Dreaming Together

Below is the text of an article I wrote for Made Up: Design's Fictions, a collection edited by Tim Durfee and Mimi Zeiger at the ArtCenter College of Design.

Artwork: Willie Riley Japanangka, Bush Plum and Snake. [source].

***

In my first year of university, I remember reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. One passage in particular leapt out at me:

It is impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of any one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone.

Something in my eighteen year-old mind resonated with this expression of fundamental existential loneliness which I suspect everyone feels to a degree as they come of age. But these words haunted me for years, and I’m not entirely sure why. It may be that I was grappling with this paradox: Are we truly condemned to live and dream alone? All of us?

Much more recently I read a novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End. It’s a terrific story, and has stood up well over something like fifty years; although here, as always, there’s nothing so characteristic of an age’s thinking as its science fiction. Clarke is of course most famous for co-writing with director Stanley Kubrick the epic 01968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of all sci-fi writers, he strikes me as remarkable for the way his imagination burned to achieve escape velocity from the culture of his era – not to mention his species; to dream a way out into truly different times and places, and take us there.

It was reflecting on Clarke’s feats of imagination that got me to wondering about the odd fact that our brains are not temporally bound. There’s no physical limitation preventing us from cognising wildly different and yet fully coherent life-settings in detail. Anatomically, human brains across the planet, and over tens of thousands of years, haven’t really varied much. Yet the variety of worlds – landscapes, cultures, languages, values, technosocial setups – that the human brain has managed to host, to create and navigate, has been enormous. The very fact that each of us today carries in mind a model of our personal context and surroundings at this historical moment, a world in many ways unimaginable to our ancestors, underlines that in principle we’re capable of imagining equally disparate possible worlds of the future – even if we generally don’t. It’s what our minds are surrounded and scaffolded with that makes all the difference.

“Unimaginable” is not absolute, it’s situational. The reason that this matters, I suggest, is that it points to a missing piece in our modern technoculture: I think we have a chronically impoverished practice of public imagination. Yes, there’s Arthur C. Clarke, and Godzilla, and Star Trek, and many other speculative entertainments before and since; but for “serious” purposes – governance, politics, and the “real” worlds we shape using those processes – we simply have not developed a habit of imagining and sharing the long-range scenarios at issue in any concrete way. Meanwhile the massive failure to understand our power as a species and to exercise it with anything approaching strategic foresight, let alone wisdom, is producing epically hairy environmental, economic and other consequences that are increasingly plain to see.

This is not a new line of thought. Noting the curious imbalance that we have countless thousands of history specialists and yet pay scarcely any serious attention to the rest of time, it is now over eighty years since the stupendously influential author H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man) called for Professors of Foresight. Some inroads have been made on that front since; indeed the entire scholarly field of futures studies, also known as foresight, speaks to the need highlighted by Wells in 01932.

Nigh on half a century has passed since Alvin Toffler observed, in a classic article which led to his 01970 bestseller Future Shock, that we have no “heritage of the future”. This observation goes right to my point about the need for an overall cultural capacity, toward which an academic field has proven to be only a partial solution: our inherent and permanent lack of a future “heritage” means we have to work hard to create one. And although certainly a challenge, the creation of tangible compensations for our lopsided temporal inheritance can certainly be done, as the emerging practitioners of experiential futures and design fiction are now learning.

It seems to me that the stakes and eventual possibilities for these hybrid forms of design are far greater than one might suspect from watching highly produced videos on the thrilling future of glassware, or prototypes of nifty gestural computer interfaces.

For when it comes to the process of public choice – the way humanity supposedly shapes its destiny in our ostensibly most “developed” communities – we congratulate ourselves on the accomplishment of democracy, and fret endlessly over its procedures; the whos and hows of voting; the rituals of deliberation (the weighing of alternatives) and decision (the killing of alternatives when we make a choice). But regardless of who votes, what is the real meaning of any such choices if the alternatives among which we are selecting are underimagined, or clichéd – or simply absent?

Whatever their personal shortcomings, I locate the problem not with political candidates but in the scandalously uninspired fodder used to generate public conversation. So where might we look for a solution?

My friend Natalie Jeremijenko, an engineer and artist, has described her work as being about the creation of ‘structures of participation’, a phrase I use often because to me it captures what good futures work does, too. Foresight practice involves creating structures of participation for co-imagining. Likewise, the task of governance is bound up with the design and use of structures of participation for collectively shaping the common good. To my mind, those appear in quite diverse forms and at different scales, ranging from the design of a meeting or conference, to the design of a political/legal system like the United States of America, and also to the design of a political and experiential futures intervention like the one I’m about to describe.

With foresight and design colleagues I have been doing experiential futures since 02006, and its roots and influences go back much further. Of all interventions that I know of in this vein, the most exciting to date is one I heard about shortly after it occurred during the Arab Spring. It is a significant illustration of the faculty of public imagination.

In January 02011 Tunisia ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, ending a 23-year dictatorship. Immediately the economy started tanking – the revolutionaries hadn’t known they would succeed, and didn’t have detailed plans for next steps. With a backdrop of economic suspension and a political vacuum, what followed might have been as bad as what had gone before. What did in fact happen next was rather extraordinary.

A month after the revolution, for one day in February 02011, several newspapers, television and radio stations across the country reported as if it were June 16, 02014; three years and four months into the future. They reported stories from within a hypothetical future Tunisia enjoying newfound stability, democracy and prosperity.

Social media activity swarmed around the #16juin2014 hashtag (and for the first time led the national conversation to trend at number one on French Twitter), and critically, the mood and situation began to change as people imagined and debated the destiny of their country. The intervention also helped spread the call for Tunisians to get back to work, a key step towards recovery in the wake of the upheaval.

This remarkable story should prompt many questions, but the one we’re most interested in here is: how might a sustained commitment to structures of participation for public imagination work in other contexts at scale?

For instance, what if standard political brand-oriented advertising expenditure were curbed, and candidates instead had to produce feature documentaries not about, but “from” the future that their policies envision?

Most places have a library or museum dedicated to preserving their past; how about a public building dedicated to immersing visitors in an ever-evolving array of experiences of what the community could become one generation from today?

Or why couldn’t we set aside a public holiday each year, dedicated to staging a Festival of Possible Worlds in the streets, parks and piazzas of great cities around the globe?

Let us return to where we began. It is true that at some level, our personal experience can be only ours. But I no longer fear that we are condemned to dream alone.

I think that humanity is fundamentally psychedelic – quite literally: mind-manifesting – and that the history we collectively choose to live out in years and decades to come will depend on how well we cultivate public imagination, through experiential futures, large-scale participatory simulations, transmedia games, and the like.

I believe we can dream together, now. And I suspect that to the extent we rise to the challenge of good governance for the 21st century, that’s exactly what we will be doing on a regular basis.

***

Links:
(updated 05feb18)
> Pdf version of the article including references as it appears in the finished book. The full title is "Dreaming Together: Experiential Futures as a Platform for Public Imagination".
> Made Up: Design's Fictions finally published by ArtCenter Graduate Press and Actar in April 02018.
> Video of the short presentation at Institute for the Future's 02013 ReConstitutional Convention, on which this piece was based.

Related:
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> An experiential scenario for post-revolution Tunisia
> A History of Experiential Futures 02006-02031
> Whose future is this?
> The technology of public imagination
> TEDxFutures 

How future-shock therapy works

I've been thinking a lot about why we're doing the type of work we've been doing over the past couple of years, manifesting alternative futures in the form of immersive experiences and tangible artifacts (postcards, products, props). This question is central to my doctoral dissertation topic that's been gestating throughout the semester, but I find it hard to write about -- there's a tangle of related ideas that don't seem to want to let go of each other, so pulling at one thread seems to disturb the whole clump.

But here goes.

There are three points I want to make, and I'll spread them over several posts. First I want to say something about the concept of future shock and how it gives rise to the idea of future-shock therapy. Next I'll talk about the "therapy" aspect of it, the immersive or experiential role of arts and design in this effort. Finally, we'll examine the relationship between scenarios, simulations, and hoaxes.

/Part One/

Although there may be many things about Alvin Toffler's famous 01970 book Future Shock that are intellectually questionable (see for instance Richard Slaughter's reappraisal in this 02002 article), I think the underlying thesis remains valid, and the challenge he describes there is even more pressing today. I recently went back to "The Future as a Way of Life", the article published in Horizon magazine in 01965 which introduced the concept. (It was republished in the 01971 book Society as It Is: A Reader, which is how I got a hold of it. I quote at length here because it's interesting reading but hard to come by -- although the full text of the book version, which makes the same basic points with a lot of extra fluff that most readers can do without this many years later, can be found online.) Anyway, Toffler writes (pp. 450-451):

Culture shock is the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor.
...
It is what happens when all the familiar psychological cues that help an individual to function in society are suddenly withdrawn and replaced by new ones that are strange or incomprehensible.
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Yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with a much more serious malady that might be called "future shock." Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow.
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Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the super-imposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one's own society.
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This is the prospect that man now faces as a consequence of accelerated change -- the prospect of dislocation far more subtle, complex, and continuous than any we have known. Change is avalanching down upon our heads and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it.

He briefly describes a whole range of areas in which accelerating change can be discerned -- including energy, information, agriculture, work, urbanisation, biology, and the brain --then elaborates on the nature of the challenge as he sees it (pp. 457-458):

The commanding point is that we can anticipate volcanic dislocations, twists and reversals, not merely in our social structure, but also in our hierarchy of values and in the way individuals perceive and conceive reality. Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people.

We think of ourselves as sophisticated and well educated, but how well prepared are we, as a society, to cope with the sudden new sensations, pains, intellectual turnabouts, eruptions, and shifts in perception that are likely to confront us as we speed forward into a culture in which computers can learn, and can improve upon their own performance, in which man is no longer the only manifestation of high-level intelligence on the face of the earth, and in which, in fact, he may come crash up against the realization that his globe is not the only inhabited parcel of real estate in the universe?
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For the current upbringing of most people, and the subtly inculcated sense of time that comes with it, are both inimical to adaptability.
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The fact is -- and simple observation of one's own friends and associates will confirm it -- that even the most educated people today operate on the assumption that society is relatively static. At best they attempt to plan by making simple straight-line projections of present-day trends. The result is unreadiness to meet the future when it arrives. In short, future shock.

As Slaughter notes, Toffler's prescription for education is, broadly, right on (pp. 458-459):

What, if anything, can be done to lessen this shock and the disorientation and disability that come with it? Society has many built-in time spanners that help to link the present generation with the past.
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No such time spanners enhance our sense of the future. We have no objects, no friends, no relatives, no works of art, no music or literature, that originate in the future. We have, as it were, no heritage of the future.

Despite this, there are ways to send the human mind arching forward as well as backward. We need to begin by creating a stronger future-consciousness on the part of the public, and not just by means of Buck Rogers comic strips and articles about the marvels of space travel or medical research. These make a contribution, but what is needed is a concentrated focus on the social and personal implications of the future, not merely on its technological characteristics.
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We offer our children courses in history; why not also make a course in "Future" a prerequisite for every student, a course in which the possibilities and probabilities of the future are systematically explored, exactly as we now explore the social system of the Romans or the rise of the feudal manor?

We train our Peace Corps volunteers by attempting to give them advance knowledge about the conditions and culture of the country to which they are assigned. Why not devise an education designed to minimize future shock?

The emergence of the academic field of futures studies during the second half of the twentieth century can be seen as a response to this challenge. It is exactly what Toffler calls for --- an attempt to devise an education designed to minimise future shock.

But it has, I think, failed to have the mainstream impact that it should have.

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, like other futurists I frequently find myself in conversations with people who have never heard of futures, are incredulous that it exists (because of their assumptions about what it entails), and who accordingly think there is something wrong with me because I study it. (This misunderstanding occurs with monotonous regularity in the press, too, most recently in this abysmally lazy piece in The Economist -- among the suitably appalled futurist responses so far: Michele Bowman, Jamais Cascio, and Maree Conway).

Even if we're doing good work, the what-futures-is-not conversation that ensues in nine out of ten first meetings with anyone of even moderate intellectual curiosity suggests strongly to me that the formal study of futures is not having the impact it should be having on popular discourse about "the future".

One of the reasons is that the idea of making the study of the future intellectually respectable tends to be conflated with the hope of doing so on a scientific, empirical basis. The big mistake Toffler makes, I think, is his insistence on a singular conception of the future (pp. 459-460):

We must kill, once and for all, the popular myth that the future is "unknowable."
...
Every day brings improvement in man's ability to peer into the darkness ahead, and this is true in the social as well as the "hard" sciences.

He does acknowledge that "the future" is constantly in flux (p. 461):

[W]e might consider creating a great national or international institute staffed with top-caliber men and women from all the sciences and social sciences, the purpose of which would be to collect and systematically integrate the predictive reports that are generated by scholars and imaginative thinkers in all the intellectual disciplines all over the world. Of course, those working in such an institute would know that they could never create a single, static diagram of the future. Instead, the product of their effort would be a constantly changing geography of the future, a continually recreated overarching image based on the best predictive work available.

Yet at the same time it can be seen how he holds fast to the assumption that a singular -- albeit evolving -- idea of The Future is sufficient. "If the contemporary individual is going to have to cope with the equivalent of millenniums of change within the compressed span of a single lifetime, he must carry within his skull a reasonably accurate (even if gross) image of the future." (p. 458)

Our notion of future-shock therapy takes seriously the challenge of anticipatory, immersive experience -- educating to mitigate future shock, as it were. But it's integrated with the plurality of alternative scenarios which we believe to be essential; faithful to the radical contingency and unpredictability which increasingly mark the accelerating historical process. In contrast to Toffler's advocacy of a probabilistic single best-guess, our prescription for future shock involves entertaining a multiplicity of images of the future, based on differing emphases, interpretations, aspirations, and concerns -- each with their own logic and legitimacy.

/To be continued.../