since then, American families have lost more than $7 trillion in equity in their homes. There's been a lot of foreclosures, but guess who's buying up those foreclosed homes? 00:12:49 It's big capital. They're stepping in and now they're financializing houses.

One economist we talked about, talked to us about this and said, we don't really make that distinction in our society, and we need to start making it.

I have a financial advisor who came to me with an investment opportunity, not that I'm some big mucky muck, but I have a little bit of investments and it was investing in wind. And I read through the materials and I was, and I went to my advisor and I said, so am I actually investing in the productive growth and development of wind farms?

when we're investing in the stock market, we're mostly just hoping that the value of those shares will rise. That money is not actually reaching companies and being used in productive ways. And that's true. We can see it with private equity too.

we're not in the economy of the 1950s anymore. And we act as though we are, that finance is this productive force and it's building, it's building wealth. Well, for the most part, it's not. It's, there's so much financialization, so many financial assets, that they've become an extractive force. And a big piece of this 00:06:37 is that we're not really distinguishing between productive investments and speculative investments

political self-consciousness sort of 00:55:29 receding as one goes further back in time there was a book published in 1946 by the Dutch archaeologist Henry Frank Ford's called befall philosophy which 00:55:42 was about the the ancient Middle East Mesopotamia and Egypt and all that sort of thing but he wasn't actually arguing that these people didn't have the capacity for philosophy he was simply 00:55:55 pointing out that they didn't have an explicit written tradition of speculative thought like that of the ancient Greeks so that when they did speculate they did it in other ways 00:56:07 through images through discourse on the nonhuman world etc etc to find the idea that there have actually ever been individuals who didn't possess any capacity for philosophical reflection

An organization of designers collectively advocating for the ethical practice of design and for the bargaining power of employees, freelancers, and educators against the commoditization of design by corporate and capitalist value extraction that is actively undermining the flourishing of humans for the sake of monopolizing social communication through advertising and marketing and the accumulation of profits for the benefit of a select few at the top of the corporate hierarchies.

The Ministry for the Future

If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

The Ministry for the Future

Ministry for the Future

These observations were made with the naked eye and with the help of some simple instruments as the gnomon. The Babylonians, in particular, were rather advanced observers. Archeologists have found an abundance of cuneiform texts on astronomical observations. In contrast, there exists only one report of an observation made by Anaximander, which concerns the date on which the Pleiades set in the morning. This is no coincidence, for Anaximander’s merits do not lie in the field of observational astronomy, unlike the Babylonians and the Egyptians, but in that of speculative astronomy. We may discern three of his astronomical speculations: (1) that the celestial bodies make full circles and pass also beneath the earth, (2) that the earth floats free and unsupported in space, and (3) that the celestial bodies lie behind one another. Notwithstanding their rather primitive outlook, these three propositions, which make up the core of Anaximander’s astronomy, meant a tremendous jump forward and constitute the origin of our Western concept of the universe.

speculative

speculative writing

(Dunne, 1999). The call has influenced movements such as Critical Design (Dunne and Raby, 2001), Design Fictions (Bleecker, 2009) and Design for Debate (Dunne and Raby, 200

Design has also taken a critical approach to time in its attempt to anticipate the impacts of present actions in the future, particularly those concerning the introduction of new technologies. This attitude may be generally identified in particular design projects but is most evident in speculative design movements such as Design Fictions, Critical Design and Design for Debate.Since design is often focused on yet-to-exist interventions in a given context, it is often said to be invariably future-oriented (e.g. in Dunne & Rab

New experiments provide opportunities for thought that precede the results.