Hopkins on the power of imagination ⊗ Feral thought experiments

Hopkins on the power of imagination

This week I finished a pretty depressing book, so I might be a bit biased in my “I need this energy” kind of thing, but I really feel like a bit of Rob Hopkins every now and then is good for one’s mental health. Here he’s in conversation with Michael Mezzatesta at Change Now in Paris. In issue No.363 we had Hopkins in Matters Journal making the case for imagination as a climate tool, you can see this one as an updated version with some politics, loads of references to inspiring people and works, and a strong argument for why positive visions matter strategically right now, not just motivationally or emotionally.

Mezzatesta mentions the “cult of pragmatism” a couple of times, a term I quite like. The ambient assumption that the current system is effectively permanent, and that anyone who imagines otherwise is naive. Hopkins says he’s been called naive for decades for believing communities could run their own energy and that cities could function without cars. Meanwhile, Europe spent years buying billions of euros of Russian gas thinking naively that there was just no other way. Some of the more progressive ideas are often called “radical”, he proposes that the widespread insistence on endless economic growth as a stable foundation, is the genuinely radical idea. Spain decarbonised its grid, gained geopolitical independence, and can now say no when the rest of the EU cannot. The UK Green Party, under Zack Polanski’s “make hope normal again” platform, multiplied its membership and took a seat Labour had held for a hundred years. The cult of pragmatism is not the smart position.

Hopkins explains that the messages of fear haven’t worked, that instead we should long for a better future, not dread it. The moon landing came after a century of collective longing built through stories, films, and songs—Jules Verne in 1865, then Tintin, Mighty Mouse, jazz dances, dozens of films rehearsing the journey before Armstrong stepped out. Hopkins’s argument is that the same work is needed now, and that it is already happening. He draws on adrienne maree brown, Mariame Kaba, Walidah Imarisha—writers from the Afrofuturist and prison abolition traditions who have been building longing for radically different futures for decades. And of course Ruha Benjamin who wrote: “a world without prisons: ridiculous. Schools that foster every child’s genius: impossible. Work that doesn’t grind us to the bone: naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, and love: in your dreams. Exactly!” (If you want, the transcript might be more legible on Mezz’s Substack.)

The poet Rilke once said, “the future must enter into you a long time before it happens,” which feels to me like one of the things that we often forget in activism around climate. […]

Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist jazz musician and composer said that “The future is obvious, but the potential impossible is calling softly and knocking gently.” […]

“What if the role of activism, in addition to raising awareness and pointing out the dangers of particular policy decisions and so on, was to mobilize on a previously unimaginable scale, a deep and intense longing for a different future?” […]

Everything that we need to do to rapidly decarbonize around the world already works somewhere. You can go and See it. But what’s missing is the longing piece. The novelist Don DeLillo, he, in his book Underworld, said longing on a large scale is what makes history. […]

Because the reality is that doing the opposite of this is a daily practice for all of us. We wake up, we turn on our phones, the future disappears, sucked into the present. And that’s why doing this is such an important practice.

Our future is being devoured by feral thought experiments

Here we have a more bounded example than the capitalism, hierarchy, patriarchy, politics, climate crisis argument presented above. Henry Farrell riffs on a comparison made by Elias Isquith, who likens Scam Altman’s worldview to that of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. Both men claim a unique grasp on the direction of human history.

According to Farrell, and I think this is the insight to keep coming back to, “Altman is drawing on a much stranger set of notions, which suggests that our present is not determined by our past, or by chance, but by a radically constrained version of the future. A lot of AI discourse reverses the arrow of time, so that instead of a fixed past and an indefinite future, we face a definite future, which directly or indirectly shapes its own past.”

Farrell warns that many AI-related thought experiments have gone “feral,” spreading beyond their original context and limiting democratic debate by presenting a very narrow, deterministic vision of the future. These scenarios, often treated as inevitable predictions rather than speculative guesswork, mislead society and shape policies based on unfounded certainty.

In another era, in another culture, this hubristic assertion of having discerned the golden path to the inevitable future would be grounds for charges of heresy or blasphemy. The egomania here is astounding, no less so than that of a character who fancies himself Fate (and/or Death) incarnate. […]

And it is a genre; a concatenation of LessWrong posts, academic and sort-of-academic articles, think-tank thought pieces, Substack posts and the like, which not only build on a similar set of tropes, but also (and here is the point I want to emphasize) adopt a narrative structure that interprets the present only in terms of some posited near term future of radical transformation. […]

Those possible futures are being devoured by thought experiments which have gone feral, and have spread like an invasive species from their proper environment into the realm of general discourse.

§ Why are London’s top galleries full of laptops?. LOVE this! “The National Gallery’s Supporters’ House opened last year in a suite of rooms that were formerly staff offices. As well as this quiet ‘salon’ for working and meeting friends, there is a bar, restaurant and events programme. Esmee Wright, the gallery’s communications manager, says 20,000 people have signed up as members at ‘the House’, which costs £130 a year. While ‘it’s mainly a destination to eat, drink and pause before or after visiting the gallery’, many members use it as a convenient co-work spot.” (Also on archive.ph.)

§ This is how we get moral AI companies. In this short essay at the NYT, Paul Ford just nudges both issues and goes into details more on ethics and how AI as we know it got here, but: software engineers need to have a professional order and, when what they build becomes infrastructure, it needs to be regulated. “Software industry people might have good degrees and are often good people, but they are making it up as they go along. They take no oath, are inconsistently certified and can only be fired, not exiled from the trade.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Space to Breathe. Mentioned in the Hopkins interview, and which I’d somehow missed. “Space to Breathe is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, framed with a future where there are no prisons or police. The year is 2070 and Sojourner is a young genderqueer filmmaker who sets out to understand how abolition came to be, through history's archives on the movements of the early 21st Century.”
• Future of Foresight podcast with guest Radha Mistry. “An expert in foresight who has held senior positions at Autodesk and Steelcase, before joining the global design and engineering consultancy ARUP where she heads up Foresight & Thought Leadership. As regular listeners will anticipate, we cover a ton of ground in this episode - from cities to agriculture, media to robots, wellness to global trade, climate change to zero G orbits. Tune in today!”
• More-than-human design pedagogy: reimagining design education to engender sustainable utures. “This paper utilizes a UK university design studio module as a substrate to explore how novel systemic and technological futures methods More-than-Human-Centred Design and Speculative Design can be leveraged, alongside Constructive Alignment techniques and ‘glocal’ education policies, to reimagine sustainable pedagogic practice.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• The more young people use AI, the more they hate it. “Contrary to the tales spun by tech companies like OpenAI and Google, polling data shows that Gen Z students and workers are a big part of the wider cultural backlash against AI. And even as they utilize these tools, vast swaths of young people are deeply acrimonious and even resentful of the AI-centric future that many feel is being forced on them.”
• The zero-days are numbered. “As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. As these capabilities reach the hands of more defenders, many other teams are now experiencing the same vertigo we did when the findings first came into focus. ”
• China’s AI companies are going closed source. “China’s leading AI players do not have the funds to burn tens of billions like America’s leading labs, and the sheen of open source vibes in 2025 has worn off. So they’re now scrambling to make money and hook investors with closed source models. Smaller open models help with overseas go-to-market and robotics, but won’t cover the costs of 1GW clusters.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Battery costs have declined by 99% in the last three decades, making electrified transport a reality. “The chart below shows the decline in lithium-ion battery cell prices since 1991. Note that this is shown on a logarithmic scale. The price declined by more than 99%. In 1991, lithium-ion batteries cost around $9,200 per kilowatt-hour — 33 years later, they cost just $78.”
• A complete guide to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). “The AMOC is both the product of a stable climate and a factor in maintaining weather patterns around the planet. To plan for future scenarios, we need to first understand how the AMOC works and what might happen if it collapses.”
• Circularity Gap Report 2025 (CGR). “The [Sitra] Circularity Gap Report 2025 finds that global circularity continues to decline, with only 6.9% of materials entering the economy coming from secondary sources. Rising material extraction, growing stocks and persistent waste are outpacing current circular economy efforts. The report calls for systemic, science‑based action across production, consumption and policy to reduce virgin material use and operate within planetary boundaries.”

Asides

• Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2026. Incredible stuff! “A collection of some of this year’s winning and honored photographs. Nearly 9,000 entries were submitted to organizers by member photographers from 15 countries.”
• Animals wander through neighborhood streets at twilight in Nicholas Moegly’s illustrations. “There is both a timelessness and a sense that these locations could represent virtually anywhere around the U.S. Sometimes, deer and foxes meander through yards or down alleyways, glancing backward as if responding to a sound.”
• Eames modular building system at Triennale Milano. “The main attraction of the 800-square-metre exhibition is a two-storey building constructed using the pavilion system, which was developed under the stewardship of longtime Eames Office collaborator and design consultant Eckart Maise.”