Don't Save This World. Design the Next One

I started this newsletter because I’d had an insight that I didn’t see anybody else talking about: namely, that the problems of the 21st century will have to be solved with ideas from the 21st century. Yet all our proposed solutions seem to be from other eras.

I’ve set out to do two things in my postings here: discover and report on truly new solutions that will help us earn optimism about the future; and where I can’t find such new ideas, invent them.

In this article I’ll lay it out one of the inventive processes I use. This is an approach common to many of my posts. I’ll present it in four easy stages that you can learn to follow yourself. Then, I’ll give you a couple of fun examples of how I’ve used it.

My “four easy stages” correspond to four themes you’ll find running through most of the articles I’ve written here.

1. Narrative as Cognitive Technology. The first thing to realize is that we think in stories. As Brian Boyd, author of On the Origin of Stories, puts it, “If the human mind can understand something in narrative terms, it automatically will.” Anything that happens to us or in the world, we unconsciously and adroitly fit into some story. In a very concrete way, we make sense by storytelling. I’ve talked in detail about how that works, in posts such as “Who Paints the Dew on the Daisy.” The narrative instinct is one of our most basic cognitive functions; we can’t not understand the world as a grand story unfolding. But stories are a Procrustean Bed: we cut off any parts (facts, news items and sources) that don’t fit the framing we’ve committed to. Once we catch ourselves doing this, we have an opportunity to reframe the situation, by looking for other ways to tell its story.

2. Earned Optimism vs. Apocalyptic Thinking. Once you see that our society has become mesmerized by apocalyptic narratives, you can’t unsee them. According to literary theorist Northrop Frye, there are two kinds of apocalypse: divine and demonic. They appear in our thinking as naive optimism, or a conviction that we’re all doomed. Recognizing them as the framing mythos of our current age, we can reject them, and instead, search for actual solutions to our problems. In some posts, such as “Apocalypse, or Just a Catastrophe?” I talk about how apocalyptic language—borrowed largely from religious tradition—distorts our perception of actual, complex change. We can build ourselves corrective lenses, using a vast toolkit that much better minds than mine have assembled. In posts like “Our Subtopian Future” and “Planning Backwards” we explore specific techniques for analyzing the future that are used in the foresight community.

3. Design and Constraint as Creative Practice. One particular lens has turned out to be most useful for me. There seems to be a common assumption both our positive and negative visions of the future share—and it’s a mistake. It is the assumption that freedom means absence from constraint.
   This assumption is the atomic unit that our hopes and our fears about the future are built from. But not only is it false, the opposite is true: constraints generate freedom. And this isn’t a metaphor, it’s not abstract; the haiku, the sonata and novel forms, the constitution, and biological ecosystems are all examples of generative constraints. I lay out the unbounded creative possibilities in “Apocalypse as Design Constraint.”
   Having recognized our limiting narratives, and reframed our situation in terms that are appropriate to now, what remains is to find the constraints that will maximize our ability to act in the new worlds we’re envisioning. If this sounds abstract, I go into a lot more detail in “A Guiding Principle for Foresight.”

4. Fourth: If constraints generate freedom, the question becomes: constraints on whom and what? Who (or what) are the real stakeholders in today’s pseudo-apocalypse? The design process has to account for nonhuman stakeholders, or it reproduces the same extractive logic that’s ruining the planet, in new clothes. A simple example in this case would be fishing quotas—by limiting how much we can catch, they guarantee there will be something to catch in the future.
   Here, I rely on Alicia Juarero and Karen Barad—both thinkers revealing to truly new ways of living in and working in the evolving world.

Following this process, I’ve developed what I think are some new ideas, and expressed them in posts such as “Post-Colonial Science Fiction I: Space Opera,” which is about what 21st century science fiction could look like; or “Should a Teslabot Shoplift?” which invites you into the ethical minefield that is personal robotics; or, “Reinventing the Subsistence Economy,” which asks what a post-growth society would really look like.

All of this sums up to a unified approach: The narrative analysis explains how we think; the apocalypse/optimism theme describes the trap we’re in; the rights consideration maps who gets to participate in the future; and the design/constraint method offers a method for building it.

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All that having been said, there’s only two posts I would say are “must-reads” for you to get what I’m doing. The first is “The Science Fiction of the 1900s,” which solidly introduces the idea that 21st century problems need 21st century solutions. The scond is “Who Paints the Dew on the Daisy?” This article is about theories of change, and how they are deeply entangled in our narrative-driven brains. It’s a fun unveiling of our cognitive biases, and provides a good explanation of why I’ve settled on constraint as the most interesting model for change.

Now, for some examples of this technique in action. Check out:

• “After the Internet” — Is our current Internet the only possible global network? Or are there other possible models for a digitally connected society? I consider a couple.

• “The Single-Family Space Colony” — A three-parter that asks whether Gerard K. O’Neill’s giant space colonies are the only way to go. What if we could build space habitats so small you could take a mortgage on one?

• “So What’s New?” — A great example of an idea from the 21st century—enactivism—with an unfolding of it to explore new possibilities it presents, both in the real world, and for science fiction.

• “Express Elevator” — Talking about narrative again, this time the idea that the best fictional futures have both utopian and dystopian sides or ways to read them. I explore how such stories are constructed, and what you can do with them.

There’s a lot more in the archive, so feel free to nose around, and share what you find with your friends. There’s even some short fiction here, as well as links to free stories of mine on other sites.

A final note: Unapocalyptic will be undergoing a significant upgrade this summer, so be patient just a little longer, and there will be a lot more content, connections, and announcements in the very near future. Thanks!

—K