Week 19 / 2024

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One Big Thing

The top half of this week saw me sitting in on the first two days of workshops for the latest collaborative foresight cycle at Media Evolution (see header image). This time the topic is infrastructure, deliberately very broadly defined (or perhaps more accurately undefined.

Infrastructure is in some regards the field of futuring I'm best qualified to work with, at least on paper: I did my PhD on infrastructures futures and theory at the University of Sheffield, stretched somewhat uncomfortably at times by a two-fold affiliation to both the civil engineering and urban studies departments. Asking what we mean when we say "infrastructure" was a big part of my project, though in hindsight I was retreading question that had already been asked by various notable STS scholars before me. In my defence, I didn't have a supervisor who really knew the STS field, or even that my work would be a good fit with it! But the upside of that is that I think I reapproached the definitional question in a useful way.

(If you'll excuse a moment of Inside Baseball: Susan Leigh Star's relativisiation of infrastructure as an object of sociological research was timely, deeply necessary and highly commendable, but by the early 2010s it had resulted in a perverse and unintended outcome, whereby the study of what Star referred to as a "system of substrates"—and what I refer to, with a very intentional pun, as concrete infrastructure—had once again been largely left to engineers. The last decade has seen quite a swing back in the other direction, however—and I think there's further to go yet, as the matter of the materiality of the so-called "cloud" becomes an ever more pressing and public question.)

Anyway, the Big Thing I've brought home from these workshops is that all four groups ended up choosing to develop scenarios that are more or less degrowthy in character. Even allowing for questions around the demography of the participants—middle-class Nordic professionals, albeit from a very wide range of fields and disciplines—this was quite surprising to me. Even just a few years ago, it was argued that degrowth was just too fringe an idea to ever get much traction outside of fairly radical scenes. I think there's something to be said for that argument, particularly when it comes to folk who aren't middle-class Nordic professionals—though I would add that it's much more a matter of the ease with which the label can be attacked than of problems with the actual substance of the concept.

Nonetheless, one scenario out of four, or maybe two, would not have surprised me. But a full house, four from four? That feels like something new. That feels like something fairly fundamental is starting to shift.

One Small Thing

The recording of a talk on worldbuilding I gave in Copenhagen last month is available for public viewing! I felt that it was among the best public presentations I've ever given; audience reactions (both in person, and to the video) would seem to support that hypothesis.

Massive thanks to Michele, Mark, Mette, Csilla and Jon at the Green Solutions Center for inviting me along, and for making everything run so smoothly. I'm looking forward to doing more things with them later in the year!

A Clipping

I said last week that I thought I was taking too many clippings. I think I've taken even more this week than I did in the previous week, so that's going well!

(The first step, they tell me, is admitting that you have a problem.)

Picking a piece for these weeknotes was easy, though. This Danish Design Center interview with Cameron Tonkinwise deserves to be read all the way through, but I'm going to pull out a bit that speaks to a discussion I was having with Danielle Wilde while I was up visiting at Umeå University during April. Danielle asked a very interesting question about the use of target dates as scaffolding for participatory futuring processes, and I realised that while I had an instinctive answer—namely that target dates help less experienced participants get going with the process, but that ultimately they end up being a constraint on the imagination—I hadn't actually considered it directly.

Well, Tonkinwise has seriously considered it—and his take confirms my instinct, while also throwing down a challenge to using dates even as training wheels:

... the moment you say to somebody, OK, just imagine 20-30 years into the future, as if that’s going to help them think about something preferential, they will immediately pre-populate that future. They will pre-populate it with things that exist now that have just gotten ten years older or developed.

When you give a date and get people to think about a future, they’re extending the present. So the only way around that is to labor really hard using scenario plans or different tools or techniques to just say, “OK, it’s in the future, but let’s imagine this bit of now doesn’t exist, and let’s imagine this bit about the future does.” 

You have to do so much work to stop people from extending the present that I think it’s more helpful just to say, “Let’s just imagine the preferential.” Then people are just not doing this extension bit, implicitly or explicitly. I’ve found that getting people to stop thinking like that is necessary. 

The last bit to say is that the moment you say future the other way, it’s kind of colonized. You know, by science fiction, dystopian films, global corporate reports, and plans. There’s such an imaginary that just fills it up. If you just start by thinking about the preferential and a day in the life of the preferential, it allows you to start doing social fiction instead of science fiction —  to start doing political change and not technological change. 

Lots of food for thought there—and in the whole interview, which I once again commend unto you.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 19 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe, but please consider supporting this research journal with a small monthly payment—you'll get access to the occasional bit of Exclusive Content ™️, but first and foremost you'll get the warm glow that only ever comes from enabling fully independent and climate-focussed foresight research to continue.

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Have a good weekend.