The awakening of the imagination of the future since the eighteenth century has participated in the process of radical change known as the Great Acceleration. Now everything is at stake. What alternatives can we imagine for the next decades?

This text was originally published in Spanish on January 2022 in Telos 118 and was written to accompany the exhibition “La Gran Imaginación: Historias del Futuro”, November 2021 — April 2022, Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid.

In the city of Paris, one day in the year 1770, a man engages in a heated discussion with his friend, an English philosopher who visits the city, about the defects and injustices of the Parisian society of his time. Soon after, the man goes to sleep and, unknowingly, wakes up as an old man who wanders through the same city but in the distant future—in the year 2440 to be exact. As he tours the city, he discovers a society and a way of life that, from his perspective, formed in the 18th century, are nothing short of ideal. The streets are wide, clean, and beautiful. The inhabitants are very polite, and they all seem happy. They dress comfortably and work as doctors or lawyers, occupations he considers valuable. Monks, prostitutes, and tramps no longer exist in what is an egalitarian society governed by reason and science.

This is, broadly speaking, the story imagined by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and published in 1771 under the title L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais, a key work insofar as it can be considered as the first utopia or, more precisely, uchronia situated in the future. Literary critic Paul Alkon argues that Mercier’s novel “initiates a new paradigm for utopian literature.” [1] Mercier was the first to imagine an ideal future to encourage his contemporaries to try to build it. Of course, he was not the last. From the end of the 18th century and, above all, from the 19th century onwards, we witnessed an awakening of the futuristic imagination that, both to warn us and to inspire us, was expressed through literature, illustration, architecture, and later, cinema, comics, design, video games — in addition to specialized fields of the social sciences such as Futures Studies and Strategic Foresight.

From the perspective of our seemingly tomorrow-obsessed global culture, it is easy to underestimate the importance of such intellectual and creative development. We tend to view foresight as a characteristic feature of our human nature. This is argued, for example, by a group of psychologists led by Martin Seligman in their book Homo Prospectus: “the unrivaled human ability to be guided by imagining alternatives stretching into the future — “prospection” — uniquely describes Homo sapiens.” [2] However, and although it is clear that this prospective capacity has probably played a central role in the daily lives of all human beings, it is valid to ask: Have we always imagined, as Mercier did, long-term futures in which our ways of life are radically different from the present?

In fact, for most of our history and for most people, that foresight was limited to exploring their immediate surroundings in the short term. There weren’t enough radical changes in people’s lifetimes to make it necessary or attractive to imagine things decades or centuries in the future. Jim Dator, one of the pioneers of Futures Studies, uses the metaphor of an old roll of film to describe this condition:

We look down and see the scene in the frame in which we are standing, and we look forward, and as far as we can see, the scene in each frame seems the same as it is where we stand now. And if we look backward, we see the same thing: not much change that we can see from the past to now. [3]

What happened towards the end of the 18th century, mainly in Europe, that we could recognize as an engine of change for the emergence of the futuristic imagination? Dator himself proposes the following explanation:

“the rate of social and environmental change itself picked up and began to accelerate (…) It was as though someone had picked up the old movie film off the floor, placed it in a motion picture projector, and turned on the switch.” [4]

Earth sciences use the concept of “Great Acceleration” to refer to the explosive increase in the rate of growth in a wide range of measures of human activity (gross domestic product, foreign investment, primary energy use, etc.) and the impact that such growth has had on the planet’s ecosystems. This process, which registers most dramatically in the second half of the 20th century but is usually traced precisely to the middle of the 18th century, involved much more than just material changes. “The term ‘Great Acceleration,’” as the creators of the concept explain, “echoed Karl Polanyi’s phrase ‘The Great Transformation,’ and in his book by the same name Polanyi put forward a holistic understanding of the nature of modern societies, including mentality, behavior, structure and more.” [5]

Is it a coincidence that the imagination of the future has been unleashed precisely in tune with the Great Acceleration? That was the question explored in “La Gran Imaginación: Historias del Futuro”, an exhibition I curated for Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid. The exhibition proposes a journey through a universe of fiction and daydreams that, at different historical moments, have evoked what a future time might be like through literature, cinema, comics, design, or architecture, among other disciplines.

During the last 250 years, humanity as a whole, although in a very uneven way, has gone through the process of radical change denoted by the concept of the Great Acceleration. At the same time, a sort of “Great Imagination” focused on future possibilities, both positive and negative, has driven this process forward as if it were a magnet pulling people’s hopes and fears. A key premise of the exhibition is that this Great Imagination should not be interpreted as a mere epiphenomenon. We must recognize it as a critical factor that forms a feedback loop with the cultural, political, socio-economic, and Earth system transformations. All these changes make imagining futures possible, attractive, and even necessary. At the same time, these images of the future encourage and guide the innovations that make social change possible.

As a consequence of this process, we are now at a critical moment, a sort of cliffhanger in the history of modernity that involves not only a pandemic and an economic recession that had not been seen in more than a century but also the crisis of democracies, the risks associated with the development of artificial intelligence, and the gigantic civilizational challenge posed by climate change. Everything is at stake. What futures can we envision for the remainder of this century and beyond?

A central theory in Futures Studies, proposed by Jim Dator himself, could offer us an answer. According to him, the millions of prospective visions created throughout history can be grouped in four archetypes or “generic images of the future,” namely: growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. Rather than four neatly delimited categories, these archetypes suggest four cardinal points — each with its own themes, hopes, and concerns. None of those generic images, by itself, is positive or negative, utopian or dystopian — even collapse can be a window of opportunity for new beginnings. One aspect that, from my perspective, gives currency to this conceptual framework is that it also functions as a kind of theoretical and political compass to guide us in the current debates that from different fields of scientific knowledge — political economy, science and technology studies, ecological economics, among others — propose alternative solutions to the crossroads in which we find ourselves.

To communicate these alternative futures, the exhibition presented four original installations that were the product of collaborations between design futurists and a group of theorists at the forefront of their different research fields. Carlota Pérez and the team of Jacques Barcia and Jake Dunagan from the Institute for the Future explored the possibility of a new era of sustainable, global, and equitable growth. Raphaël Stevens and N O R M A L S wondered: Is the collapse of our civilization not only an inevitable but a desirable outcome? Giacomo D’Alisa and Becoming invited us to discover a form of discipline in which we learn to be Earth and enjoy simplicity. Finally, Holly Jean Buck and oio studio presented a world in which technological transformation has created a new emotion for a new nature.

As curator of the exhibition, I invited each of the four authors mentioned to prepare a short presentation of their ideas. In the context of what I have called the Great Imagination, these texts can be read as a dialogue between different visions of the future. In a way, these perspectives represent four alternative ways in which the next stretch of the curve representing the Great Acceleration could be drawn.

Digital, green, equitable, and global growth

Carlota Pérez

Honorary Professor, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London

One of the viable options for the future is based on the potential of information technologies to dematerialize a large part of how we meet our needs. The beginning of this model is taking place with the ‘streaming’ of music and cinema, as well as the digitization of books, magazines, and newspapers. The technological world is massively experimenting with ways to “green” energy-intensive materials such as steel and concrete; with ways to increase renewable energy while developing batteries and reducing their cost; with ways to support regenerative agriculture, laboratory food, and vertical crops around cities, to reduce the need for canning and freezing, while raising the nutritional value of the food; with environmentally sustainable forms of transport and with many other ways to reduce the carbon footprint. All of this implies massive investments in scientific and technological research and in innovation and entrepreneurship.

My environmental optimism goes hand in hand with social optimism. My research on the diffusion patterns of technological revolutions indicates to me that, after a period of ‘creative destruction,’ marked by experimentation without a definite direction, society recognizes the need to overcome the social damage as a consequence of the ‘destruction’ half and to give direction to the new potential of the ‘creative’ half. Thus arise the golden ages of capitalism. We are at precisely that crucial moment. The conjunction of post-pandemic reconstruction with the climate emergency at this midpoint of the current technological wave indicates the possibility of steering the economy towards digital, green, equitable, and global growth. We already saw it in the postwar reconstruction, the Belle Époque, and the Victorian boom. The opportunity is there. Will we know how to take advantage of it?

Collapsology

Raphaël Stevens

Futurist specialised in collapse and resilience thinking

Don’t you think our epoch has a scent of collapse? Hints of the end of this world are appearing everywhere, in recent scientists’ warnings, in the speeches of activist Greta Thunberg and Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, in World Bank and army reports, in ongoing media commentaries on the fires in Australia, Brazil, and Siberia, as well as in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2015, my colleague Pablo Servigne and I coined a neologism ‘collapsology’ and wrote a book in order to invite scholars, academic, independent experts, and the public alike, to join together and engage in a meaningful conversation on the possibility that a collapse of industrial civilisation could happen in our lifetime, for the present generation. Our aim has been to inform as many people as possible of what a growing number of scientists and institutions are saying about these little-considered hazardous scenarios so that society can organize itself politically to mitigate the risk.

Some commentators have called us ‘alarmists’ or ‘doomers’. Perhaps the best form of response is a metaphor about how it is normal to prepare for the worst in order to reduce the hazard. When your insurer or the fire department tells you that there is a possibility that your home could go up in smoke and kill your family, you do not silence them by calling them alarmists. You take this risk seriously, take out insurance, check appliances and furnishings, assess cladding and escape routes, advise or train colleagues, and install smoke detectors and extinguishers. Perhaps you notice and discuss your concerns. You try to make sure a fire never happens, and you adapt to this possibility in a concrete way.

Ultimately, modernity might not die of its postmodern philosophical wounds, but because it has run out of energy or because of an abrupt climate change or a too heavy to bear pandemic for instance. If amphetamines and antidepressants were the pills of the productivist world, resilience, sobriety, and low-techs might well be the aspirins of the hangover generation.

The discipline to thrive without growth

Giacomo D’Alisa

Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra

Growth ideology is driving humanity towards an inhabitable and unjust world. This ideology is articulated around a liberal precept: every human being is legitimated to extract, control, use, consume, waste, and dispose of all the resources deemed necessary in the pursuit of its own personal desires and wishes. This precept fosters the commonsensical demand for more stuff and feeds the expansion of industrial capitalist development. The consequence is an unfair and doomed future for the many. Degrowth is a call for unlearning and undoing the idols and the false notion of growth-led westernized society.

Degrowthers, as the “ERRES” of the Great Imagination exposition, promote the common sense according to which “people should live simply so others, human and non-human may simply live”. Degrowthers promote and enact ecologically sound and socially equitable societies. As the “ERRES”, they aim to participate in regenerating human and urban ecosystems while enjoying life. They want to convivially discuss a life worth the effort to be sustained for all. They aspire to thrive without promoting growth-driven imaginaries. Degrowth is anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist and decolonial; thus, it envisions a society with different gender relations and roles, different distribution of paid and unpaid work, cultural interactions, and co-evolutive paths between the human and non-human species. The life that degrowthers commit to sustaining does not aspire to be chimeric emancipation from nature and/or the body, as the civilizing colonial project of the capitalist modernity does. For degrowthers, the body’s materiality comes with the immanent vulnerability of what it is alive and shows the condition of inter-dependency and eco-dependency of existence. This is why care is the central commons for instituting a society that wants to sustain life. Care as a corollary in co-habitation and sharing. The discipline of caring is what degrowth push forward.

Let’s transform it all

Holly Jean Buck

Assistant Professor, Environment & Sustainability, University at Buffalo,

Out of all the visions for the future today, transformation — technology-supported transcendence of the current system — is at a low point. The spokespeople for transformation tend to be billionaire men who seek not to just transcend the limitations of human meatspace but the planet altogether. Visions of transformation are ailing. They are dominated by technological artifacts and capacities rather than led by visions of transformed social organization and social relations. Yes, there are discussions of cyberfeminism and xenofeminism and postwork feminism — but they are not mainstream. Part of transformation’s contemporary weakness lies in how unrelatable billionaires have colonized imaginations of the future. But part is also due to new strains of puritanism in society, where transformation is seen as an escape from a deserved moral penance.

What about a world in which fusion has made clean energy abundant for all and a postwork world with universal basic income, where care is valued? What about a world where precision agriculture and robotic harvesting is guided by smallholders and land collectives? What about a world in which the phaseout of fossil fuels as part of the energy transition is accompanied by groundbreaking advances in bioplastics and recycling, leading to a post-petrochemical, post-extractive material transition? And what if these operations were collectively owned by both men and women working twenty or thirty hours a week? Why are our feeds not jammed with these visions? There is nothing inherently impossible about them; much of this technology exists at the lab stage, and none of it is “too expensive” in a world spending trillions on weaponry. We need a critical mass of visionaries to make a real cultural current — with its own images, metaphors, and language — that can create pressures and demands. The first step is loosening tired binaries between technology / nature and technology / social relations; let’s transform it all.

Notes

[1] Alkon, P. (1987): Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens; Londres. University of Georgia Press.

[2] Seligman, M. et. al. (2016): Homo Prospectus. Oxford; Nueva York. Oxford University Press.

[3] Dator, J. “Manoa’s four generic images of the futures” en Compass, Julio 2017. Disponible en: https://www.apf.org/page/Compass

[4] Dator, ibid.

[5] Steffen, W. et. al. “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration” en The Anthropocene Review 2015, Vol. 2(1) 81–98.

Bibliography

Alkon, P. (1987): Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens; Londres. University of Georgia Press.

Buck, H. J. (2019): After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. Londres; Nueva York. Verso.

D’Alisa, G. et. al. (2020): The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge. Polity Press.

Dator, J. “Manoa’s four generic images of the futures” en Compass, Julio 2017. Disponible en: https://www.apf.org/page/Compass

Pérez, C. “Capitalism, technology and a green global golden age: The role of history in helping to shape the future” en Beyond the Technological Revolution, 2016. Disponible en: http://beyondthetechrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BTTR_WP_2016-1.pdf

Seligman, M. et. al. (2016): Homo Prospectus. Oxford; Nueva York. Oxford University Press.

Steffen, W. et. al. “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration” en The Anthropocene Review, 2015, Vol. 2(1) 81–98.

Servigne, P. and R. Stevens. (2020): How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times. Cambridge. Polity.

The Great Imagination was originally published in Preferable Worlds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few months ago, just weeks before the pandemic began to rip apart the fabric of our everyday lives, I went on record with an admittedly silly, perhaps childish idea. If human history was a TV series —say, a thrilling cinematic documentary—the period we are living through would be a perfect cliffhanger: that point of maximum narrative tension before the resolution in the last episode. In this case, it wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the whole series but maybe at least of the current season which may tell the story of the great acceleration associated with our modern, industrial, capitalist and globalized civilization.

The dramatic threads of this cliffhanger are well known: the world is characterized by unprecedented levels of inequality, the democratic order is everywhere in crisis, emerging technologies of artificial intelligence are posing new economic and societal challenges, we are only partially dealing with the COVID-19 crisis (and the prospect of more, perhaps more dangerous pandemics), and all of this is playing against the background of climate change as the ultimate, long-term threat to human civilization. Arguably, what happens in the next couple of decades will decide what happens in the next few centuries and even beyond.

The convergence of these big challenges coincides with — and, some may argue, is inextricable from—the rise of design both narrowly construed as a formally recognized set of professional disciplines and, more broadly, as a socially diffused mode of engaging with the world. Today, more and more individuals, communities, and organizations recognize design practices as essential to the way they live and thus, at least implicitly, as an important vector for social change.

I have been involved in this field at least indirectly and intermittently, both professionally and academically, for a couple of decades now. Also, for the last five years, I have tried to write one or two articles every year looking at design from my sort of quasi-outsider, parallax view. For example, in ‘El Diseño y yo’ (in English here), I tried to make sense of the becoming-strategic of design and its subsequent three-dimensional expansion to become, in the same movement, increasingly systemic, future-oriented, and critical. The autobiographical title responds to the fact that it was only due to those expansions—which I’ve come to see, metaphorically, as a set of welcoming open arms—that I felt both drawn to and entitled to work in the field. In ‘How Design is Politics’, I tried to grapple with some concepts and frameworks that could be useful for designers as we venture, following the aforementioned expansion, into politically charged territories.

During the same period, I also moved more intentionally to the field of futures and strategic foresight — more recently as a lecturer at the Design of Tomorrow postgraduate program at CENTRO, as a co-founder of Diagonal (a research, design, and futures studio based on Mexico City), and as a research affiliate at Institute for the Future. These same last five years have witnessed the explosion of “design futures”: a set of practices (mainly speculative design, design fiction, and experiential futures) that for decades have been converging at the intersections of design, art, and futures studies. These all share the conviction that design methods and outputs can be used to foster imagination and conversations about futures. I have had the opportunity to experiment with those practices as well.

However, the project I’m starting to develop here is more directly related to an article from last year where, so to speak, I “flipped” my interest: from the design of futures to the futures of design. In ‘Design: The “Next” 30 Years’, I used the theory of technological revolutions developed by Carlota Pérez to situate the evolution of design against a wider techno-economic and political background in order to lay out some potential lines of evolution for the next decades. As I argued following Pérez, if it currently feels like we’re living through a repeat version of the 1930s it’s because we may be going through a turning point similar to the one the world experienced in the middle of the 20th century. In this conjuncture, a set of political interventions aimed at strengthening the power of governments for tilting the playing field towards new forms of inclusive, innovative, and sustainable growth — as exemplified by recent calls for a Green New Deal — may deliver us into a new “golden age” similar to the postwar period. If things were to unfold in this way, design could play a key role—as it did during the 1950s and 1960s—to redefine our notions of what it means to live a “good life” this time in accordance with an emerging paradigm that Pérez calls “smart green growth.”

The argument I developed there could be slightly controversial for at least a couple of reasons. First, the idea of historical cycles can easily be construed more deterministically than it should—as if I was trying to predict what comes next. Second, the association of a positive future or “golden age” with the concept of growth may sound off-key in a context where more people, including young climate activists, are disparaging the idea of economic growth. At the end of the article, I followed the principles put forward by futurist Jim Dator to explain that looking at cyclical forces is simply a conceptual tool deployed to better forecast, imagine, and, most importantly, create futures. Moreover, as he argues, the activity of forecasting should always entail looking at multiple or alternative possibilities so as to inform discussions about preferred directions. This is why I closed the article pointing briefly to other current theories that, while mapping to the other three images of the future proposed by Dator as alternatives to growth, may serve as similar but competing backgrounds to explore futures of design.

Dator’s theory of alternative futures or the four generic images of the future—namely: Growth, Collapse, Discipline, and Transformation—remains a useful framework for futures imagination. First of all, it is one of maybe two or three well-established methods for exploring scenarios or alternative futures. In my experience, it is a method that works quite well to investigate and imagine broad, large-scale, or “civilizational” futures. Most importantly, as I will try to show in the articles that will appear in this publication, it’s a framework that quite presciently maps current theoretical discussions about “what is to be done” in the context of the big challenges that constitute the cliffhanger in which we’re living. The fact that contemporary theoretical discussions map well to Dator’s four futures is not merely of philosophical interest. As Milton Friedman famously argued:

Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

Thus, one of the main objectives of this publication is to review, through the lens of Dator’s futures, some of “the ideas that are lying around.” By reviewing a small subset of the recent theoretical literature dealing mainly with climate change and its multiple interactions with technology, economics, and politics, we may be able to update the map that Dator so presciently laid out.

In the year or so since the publication of that article, I’ve been researching quite deeply into recent ideas that, as I explained above, could serve as alternatives to the growth vision that I explored there. This has involved a deep dive into fields such as degrowth theory, collapsology, and ecomodernism, among other closely related and competing perspectives. This period has been a good experiment—although not always very comfortable—in developing what Jay Ogilvy called “a scenaric stance”: the capacity to hold multiple futures simultaneously in perspective while transcending both optimism and pessimism. Moreover, rather than just developing the capacity to consider these alternative futures as perhaps equally plausible or probable, the most interesting challenge has been trying to develop the capacity to find in them certain features that may be desirable and worth pursuing, that is, to consider all of them as potentially preferable. The title of the publication, Preferable Worlds, refers precisely to the qualities in those images of the future that makes them at least susceptible of being preferred by different people, in different circumstances, and perhaps for different reasons. In this way, even if I personally lean towards growth and transformational futures, the second objective of this publication is to equip myself with concepts and frameworks that could allow me to establish better conversations with people that hold different values and hopes. In fact, the ultimate goal may be to synthesize preferable images of the future that transcend the ideological frictions that currently exist between proponents of those alternative visions.

Finally, a third objective is carried over from that article: to explore both how design practices may evolve in any of those alternative futures and, at the same time, how design might be a driver of change towards any of them. I see design as a nexus between the micro and the macro, between the individual and the systemic, between technology and culture, between economics and politics. As such, arguably, design will play a key role in the resolution of this cliffhanger—whatever that may turn out to be.

The plan is to publish here what, in other circumstances, would be something close to a book. The core will be composed of a series of theoretical articles like ‘Design: The “Next” 30 years’ but looking at current theories associated with the four alternative futures and their implications for design practices. I will also try to publish other pieces that look more like typical futures work, i.e. reports with signals, trends and emerging issues, forecasts, etc. I’ve also drafted a couple of book reviews that may end up being published here.

Perhaps the most exciting thing is that I’m aiming to build here a sort of collaborative platform. Back in June, when Giovanni Caruso, Silvio Cioni, and the rest of the team at Speculative Futures Milan invited me to give a talk, I took the opportunity to facilitate a short workshop where I presented the bases of this project and collaborated with the participants in the creation of a few initial images of design practices in alternative futures. I will publish the results here soon. In a similar vein, when the opportunity emerged to teach a new course on “Select Strategic Design Topics” at the MA Strategic Design and Innovation (Ibero), I couldn’t resist the temptation to set up an exploratory design studio on the basis of this project. In collaboration with the students, I will publish some of the results here as well.

As it may be obvious, this is a self-initiated and self-funded project that will be developed on the margins of other work and teaching commitments. Even so, I will try to develop a certain discipline for publishing regularly.

If you’re interested in collaborating or exploring some of the topics presented above, please do not hesitate to leave a comment or reach out to jorge[at]diagonal.studio.

Preface: Living in a cliffhanger was originally published in Preferable Worlds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.