The Great Imagination
A dialogue between different visions of the future.
The awakening of the imagination of the future since the eighteenth century has participated in the process of radical change known as the Great Acceleration. Now everything is at stake. What alternatives can we imagine for the next decades?
This text was originally published in Spanish on January 2022 in Telos 118 and was written to accompany the exhibition “La Gran Imaginación: Historias del Futuro”, November 2021 — April 2022, Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid.
In the city of Paris, one day in the year 1770, a man engages in a heated discussion with his friend, an English philosopher who visits the city, about the defects and injustices of the Parisian society of his time. Soon after, the man goes to sleep and, unknowingly, wakes up as an old man who wanders through the same city but in the distant future—in the year 2440 to be exact. As he tours the city, he discovers a society and a way of life that, from his perspective, formed in the 18th century, are nothing short of ideal. The streets are wide, clean, and beautiful. The inhabitants are very polite, and they all seem happy. They dress comfortably and work as doctors or lawyers, occupations he considers valuable. Monks, prostitutes, and tramps no longer exist in what is an egalitarian society governed by reason and science.
This is, broadly speaking, the story imagined by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and published in 1771 under the title L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais, a key work insofar as it can be considered as the first utopia or, more precisely, uchronia situated in the future. Literary critic Paul Alkon argues that Mercier’s novel “initiates a new paradigm for utopian literature.” [1] Mercier was the first to imagine an ideal future to encourage his contemporaries to try to build it. Of course, he was not the last. From the end of the 18th century and, above all, from the 19th century onwards, we witnessed an awakening of the futuristic imagination that, both to warn us and to inspire us, was expressed through literature, illustration, architecture, and later, cinema, comics, design, video games — in addition to specialized fields of the social sciences such as Futures Studies and Strategic Foresight.
From the perspective of our seemingly tomorrow-obsessed global culture, it is easy to underestimate the importance of such intellectual and creative development. We tend to view foresight as a characteristic feature of our human nature. This is argued, for example, by a group of psychologists led by Martin Seligman in their book Homo Prospectus: “the unrivaled human ability to be guided by imagining alternatives stretching into the future — “prospection” — uniquely describes Homo sapiens.” [2] However, and although it is clear that this prospective capacity has probably played a central role in the daily lives of all human beings, it is valid to ask: Have we always imagined, as Mercier did, long-term futures in which our ways of life are radically different from the present?
In fact, for most of our history and for most people, that foresight was limited to exploring their immediate surroundings in the short term. There weren’t enough radical changes in people’s lifetimes to make it necessary or attractive to imagine things decades or centuries in the future. Jim Dator, one of the pioneers of Futures Studies, uses the metaphor of an old roll of film to describe this condition:
We look down and see the scene in the frame in which we are standing, and we look forward, and as far as we can see, the scene in each frame seems the same as it is where we stand now. And if we look backward, we see the same thing: not much change that we can see from the past to now. [3]
What happened towards the end of the 18th century, mainly in Europe, that we could recognize as an engine of change for the emergence of the futuristic imagination? Dator himself proposes the following explanation:
“the rate of social and environmental change itself picked up and began to accelerate (…) It was as though someone had picked up the old movie film off the floor, placed it in a motion picture projector, and turned on the switch.” [4]
Earth sciences use the concept of “Great Acceleration” to refer to the explosive increase in the rate of growth in a wide range of measures of human activity (gross domestic product, foreign investment, primary energy use, etc.) and the impact that such growth has had on the planet’s ecosystems. This process, which registers most dramatically in the second half of the 20th century but is usually traced precisely to the middle of the 18th century, involved much more than just material changes. “The term ‘Great Acceleration,’” as the creators of the concept explain, “echoed Karl Polanyi’s phrase ‘The Great Transformation,’ and in his book by the same name Polanyi put forward a holistic understanding of the nature of modern societies, including mentality, behavior, structure and more.” [5]
Is it a coincidence that the imagination of the future has been unleashed precisely in tune with the Great Acceleration? That was the question explored in “La Gran Imaginación: Historias del Futuro”, an exhibition I curated for Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid. The exhibition proposes a journey through a universe of fiction and daydreams that, at different historical moments, have evoked what a future time might be like through literature, cinema, comics, design, or architecture, among other disciplines.
During the last 250 years, humanity as a whole, although in a very uneven way, has gone through the process of radical change denoted by the concept of the Great Acceleration. At the same time, a sort of “Great Imagination” focused on future possibilities, both positive and negative, has driven this process forward as if it were a magnet pulling people’s hopes and fears. A key premise of the exhibition is that this Great Imagination should not be interpreted as a mere epiphenomenon. We must recognize it as a critical factor that forms a feedback loop with the cultural, political, socio-economic, and Earth system transformations. All these changes make imagining futures possible, attractive, and even necessary. At the same time, these images of the future encourage and guide the innovations that make social change possible.
As a consequence of this process, we are now at a critical moment, a sort of cliffhanger in the history of modernity that involves not only a pandemic and an economic recession that had not been seen in more than a century but also the crisis of democracies, the risks associated with the development of artificial intelligence, and the gigantic civilizational challenge posed by climate change. Everything is at stake. What futures can we envision for the remainder of this century and beyond?
A central theory in Futures Studies, proposed by Jim Dator himself, could offer us an answer. According to him, the millions of prospective visions created throughout history can be grouped in four archetypes or “generic images of the future,” namely: growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. Rather than four neatly delimited categories, these archetypes suggest four cardinal points — each with its own themes, hopes, and concerns. None of those generic images, by itself, is positive or negative, utopian or dystopian — even collapse can be a window of opportunity for new beginnings. One aspect that, from my perspective, gives currency to this conceptual framework is that it also functions as a kind of theoretical and political compass to guide us in the current debates that from different fields of scientific knowledge — political economy, science and technology studies, ecological economics, among others — propose alternative solutions to the crossroads in which we find ourselves.
To communicate these alternative futures, the exhibition presented four original installations that were the product of collaborations between design futurists and a group of theorists at the forefront of their different research fields. Carlota Pérez and the team of Jacques Barcia and Jake Dunagan from the Institute for the Future explored the possibility of a new era of sustainable, global, and equitable growth. Raphaël Stevens and N O R M A L S wondered: Is the collapse of our civilization not only an inevitable but a desirable outcome? Giacomo D’Alisa and Becoming invited us to discover a form of discipline in which we learn to be Earth and enjoy simplicity. Finally, Holly Jean Buck and oio studio presented a world in which technological transformation has created a new emotion for a new nature.
As curator of the exhibition, I invited each of the four authors mentioned to prepare a short presentation of their ideas. In the context of what I have called the Great Imagination, these texts can be read as a dialogue between different visions of the future. In a way, these perspectives represent four alternative ways in which the next stretch of the curve representing the Great Acceleration could be drawn.
Digital, green, equitable, and global growth
Carlota Pérez
Honorary Professor, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London
One of the viable options for the future is based on the potential of information technologies to dematerialize a large part of how we meet our needs. The beginning of this model is taking place with the ‘streaming’ of music and cinema, as well as the digitization of books, magazines, and newspapers. The technological world is massively experimenting with ways to “green” energy-intensive materials such as steel and concrete; with ways to increase renewable energy while developing batteries and reducing their cost; with ways to support regenerative agriculture, laboratory food, and vertical crops around cities, to reduce the need for canning and freezing, while raising the nutritional value of the food; with environmentally sustainable forms of transport and with many other ways to reduce the carbon footprint. All of this implies massive investments in scientific and technological research and in innovation and entrepreneurship.
My environmental optimism goes hand in hand with social optimism. My research on the diffusion patterns of technological revolutions indicates to me that, after a period of ‘creative destruction,’ marked by experimentation without a definite direction, society recognizes the need to overcome the social damage as a consequence of the ‘destruction’ half and to give direction to the new potential of the ‘creative’ half. Thus arise the golden ages of capitalism. We are at precisely that crucial moment. The conjunction of post-pandemic reconstruction with the climate emergency at this midpoint of the current technological wave indicates the possibility of steering the economy towards digital, green, equitable, and global growth. We already saw it in the postwar reconstruction, the Belle Époque, and the Victorian boom. The opportunity is there. Will we know how to take advantage of it?
Collapsology
Raphaël Stevens
Futurist specialised in collapse and resilience thinking
Don’t you think our epoch has a scent of collapse? Hints of the end of this world are appearing everywhere, in recent scientists’ warnings, in the speeches of activist Greta Thunberg and Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, in World Bank and army reports, in ongoing media commentaries on the fires in Australia, Brazil, and Siberia, as well as in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2015, my colleague Pablo Servigne and I coined a neologism ‘collapsology’ and wrote a book in order to invite scholars, academic, independent experts, and the public alike, to join together and engage in a meaningful conversation on the possibility that a collapse of industrial civilisation could happen in our lifetime, for the present generation. Our aim has been to inform as many people as possible of what a growing number of scientists and institutions are saying about these little-considered hazardous scenarios so that society can organize itself politically to mitigate the risk.
Some commentators have called us ‘alarmists’ or ‘doomers’. Perhaps the best form of response is a metaphor about how it is normal to prepare for the worst in order to reduce the hazard. When your insurer or the fire department tells you that there is a possibility that your home could go up in smoke and kill your family, you do not silence them by calling them alarmists. You take this risk seriously, take out insurance, check appliances and furnishings, assess cladding and escape routes, advise or train colleagues, and install smoke detectors and extinguishers. Perhaps you notice and discuss your concerns. You try to make sure a fire never happens, and you adapt to this possibility in a concrete way.
Ultimately, modernity might not die of its postmodern philosophical wounds, but because it has run out of energy or because of an abrupt climate change or a too heavy to bear pandemic for instance. If amphetamines and antidepressants were the pills of the productivist world, resilience, sobriety, and low-techs might well be the aspirins of the hangover generation.
The discipline to thrive without growth
Giacomo D’Alisa
Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra
Growth ideology is driving humanity towards an inhabitable and unjust world. This ideology is articulated around a liberal precept: every human being is legitimated to extract, control, use, consume, waste, and dispose of all the resources deemed necessary in the pursuit of its own personal desires and wishes. This precept fosters the commonsensical demand for more stuff and feeds the expansion of industrial capitalist development. The consequence is an unfair and doomed future for the many. Degrowth is a call for unlearning and undoing the idols and the false notion of growth-led westernized society.
Degrowthers, as the “ERRES” of the Great Imagination exposition, promote the common sense according to which “people should live simply so others, human and non-human may simply live”. Degrowthers promote and enact ecologically sound and socially equitable societies. As the “ERRES”, they aim to participate in regenerating human and urban ecosystems while enjoying life. They want to convivially discuss a life worth the effort to be sustained for all. They aspire to thrive without promoting growth-driven imaginaries. Degrowth is anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist and decolonial; thus, it envisions a society with different gender relations and roles, different distribution of paid and unpaid work, cultural interactions, and co-evolutive paths between the human and non-human species. The life that degrowthers commit to sustaining does not aspire to be chimeric emancipation from nature and/or the body, as the civilizing colonial project of the capitalist modernity does. For degrowthers, the body’s materiality comes with the immanent vulnerability of what it is alive and shows the condition of inter-dependency and eco-dependency of existence. This is why care is the central commons for instituting a society that wants to sustain life. Care as a corollary in co-habitation and sharing. The discipline of caring is what degrowth push forward.
Let’s transform it all
Holly Jean Buck
Assistant Professor, Environment & Sustainability, University at Buffalo,
Out of all the visions for the future today, transformation — technology-supported transcendence of the current system — is at a low point. The spokespeople for transformation tend to be billionaire men who seek not to just transcend the limitations of human meatspace but the planet altogether. Visions of transformation are ailing. They are dominated by technological artifacts and capacities rather than led by visions of transformed social organization and social relations. Yes, there are discussions of cyberfeminism and xenofeminism and postwork feminism — but they are not mainstream. Part of transformation’s contemporary weakness lies in how unrelatable billionaires have colonized imaginations of the future. But part is also due to new strains of puritanism in society, where transformation is seen as an escape from a deserved moral penance.
What about a world in which fusion has made clean energy abundant for all and a postwork world with universal basic income, where care is valued? What about a world where precision agriculture and robotic harvesting is guided by smallholders and land collectives? What about a world in which the phaseout of fossil fuels as part of the energy transition is accompanied by groundbreaking advances in bioplastics and recycling, leading to a post-petrochemical, post-extractive material transition? And what if these operations were collectively owned by both men and women working twenty or thirty hours a week? Why are our feeds not jammed with these visions? There is nothing inherently impossible about them; much of this technology exists at the lab stage, and none of it is “too expensive” in a world spending trillions on weaponry. We need a critical mass of visionaries to make a real cultural current — with its own images, metaphors, and language — that can create pressures and demands. The first step is loosening tired binaries between technology / nature and technology / social relations; let’s transform it all.
Notes
[1] Alkon, P. (1987): Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens; Londres. University of Georgia Press.
[2] Seligman, M. et. al. (2016): Homo Prospectus. Oxford; Nueva York. Oxford University Press.
[3] Dator, J. “Manoa’s four generic images of the futures” en Compass, Julio 2017. Disponible en: https://www.apf.org/page/Compass
[4] Dator, ibid.
[5] Steffen, W. et. al. “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration” en The Anthropocene Review 2015, Vol. 2(1) 81–98.
Bibliography
Alkon, P. (1987): Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens; Londres. University of Georgia Press.
Buck, H. J. (2019): After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. Londres; Nueva York. Verso.
D’Alisa, G. et. al. (2020): The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge. Polity Press.
Dator, J. “Manoa’s four generic images of the futures” en Compass, Julio 2017. Disponible en: https://www.apf.org/page/Compass
Pérez, C. “Capitalism, technology and a green global golden age: The role of history in helping to shape the future” en Beyond the Technological Revolution, 2016. Disponible en: http://beyondthetechrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BTTR_WP_2016-1.pdf
Seligman, M. et. al. (2016): Homo Prospectus. Oxford; Nueva York. Oxford University Press.
Steffen, W. et. al. “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration” en The Anthropocene Review, 2015, Vol. 2(1) 81–98.
Servigne, P. and R. Stevens. (2020): How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times. Cambridge. Polity.
