interesting and useful ideas in there for thinking about futuring, and particularly climate futuring (which, at this point, is a distinction which shouldn’t be needful)… and then there’s media archaeology, which I mostly know only through the work of the (mighty mighty) Shannon Mattern, and need to investigate more thoroughly.

Because, as I point out early in the talk, all futures are narratives, and all futures are thus media(ted). This has important implications for those of us producing futures, with regard to both the processes of (re)production, and the (re)distribution of the resulting product. Per Neil Postman, media are environments, which assign roles and preconfigure possible (and impossible) responses; understanding the affordances various media (and combinations thereof), and the particular ways in which they shape speculative narratives, is therefore vital to futuring as a critical utopian project.

To choose just one example among many, if we want to understand why it is that “the left can’t meme”, and the right is historically and currently so adept at leveraging new media—a pressing question here in Sweden, where the last great PASOKification seems about to enter its final act—then we need to understand how and why the memetic stories which Sherryl Vint calls promissory narratives propagate so succesfully—particularly among younger audiences on social media, but not exclusively—despite what appears (to some of us, at least) to be their obvious reactionary and/or technoutopian form.

More prosaically, or perhaps just more practically, we need to move beyond the current well-intentioned but unguided production of hopeful and inclusive futures. This is not a matter of optimisation, though; on the contrary, it’s a matter of producing futures which undermine and expose the solutionist deification of the optimal.

[ * There are various reasons for this, already known to those few weirdos who still read this thing on the regular (and thanks again to those who got in touch with kind and supportive words). Burn-out has a way of nuking plans from orbit, and the tempo of capitalist realism makes catching up unrealistic. I kinda declared bankruptcy on a lot of stuff back in June—including a chapter for an edited volume, my withdrawal from which was likely extremely frustrating for its editors, and which I still feel bad about now, months after a very awkward exchange of emails. I can’t go back and fix that, nor pick up all the other threads I had to drop. What I can do, I hope, is do a better job of managing my commitments, and thus avoiding having to declare bankruptcy again. Giving up the apparently fruitless quest for a stable academic position is, perhaps counterintuitively, one way of doing this. ]