for - futures - backcasting - question - what does a world within planetary boundaries look like?

for - AI - futures - two possible directions - dystopian or not - Yuval Noah Harari

Der neue französische Premierminister Michel Barnier hat in seiner Zeit als Umweltminister wesentlich dazu beigetragen, das Vorsorgeprinzip und die finanzielle Verantwortung der Verschmutzenden für Schäden im Umweltrecht zu verankern. Obwohl er zu Amtsbeginn auch von der „ökologischen Schuld" gesprochen hat, erwarten NGOs und Thinktanks, deren Vertreter:innen die Libération befragt hat, allenfalls vorsichtige umweltpolitische Schritte und eine insgesamt restriktive Ausgabenpolitik von ihm.https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/le-premier-ministre-michel-barnier-est-il-vraiment-decide-a-payer-la-dette-ecologique-de-la-france-20240906_7BYVDVAUSJD2VN6M4V7DAI2N2E/

for - futures - transition - social commons design

for - book - Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbach - 1975 - 2009 - futures dismantling capitalist-driven growth and suburban sprawl

for - progress trap - dark futures scenario - like Easter Island but on a global scale

comment - The potential global breakdown of global industrialized society, rupturing supply chains so that our highly interdependent world becomes the very Achilles Heel that hastens its demise is chilling - It could mean a huge disruption to the most important aspect of civilization - the continuing accruing and inter-generational transmission of knowledge - It would be catastrophic to lose that, but it is entirely possible - As Wright himself famously said, to use a computer metaphor, we humans are like 50,000 year old hardware, running modern software - By that, he meant that our cognitive physiology (brain and sensory processing system) has not changed for tens of thousands of years, yet cultural evolution happens at exponentially faster rates, so much so that our biological systems are not adapted to keep up with the pace, and that spells disaster - When we no longer have the sensory or cognitive apparatus to sense danger, and we are offloading that to AI, we are in an extremely vulnerable situation

progress trap - Gedanken - Think of our ancestors from 50,000 years ago. - What Wright is saying with his metaphor is that if that child from 50,000 years ago were transported by a time machine to modernity, (s)he would have little problem integrating into modern society - LIKEWISE, if we lose all the knowledge fruits of accumulated over so many thousands of years, it would be like being born into a human tribe 50,000 years ago. - We would likely still have language, but all our technology may have to start from scratch!

ref. Futures Cones

Die Unberechenbarkeit (en) des Zeitkomplex (en)

for - question - no viable replacement for fossil fuels? - energy futures - deep geothermal

question - no viable replacement for fossil fuels? - That may not be true - Deep geothermal may be the viable answer in the short-to-medium term and - nuclear fusion may be the solution on the medium term - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Deep+geothermal

for - stories - salience of adjacency- imagination - stories - futures - Ernest Becker - self - timebinding - symbolosphere - quote - Brian Eno - book - Citizens - Jon Alexander - Arian Conrad - citizens - not consumers

quote - Brian Eno

• The stories we tell
  • shape how we see ourselves, and
  • how we see the world.
• When we see the world differently,
  • we begin behaving differently,
  • living into the new story.
• When Martin Luther King said
  • “I have a dream,”
• he was
  • inviting others to dream it with him,
  • inviting them to step into his story.
• Once a story becomes shared in that way,
  • current reality gets measured against it and
  • then modified towards it.
• As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world,
  • we begin behaving differently,
    • as though that world is starting to come into existence,
    • as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there.
• The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.
• By this process it starts to come true.

• Imagining the future makes it more possible.

• Sometimes this work of imagination and storytelling is about the future,

  • as in Dr King’s story.
• Art can play this role:
  • what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.
• We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through
  • style and
  • fashion and
  • art,
• our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds.
• Through them we sense what it would like
  • to be another kind of person
  • with other kinds of values.
• We rehearse new
  • feelings and
  • sensitivities.
• We imagine other ways of thinking about
  • our world and
  • its future.
• We use art to model new worlds so that
  • we can see how we might feel about them.

comment - This is a really powerful writing from Brian Eno. - Storytelling is an exercise in - the imagination of alternative possibilities to our own reality. - Stories can become both - inspirational and - aspirational - They can paint a picture in our mind of - a fantasy - a world that does not yet exist - but that nonexistent but desirable reality can then serve as the goal for which we strive - Mapping Futures interventions is then, essentially an act of desirable, inspirational make believe, and mustering the resources to turn the fantasy into reality - Progress relies on design, the imagination of unrealities in vivid detail, - in order to turn them into realities - In doing this, it is not an act carried out in ivory towers, - but in the everyday life of every one of us - We are all engaged in desirable fantasies daily whenever - we decide what meal we will prepare or restaurant to dine at - which clothing outfit to wear today - what we plan to write or say next to another - Every decision we make as a choice between different future alternatives - When it comes to planning major future decisions, - we need to have as much detail as possible of the imagined future - The Town Anywhere project conceived by Ruth Ben-Tovin and employed in the Transition Town movement for many years fis an example of such a simulacrum - https://hyp.is/mqeCtAE_Ee-Yxleqg7GFww/docdrop.org/video/cRvhY4S94ic/ - It provides an artistic space for citizens to imagine a desirable fantasy that can be embodied, enacted and deeply remembered through the participatory and collective citizen act of creating a proxy of their future local habitat in the present, and exploring and momentarily inhabiting their simulacrum. - In this way, this compelling experience is like a branding iron, searing the memory deep into our memory, where it can help guide our actions to realize the desirable fantasy. - Couched within a citizen's FREEligion and FREElosophy we generically call Deep Humanity, an open source, open knowledge approach to universal raison d'etre for what it deeply means to be human, Town Anywhere can scale to fire up the imagination of citizens to co-create our collective future. - Town Anywhere, along with other citizen initiatives which I belong to that advocate healthy citizen power such as SONEC, Stop Reset Go, Deep Humanity, the Indyweb, Living Cities Earth and many, many others can emerge a human murmuration to drive the transition - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fleemor.medium.com%2Fmesmerized-by-the-murmuration-on-human-potential-f4c9ffe06ffa&group=world - As Jon Alexander and Arian Conrad write here, we have to find the narratives that matter to us, where WE is the citizens. Other thinkers like Jose Ramos write along the same line: - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-planet.medium.com%2Fdiscovering-the-narratives-that-matter-to-us-327958a2daec&group=world

for - Town Anywhere - Transition Town - town anywhere - Ruth Ben-Tovim - Deep Humanity BEing journey - TPF - Town Anywhere BEing journey - LCE - Town Anywhere - adjacency - rapid whole system change - futures - town anywhere - SONEC

summary - Town Anywhere provides a simulacrum, as Brian Eno talks about in the forward to Jon Anderson & Arian Conrad's book Citizens - https://hyp.is/m_HuigEvEe--6UdGv2HVDA/www.jonalexander.net/the-foreword

Summary - This is a

for - indigenous futures - decolonial futures - Ngoni futures - African futures

post comment - Linked In post comment - futures

for - futures - deep time - Jose Ramos - deep time - Deep Humanity - deep time - Mutant Futures - temporal conscientization

summary - Jose's article introduces an important new framing that can help give deep insights into the current poly-meta-perma-crisis that civilization is moving through. - This article synthesizes a diverse source of salient knowledge in the social sciences to shape a futures perspective that contextualizes modernity in deep time. - The deep time perspective helps us to remove the temporal blinders we may have on that may give us a false sense of permanence of social constructions that have been dominant in our lives.

for - Mutant Futures steps

steps - Mutant Futures - 1. List the issues and themes that are important and meaningful to us. - 2. Explore the issue or theme through a deep time perspective. - 3. Organically emerge - a story of change that is - inspiring, - dramatic and - compelling - This is a story that helps us to make sense of - where we’ve come from and - where we want to go. - 4. Practice telling the story - 5. Determine what kinds of roles we want to play in this story of change. - Our narrative and the future(s) it contains might be calling forth new selves from us. - 6. Determine what - new - methods - techniques or - technologies - are being called forth from these narratives of change. - As we deconstruct outdated social constructs, we need to - imagine - prototype - build - new social constructs. - 7. Emerge the communities required to undertake this journey.

quote - shared futures - climate crisis and appropriate language - (quote below)

• My belief is that
  • societies cannot organize effectively
  • to cope with
  • the impacts of climate change
  • without a shared understanding of
  • the future that awaits.
• Currently, representations of the net-zero future
  • don’t do that.
• They are a denial of the best of human nature.
• They shut down the possibility of
  • imagining something different
  • in favor of a fantasy of more of the same,
    • minus catastrophic climate change.
• With a better, shared understanding of the world we’re moving toward,
  • we can better organize ourselves to live in that world,
    • whatever that might mean,
    • whatever that might look like.

Der Staat New York plant - wie einige andere Bundesstaaten - "Klimawandel" zu einem verpflichtenden Unterrichtsinhalt an den Schuhen zu machen. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/nyregion/nyc-climate-change-education.html

for - energy futures.South Africa.IRP inaccuracies

• for: futures, clear vision of desirable future, desirable future - 4 pillars

• desirable future: 4 pillars

  • security
    • we can manage, alleviate, adapt to the dangers of the polycrisis
  • opportunity
    • people can express their agency and grow and explore
  • justice
    • equality and fair distribution of wealth. Everyone deserves to live a life based upon holistic wellbeing
  • identity
    • we all need to feel like we belong

• for: inefficiencies - example - cars, low carbon futures - reduce cars

• for: quote, climate futures - both green new deal and regrowth don't work, green new deal - criticism, degrowth - criticism

• for: plan B, climate futures, dystopian future, civilization collapse

• title: If We’ve Lost the Climate War, What’s Plan B?

• subtitle: Why a carbon tax won’t save us, and what’s next.
• author: Crawford Kilian

• date: Nov 22, 2023

• summary

  • a good article that shows the complexity and unpredictability of a collapse scenario and system justification theory, which sounds like the boiling frog syndrome

• for: futures - neo-Venetian crypto-networks, Global Chinese Commons, GCC, cosmolocal, coordiNation, somewheres, everywheres, nowheres, Global System One, Global System Two, Global System Three, contributory accounting, fourth sector, protocol cooperative, mutual coordination economics

• summary

• learned something new
  • I learned a number of new ideas from reading Michel's article. He gives a brief meta-history of our political-socio-economic system, using Peter Pogany's framework of Global System One, Two and Three and within this argues for why a marriage of blockchain systems and cosmolocal production systems could create a "fourth sector" for the transition to Global System Three.
  • He cites evidence of existing trends already pointing in this direction, drawing from his research in P2P Foundation

• for: different possible socio-economic-political futures

• comment

  • Michel outlines the possibilities then selects the last one as the one he situates himself in and will write on, namelyl:
    • A dream to integrate:
      • markets,
      • networks,
      • state functions, AND what we could call
      • ‘the Commons’

• for: futures, futures - climate change
• annotate

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/26/geert-wilders-far-right-pvv-dutch-climate-policy

• for: alternative futures

• comment

  • we need to provide a detailed vision to the public of what such an alternative future looks like

• for: cultural evolution - diverse movements, cultural transition - diverse movements

• summary

  • Bill Reese and Rubin Nelson believe that the dynamic / relational quadrant of indigenous culture is the most viable futures

• for: future cities - Africa, CommuniTgrow, urban planning - Africa, African cities, futures - African cities, 2 Billion Strong, Gita Govin, Richard Rubin, Alistair Rendall

• title:

  • 2 Billion Strong
    • A Regenerative Solution to Building Sustainable African Cities
• author
  • Gita Govin
  • Richard Rubin
  • Alistair Rendall
• date: 2012
• summary
  • This book outlines the vision from sustainable architectural firm CommuniTGrow for a template for a future sustainable African city. The first project launching in 2024 is the Milkwood Development in Cape Town:
    • https://milkwoodcity.co.za/

• paraphrase
  • Karl Friston takes Andy Clark's perspective
    • the real problem is a meta problem
      • why do we spend so much time trying to make sense of our sense-making?
  • Karl talks about futures and different pathways to the futures
  • Humans seem to have this unique property to plan futures, some of which are counter-factual

• for: TPF
• comment
  • Hamburg climate futures outlook 2023 report supports need for something on the scale of the planned TPF

• for: futures - food production, futures - water production, desalination, ocean solar farm, floating solar farm, floating city
• title: An interfacial solar evaporation enabled autonomous double-layered vertical floating solar sea farm
• author: Pan Wu, Xuan We, Huimin Yu, Jingyuan Zhao, Yida Wang, Kewu Pi, Gary Owens, Haolan Xu
• date: Oct. 1, 2023
• source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1385894723041839?via%3Dihub#f0005
• comment
  • Since this simple design integrates fresh water and food production, it can be integrated as a module for a floating city.

• for: futures, futures - Canada, climate impacts, climate impacts - Canada
• title: CANADA IN THE YEAR 2060
• author: Anne Shibata Casselman
• date: Sept., 2023

• for: futures, digital futures, online vs offline role reversal, inequality
• quote
• paraphrase
  • We are already seeing the emergence of
    • ‘tech-free’ camps and
    • ' tech-free' vacation packages
  • Experiencing life ‘offline’ will become a generational goal,
    • much like the Millennial generation introduced ride sharing and home sharing.
  • Ironically, it will be technology that enables this trend, and premiums will be paid for uninterrupted time to focus or to simply enjoy being alive.
  • This may also indicate a new kind of disparity between economic strata, with
    • the more-wealthy affording privacy, peace and quiet while
    • the lower strata remain fodder for 24/7 social media aggregators and botnets.
• author: Sam Adams
  • 24 year veteran of IBM
  • senior AI research scientist, RTI International

• for: quote, quote - Stowe Boyd, quote - progress trap, quote - unintended consequences, unintended consequences, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap
• quote:
  • Technological change is an accelerant and acts on the social ills like pouring gasoline on a fire
• author: Sowe Boyd
  • consulting futurist on technological evolution and the future of work
• paraphrase
  • In an uncontrolled hyper-capitalist society,
    • the explosion in technologies over the past 30 years has only
      • widened inequality,
      • concentrated wealth and
      • led to greater social division.
    • And it is speeding up with the rise of artificial intelligence,
      • which like globalization has destabilized Western industrial economies while admittedly pulling hundreds of millions elsewhere out of poverty.
  • And the boiling exhaust of this set of forces is pushing the planet into a climate catastrophe. -The world is as unready for hundreds of millions of climate refugees as it was for the plague.
  • However, some variant of social media will likely form the context for the rise of a global movement to stop the madness
    • which I call the Human Spring
  • which will be more like
    • Occupy or
    • the Yellow Vests
  • than traditional politics.
  • I anticipate a grassroots movement
    • characterized by
      • general strikes,
      • political action,
      • protest and
      • widespread disruption of the economy
    • that will confront the economic and political system of the West.
  • Lead by the young, ultimately this will lead to large-scale political reforms, such as
    • universal health care,
    • direct democracy,
    • a new set of rights for individuals and
    • a large set of checks on the power of
      • corporations and
      • political parties.
  • For example,
    • eliminating corporate contributions to political campaigns,
    • countering monopolies and
    • effectively accounting for economic externalities, like carbon.

-for: quote, quote - Jennifer Jarratt, quote - progress trap, progress trap, unintended consequences, technology - unintended consequences, quote - unintended consequences, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap - quote: with new technologies come new crimes and criminals – opportunities for all! - author: Jennifer Jarratt - co-principal of Leading Futurists LLC

• for: quote, quote - Barry Chudakov, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
• quote
• paraphrase
  • Technology’s greatest contribution to social and civic innovation in the next decade
  • will be to provide
    • accurate, user-friendly context and
    • honest assessment of
      • issues,
      • problems and
      • potential solutions / comment - indyweb /
  • We are facing greater accelerations of
    • climate change,
    • social mobility,
    • pollution,
    • immigration and
    • resource issues.
  • Our problems have gone from complicated to wicked.
  • We need
    • clear answers and
    • discussions that are
      • cogent,
      • relevant and
      • true to facts.
  • Technology must guard against becoming a platform to enable targeted chaos,
  • that is, using technology as a means to
    • obfuscate and
    • manipulate.
  • We are all now living in Sim City:
  • The digital world is showing us a sim,
    • or digital mirror,
  • of each aspect of reality.
  • The most successful social and civic innovation I expect to see by 2030
  • is a massive restructuring of our educational systems based on new and emerging mirror digital worlds. / comment: This bodes well for Indyweb for education/
  • We will then need to expand our information presentations to include
    • verifiable factfulness that ensures any digital presentation faithfully and
    • accurately matches the physical realities.
  • Just as medicine went from
    • bloodletting and leeches and lobotomies to
    • open-heart surgery and artificial limbs,
  • technology will begin to modernize information flows around core issues: urgent need, future implications, accurate assessment.
  • Technology can play a crucial role to move humanity
    • from blame fantasies
    • to focused attention and working solutions.”

• for: extinction, hope, futures, radical collaboration, indyweb, TPF, SRG
• quote
  • people from all different aspects
    • all different kinds of business people
    • in governments
    • not just the finance people
    • but the environmental section and so on
  • they need to get together and discuss
    • calmly and
    • productively
  • what we can do to creating a new mindset
  • and we can only work out a future economy if people come in from these different sectors and
  • talk together
    • not in a controversial way but
    • in a way of we must find a solution
  • because humanity is not exempt from extinction
• author
  • Jane Goodall

• for: futures, decarbonizing - cultural sector, climate futures - cultural sector, climate futures - cultural industry
• paraphrase
  • more local performances
  • more local purchases
  • leverage point for regional transition
  • reduce capacity
  • slowdown
  • reconceive / eco-conceive the arts so that it may endure
  • educate and change public policy

• for:UBI, universal basic income
• for: UBI, universal basic income, futures
• The physical labor required to maintain life’s essential conditions against the forces of entropy.
• The intellectual labor required to constantly test and advance the individual and collective maps of our ever-evolving territory.

• The spiritual labor required to continuously renew our sense of individual and collective connection to all that is.

• comment

  • two of these are articulating the entanglement of the individual and collective.

1. Passing the reverse Turing test
2. Higher standards, higher floors and ceilings
3. Human centipede epistemology (ugh what an image)
4. Meatspace premium
5. Decentralised human authentication
6. The filtered web

Intuitively I think 1, 4, and 6 already de facto exist in the pre-generative AI web, and will get more important. Tech bros will go all in on 5, and I do see a role for it (e.g. to vouch that a certain agent acts on my behalf). I can see the floor raising of 2, and the ceiling raising too, but only if it is a temporary effect to a next 'stable' point (or it will be a race we'll loose), grow sideways not only up). Future 3 is def happening in essence, but it will make the web useless so there's a hard stop to this scenario, at high societal cost. Human K as such isn't dependent on the web or a single medium, and if it all turns to ashes, other pathways will come up (which may again be exposed to the same effect though)

• = First Edition of Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook (2021)

  • : Question: Is it plausible that the world will reach deep decarbonization by 2050?
    • Answer: No

• = Second Edition of Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook (2023)

  • : Question: What affects the plausibility of attaining the Paris Agreement temperature goals?

• alternative method for assessing plausibility of = climate futures called the = social plausibility framework

climate futures based upon: - social drivers - physical processes

= Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023

• There are a number of possible = climate futures
• but not all are plausible

!- Futures Thinking: The value of Coal, Oil and Gas in our current industrial society - If we do away with coal, we cannot manufacture - How do we find a solution to this? - Efficacy - can we get rid of / redesign infrastructure so that we can eliminate unnecessary use of coal / oil / gas? - ie. relocalize to eliminate need for energy intensive transportation, locally produced bio-fertiilzed food production to get rid of fossil fuel fertilizers, replace 24/7 refrigerators in every home with fruit and veg underground cold cellars and only very small fridge or freezer with ultra insulation for very low energy consumption

!- Futures Thinking : summary - our generation has the most wisdom to deal with the problem, even though it is an unprecedented problem - We need diversity of opinions and perspectives. Like in evolution, that diversity will emerge an optimal solution - To consciously culturally evolve, we need to put all ideas on the table and discuss openly - An open, interpersonal, people-centered knowledge ecosystem such as Indyweb is suitable for such a process

!- for : futures - very appropriate description of what appears to be the most sensible futures for civilization

Using Gibson’s Jackpot as a thought experiment for evaluating longtermism

The idea of social cost of carbon (SCC) is fascinating: seemingly it aims to make the social costs of climate crisis objective by giving them a price tag. But then it becomes clear that the price tag depends on political / value judgements concerning the future, on which the idea of "discounting" depends.

Here Jenkins makes a key distinction in his emphasis that social and cultural interaction with technology is always more important than the technology itself.

"We live in the shadow of clouds."

It is critical to create stories and narratives of what an ecologically regenerative society living within planetary boundaries looks like at a local level that we are familiar with. We need enliven and enact futures studies and backcast to our current reality.

Imaginative storytelling by the artists is critical at this time so that we can imagine and not be so afraid of what a transformed future looks like. Indeed, if we do it right, it can be FAR BETTER than our current unbalanced civilization.

This almost appears to be a small, community-based commonplace book.

And apparently published on PubPub.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Samuel Klein</span> in Samuel Klein on Twitter: "@flancian See also https://t.co/KMmU7pDuQx" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>05/18/2021 19:30:42</time>)</cite></small>

tag

tag

Greetings! Potemkin here (one of the primary authors), just getting the hang of this annotation system. It's open-source. I like the idea of using annotation to facilitate deeper discussion, and perhaps as a more civilized and precise method of commenting or interacting with a website. I think this can facilitate virtual study groups and other remote collaborations. Exciting stuff!

Please annotate, comment on blog posts that are open for comments, and let's try to build a positive, supportive, open ecosocialist community dedicated to creating Better Worlds and Brighter Futures!

Another side to Open Education: open opportunities. While they still mean “opportunities for success in the current system”, it’s compatible with a view of student success which goes beyond the current system.