THE NEXT: Shared Visions, or Memeing The Future
Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence Economy (part 3)
This is part 3 of 7 in Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence economy. You can read installments 1 and 2 here, read the entire paper in full here, and collect it on Zora here.
And if you already know this is something you’d like to be a part of, join RADAR.
THE NEXT: Shared Visions, or Memeing The Future
In one of our first collective conversations including newish RADAR member Caitlin Keeley, she vamped a thought that has been lodged in many of our brains ever since:
“The future belongs to those who think about it.”
It calls to mind so simply one of the problems with the futures industry (and the trend forecasting industry, and the advertising industry, and the consulting industry…) that RADAR is trying to tackle.
Who thinks about the future today?
Brands after their own self-interests. Agencies after their own self-interests (or, if we’re lucky, after their clients’ interests). Employees in trendy offices surrounded by like-minded co-workers and like-minded networks, courting cookie-cutter clients with cookie-cutter visions of tomorrow.
At least, that’s who’s paid to think about the future; whose narratives of the future are elevated and celebrated; whose narrow ideas keep us cycling through the status quo in service of a broken capitalist model; who compete with one another through same-but-different storytelling rarely rooted in human truth. After all, it behooves them to sell us a particular vision of the future where everything continues just as it is, only better.
“Today, we are living deep inside the Consumer Story, a foundational story of humans as inherently self-interested and competitive. This story has shaped not just individual behavior but organizational design, economic theory, the role of government, morality — all of culture and society. But this is not as inevitable and inescapable as it feels, for stories do change.” – Jon Alexander, Citizens — Why the key to fixing everything is all of us
It’s one of the first things people notice when they join RADAR, that they’ve entered some kind of respite from what has been their professional experience to date.
Suddenly surrounded by more, diverse minds with more, diverse experiences thinking more diversely about the future, everything shifts. Freed from the expectation that every story must serve consumerist outcomes, their worlds open up. Here, they’re welcome to think about the signals they share and the trends they spot in service of better futures — and surrounded by peers who genuinely want to act on them. As member Kiana Pirouz said recently (and echoed in a tweet), “it's so refreshing to be in a place where making things is possible.”
As Rebecca Solnit wrote for The Guardian, “Our greatest power lies in our roles as citizens, not consumers, when we can band together to collectively change how our world works.”
It’s collective change that starts with collective vision.
“Rather than providing pre-packaged images of possible futures, it is important to encourage do-it-yourself and do-it-together attitudes towards the creation and exploration of futures.”
— FoAM, The Art of Futuring
If the future really does belong to those who think about it (and we believe it does), then we believe that should include more, and we mean way more of the population than it does today. We’re not talking about individual daydreaming or even about creating new pathways into the same old industries. Rather, we’re talking about engaging the collective imagination in discovering better futures, so we can in turn cultivate a community of visionaries capable of actually creating better worlds.
We didn’t realize at the time, but what we’ve been doing at RADAR for a bit over a year now is perfectly captured by fellow member and Sentiers author Patrick Tanguay’s reading of Cassie Robinson’s work on Imagination Infrastructures: “Not just replacing wrong or incomplete stories with better ones, not exactly inventing fictions further out in time, not exactly strategic foresight, futures, forecasts, or any of the related term either. A new space between all of them, with a lot more people purposefully included.”
In so many words, that’s our answer to Ikigai. In finding the intersection of what we love, what we’re good at, what the world needs, and what we can be paid for (we know, we’re working on this last bit), what we found was this idea of working upstream of research and innovation — in the world of activating imagination.
We don’t just report research, we bring to life visions of better worlds in better futures to motivate the many and activate change. Because when you think of better futures like memes (by which we mean, the academic, Richard Dawkins, OG definition of memes), you can start to see the potential in their propagation. You open up, in Kiana’s words once more, “a portal of possibilities — a modality to explore, collaborate, contribute, play, prototype” together, all with a shared outcome, a better future, in mind.
“You shouldn’t keep your vision carefully packed away on the top shelf, take it out into the world, play with it, work with it, test it in a wide range of situations. See the present as an experimental ground for the future.” — FoAM, The Art of Futuring
Experiments in multiplayer futures. That’s just what we’ve been up to.
More on that in our next chapter.
This has been installment 3 of 7 of Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence Economy. You’ll find installment 4 in your inbox tomorrow, and if you missed it, you can read 1 and 2 here.
As a reminder, we’re extending availability of our Patron NFTs for those 7 days. If the vision laid out in these pages resonates, we invite you to take part in the inaugural cycle that will bring to life our theory of Multiplayer Futures: Play. It’s the first of many more to come.
See you tomorrow 🔮