On the Need for New Futures
One of the most curious facts about living as we do today is that our future does not, strictly speaking, exist. This fact has been well elaborated by Bruce Sterling over the past few years (“Atemporality for the Creative Artist” being especially good), and picked up on ably by Justin Pickard in the recent Gonzo Futurist manifesto. Our philosophy of history has more or less collapsed, we are confronted with dizzying arrays of signals strong and weak, fair and foul.
Setting aside all the wonderful, promised technologies beating down our door, let’s be real about the fact that at least some of the following Bad Things will probably happen in the next century: dwindling fossil fuels, climate change and its attendant catastrophes, crises in water supplies, rampant antibiotic resistance, global pandemics, overpopulation, and black swans birthed from unceasing societal acceleration.
We must recognize that we cannot hold the same life expectations as that of mid-20th century Americans (no matter what country we live in). This has manifested itself in a fascination with social collapse that has penetrated the popular consciousness (Mayan prophecies, zombie chic), extending out to projects of managed despair among certain intellectual circles (the Dark Mountain project, most notably). Yet rarely does this talk of “diminished expectations” manifest itself in a questioning of those expectations in the first place. Progress/development not same as growth, and an integral thesis of solarpunk should be about decoupling the first from the second. More is not better.
First posted July 2012!!
10 years old! We can’t believe it.
Many of Adam’s open questions have been explored in the last decade. But there’s still so much more to create, learn and do. Both in the imaginative realm but also this one.
Solarpunk has come so far in the last 10 years. Let’s do the next 10 with the same generosity, community curiosity and sense of urgent activism that the previous one did.
Here’s to a brighter, fairer, more equitable future in the anthropo green.
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