Hope for the future ⊗ Terranascient futures studies & foresight ⊗ Solarpunk: A container for more fertile futures

This week →{.caps} Hope for the future ⊗ Terranascient futures studies & foresight ⊗ Solarpunk: A container for more fertile futures ⊗ Regenerative needs to be the new sustainable, Sloan, and Webb

A year ago →{.caps} A favourite in issue No.165 was All These Worlds Are Yours by Cennydd Bowles.

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Today is the March equinox, representing the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. New season, new template!

The new, slightly different template, also happens to arrive at the right time to welcome the very first supporting sponsor for Sentiers, the modern family office and venture studio Pardon Inc. Thanks to their team and of course to all individual members who together make this newsletter more sustainable.

Hope for the future

Superb article/keynote transcript by Audrey Watters. She’s been a dedicated observer/researcher/critique of ed-tech for years now, with a reputation, by her own admission, of being quite the Cassandra in the field. For this talk presented at Digifest 2022, she focused on hope, but a hope built on not forgetting, on understanding and learning from history, and on lessons from the likes of Walter Brueggeman, Rebecca Solnit, Alan Kay, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Antonio Gramsci (not a bad list, you’ll agree).

Although loosely centered on ed-tech, this can all be read as being about technology more generally, and even on a societal level, as we face a disheartening number of massive challenges. As Watters explains, “criticism is generative; it can be one of many (small) acts of hope.” Finding hope and optimism is not an in-born quality, it’s something one can work on, construct, and promote. We can find hope in the challenges already overcome, in the changes already made, and work towards the futures we want. Must read (seriously, I kept way too many quotes below and it’s still only about a third of what I highlighted).

“Amnesia leads to despair in many ways,” she continues. “The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.” […]

==The luddites didn't want to go back; they wanted the future to be better.== […]

“Writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future,” Butler said. "“But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. ==The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.==” […]

As my other favorite science fiction author Ursula Le Guin said, “any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” And we must resist and we much change. We must believe we can. We must have hope. […]

Education straddles the past — "the curriculum" — and the future — individually and societally. Education is about what we learn today so we can be better tomorrow. Education is a practice of hope. You cannot be indifferent about the future and be an educator. […]

==”I hate the indifferent. I believe that life means taking sides. One who is really alive, can be nothing if not citizen and partisan. Indifference is lethargy: it is parasitism, not life. Therefore, I hate the indifferent.”== […]

==Hope is not in technology. Hope is in our humanity.==

Terranascient futures studies & foresight

I’ve already shared some articles over the last few months about indigenous knowledge and the great lessons and philosophies western thinking can glean there. How humanity needs to go back to a much more symbiotic relationship with nature, which so many of these cultures have kept alive. In this piece, Teresa Inés Cruz, a Colombian American researcher, designer, and futurist, merges this ideas with the practices of future studies and foresight, challenging those who invent the futures they want to learn from indigenous tradition and propose “positive and optimistic scenarios that encourage humane action.”

==The concepts of learning, unlearning, and relearning belong in every futurist’s repertoire in the sense that we need to learn our bias for progress, unlearn its primacy as a societal objective, and relearn that the human condition is best served by achieving homeostasis–steady equilibrium.== […]

As we move towards a precipice of life destroying planetary and human limitations, we are proposing a shift in our approach to creating future scenarios by transitioning from dominant colonized structures of process and output and turn towards an awakened sense where we imagine new possibilities for our future ancestors and engage in nature-based and Indigenous sensemaking. […]

==Diversity and Inclusion needs to incorporate not only different knowledge systems including Indigenous worldviews based on collective intelligence, but it also needs to integrate a new range of contributors of different geographies and ages.== […]

The futurists of the world struggle to convey positive and optimistic scenarios that encourage humane action. Too much of the foresight profession is concerned with generating profits at the expense of worldwide mental and biological health.

Solarpunk: A container for more fertile futures

In this piece written for the launch issue of Solarpunk Magazine, Jay Springett reviews the foundational ideas of the movement, why it exists, what it aims to foster, and some of the most important aspects of this growing wave of “practical utopiasm.” If you don’t know about Solarpunk, this is the intro to read and refer to, if you are a Solarpunk, it’s one of the pieces to send to friends, and an excellent articulation of why we need it.

The article is also quite extensively linked, so explore from there, and I’d encourage you to pay specific attention to the part about “cultural fracking,” which is a fantastic lens not only in this context, but in anything having to do with popular culture, especially movies.

Under the logic of media produced by narrative monopolies, it is costly to risk money on a new idea. Instead it’s safer to simply mine the past for new material. I call this “cultural fracking,” a phenomenon described by solarpunk author Andrew Dana Hudson as “the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past.” […]

==solarpunk is -punk because it stands in opposition to the increasingly mainstream position that we live in a world with no future.== […]

Solarpunk worlds depict curated landscapes: hillside agroforestry in keyline rows, rain gardens and revitalised suburbs undergoing sprawl repair. These aren’t products of far-fetched technological leaps. Instead, they are ==a collection of ideas pulled laterally from the world as it exists today (or that were historically overlooked) and projected forward, everywhere. Its aesthetic emerges from real world praxis, from recovered agency==. […]

Solarpunk is a narrative strategy for creating this feeling of a speculative present—a present in which we plumb the depths of the imagination for better possibilities at whatever scale—in the minds of people who encounter it.

Shorts & Asides

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Regenerative needs to be the new sustainable because “we are already over or close to breaching many of the nine planetary boundaries being anxiously monitored by scientists around the globe. It means that doing no harm is no longer going to cut it.” “==Focusing on more than preserving the planet for future generations, regenerative thinking weaves justice, climate, economic equality and human dignity into its core logic and places an increased emphasis on systemic thinking, democratic decision making, and place-based solutions inspired by Indigenous wisdom and dialogue.==”

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Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online. “[T]hat’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, ‘is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?’ Those are all expressions of care. ==And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.==”

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Workplace serendipity, invention, and lessons from Prohibition 1920-1933. Matt Webb with some thoughts on a paper saying that “closing saloons during prohibition reduced patenting by ≅15%.” Bumping into people and socializing fosters invention, how “could this kind of serendipity be achieved in software” for today’s distributed work modes?

• 🤩 🌊 🦪 DIY regenerative ocean farms. “Ropes of seaweed, kelp, and other sea vegetables are first strung close to the surface, where they can suck up the sunlight needed to fuel their rapid growth. Hanging from longlines below the plant life are containers filled with shellfish like mussels and scallops. And at the bottom, crates serve as homes for oysters and clams, waiting for shaved ice and champagne.”
• 😍 🇳🇱 🎨 Vermeer Scenius FTW! Connect Vermeer. “Contrary to popular belief, Johannes Vermeer was not a genius working in isolation. He was one of a network of Dutch artists who excelled in painting scenes of everyday life and drew inspiration from each other’s work. Discover this network and explore the connections between the artists and their paintings.” (Via Webcurios.)
• 🤖 🖼 Digital Curator. ”Motifs and Themes in Central European Fine Art explored by ComputerVision.”
• 🤣 📺 Oh this might be a problem for getting anything done. Watch Seinfeld Online - Streaming Seinfeld 24/7 (Via Webcurios.)
• 😍 ☀️ 🇰🇷 🇹🇭 Floating solar panels on the surface of the Hapcheon Dam in South Korea. “The project can generate enough to power 20,000 homes.” And the World’s Largest Hydro-Floating Solar Farm Goes Live in Thailand.
• 😲 🇮🇹 🏺 Roman boat that sank in Mediterranean 1,700 years ago gives up its treasures. “None of the team had expected the sands of the bay to have done such a spectacular job of sealing the wreck off from oxygen and preserving its organic materials. ‘Things have been so perfectly preserved that we have found bits of textile, a leather shoe and an espadrille.’”
• 🇺🇸 🚌 🗺 New York’s Shadow Transit, “unofficial shuttles, called ‘dollar vans’ in some neighborhoods, make up a thriving transportation system that operates where the subway and buses don’t. This interactive project, with videos, maps out that system.”
• 🇨🇱 🥵 👏🏼 Santiago just appointed the first Chief Heat Officer in South America. “The new CHO, Cristina Huidobro, will collaborate with her counterparts in Miami, Athens, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, to usher in a range of evidence-based heat interventions for Santiago, as well as some that will address the city’s disastrous water shortage.”
• 🧱 🇺🇸 🤯 The 2,731-Person Project to Build New York City in Minecraft. “Reconstructing New York City on a 1:1 scale, with each Minecraft building block representing one cubic meter of the real world.”

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