Welcome to 2025: On Building the Futures We've Been Yearning For

New Year, Same RADAR — well, kind of 👀

Hello curious humans,

After a restful holiday pause (we hope!), it feels good to be gathering again. While we'll properly kick off the year together on January 8th (here’s the link to the event in-server), the future belongs to those who think about it - so we wanted to get these thoughts flowing early. We know it's l(ong), but we hope you’ll r(ead) – sparknotes below if you must.

Oh, and if you’re not yet a member but you’re reading this note and thinking “I want in!”, please consider joining us. As always, our application is open here.

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⚡️ tl;dr

2025 is about bridging the gap between yearning and building better futures. Through a series of 'yearning labs,' we're developing muscles to navigate the space between dreaming and doing:

1. Limits of Language (Feb-Apr): Making emerging futures feel buildable, not just imaginable

2. Strange Ways & Small Things (May-Jul): Finding power in small moves that work through the cracks

3. Hospicing<>Midwifing Change (Sept-Nov): Tending to both endings and beginnings in transformation

Join us:

• Tend the Signal Garden: Keep feeding our collective intelligence

• Participate in Labs: Grow muscles for bridging yearning and building

• Pilot Possibilities: Apply new tools to domains you care about

• Archive Possibility: Help capture and share what we're learning

Key moments:

• The Drop (Jul): Turning yearning into action

• The Great Yearning Event (Nov): A collective experiment in crossing impossibility's waters

• Possibility Hours: Monthly(ish) gatherings to cross-pollinate and connect

• Events with Friends: Spontaneous meet-up & mash-ups to keep the magic alive

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What We've Learned Together

As we come back together and step into 2025, we can’t help but feel like there's something electric in the air...a tension we know intimately after years of exploring what's possible. Through hundreds of signals discussions, dozens of community workshops, and cycle after cycle of collective imagination, we've tracked futures vibrating with potential:

New rhythms of connection when everything feels out of sync. Play breaking free from its designated corners. A protopian world where humans, machines, and more make magic together. Love reimagined as a radical public force.

These aren't just dreamy visions – they're futures we can touch. We've seen their early signals, mapped their emergence, even started building their foundations. The paths forward are clear enough to taste.

And yet.

The powers invested in keeping things small and separate seem to be digging in their heels. Not just maintaining barriers, but fortifying them. Building higher walls, deeper divisions, stronger stories about why change is impossible.

That tension, that deadlock, that frustration of potential energy is exactly why 2025 feels different. Because while our signals garden continues to bloom with evidence of better futures emerging, we keep bumping up against a pattern that transcends any individual future we're tracking: the gap between yearning and building.

From Meme to Theme: The Great Yearning

While "yearning" might have become 2024's favorite mood board aesthetic, we've been grappling with something much deeper. You can see it in our Field Guide's exploration of ghosts – those shadows of possibility that haunt the edges of futures unrealized. And increasingly, we're seeing it everywhere in our signals garden: people becoming acutely aware of the distance between what is and what could be, or maybe what should be. From workplace experiments revealing how arbitrary the 9-5 workday is, to mutual aid networks demonstrating how different our care systems could be, to the surge of interest in indigenous land practices as models for regenerative futures that feel leagues away from where we are and yet so close to home.

But as our newish member Lara recently pointed out, there's something funny about yearning. People tend to yearn from a place of impossibility – like they're staring across the English Channel with no way of getting to France. But hey, did you know you can get in a boat? Did you hear they built a tunnel?

This Great Yearning, as we've come to affectionately call it, isn't just some fleeting aesthetic or memetic moment. It's what happens when we can see better futures but struggle to grasp them. When we know change is possible but lack the tools to make it tangible.

A Subtle Shift in our How

It's in this gap between imagining and building that our work finds new focus in 2025. Not away from our foundation of collective signals gathering and community cultivation – these remain our bedrock. But building on top of them, using the patterns we're tracking to develop specific practices that help bridge the gap between yearning and building.

"But RADAR," you might be thinking, "aren't you the ones always going on about how the future belongs to those who think about it?" Exactly – and we still believe that with our whole hearts. When people push back – "No, the future belongs to those who act on it" – we say: yes, and. Because here's the truth: thought without agency is just yearning, but acting without imagination is just busywork.

We’ve always aimed for both; but this year, we’re experimenting with the balance.

In cycles past, we painted vivid pictures of better futures and invited people to help build them. But something interesting happened along the way. The most powerful moments weren't when people bought into our specific visions - they were when people discovered their own capacity to imagine and act. When they found tools and methods that made seemingly impossible changes feel within reach.

This is the shift at the heart of our 2025 journey. Instead of saying "here's a better future, let's build it," we're focusing on the infrastructure that helps thought become action. We're creating spaces for collective possibility-building through a series of experimental 'yearning labs' aimed at navigating the space between dreaming and doing.

Our Focus for 2025: The Yearning Labs

Through our work together, we've identified three key barriers that keep potential energy trapped in yearning rather than enabling building:

1. Our existing language keeps emerging futures abstract and aspirational rather than tangible and actionable

2. We treat historically-specific arrangements as natural laws and assume change requires massive scale

3. We lack practices for consciously tending to both endings and beginnings in times of transformation

This year's labs take on each barrier in sequence, developing muscles to move from abstract aspiration to concrete action. Here's how:

🔬 Lab 1: Limits of Language (Feb-April)
Hypothesis: Our old vocabulary traps us in yearning mode. When we can only describe emerging futures in today's language, they stay abstract rather than actionable.

In Action: Through wordless exploration and new vocabulary creation, we'll develop tools that bridge between dreaming and doing. Instead of just talking about "more caring futures," we'll build language that helps us actually create them.

🧪 Lab 2: Strange Ways & Small Things (May-July)
Hypothesis: We treat historically-specific arrangements as natural laws, assuming change requires massive scale.

In Action: We'll make the familiar strange and experiment at human scale. Think of social structures as IKEA furniture - assembled one way now, but capable of being rebuilt differently. Through small experiments, we'll find power in changes that work through the cracks.

🧑‍🔬 Lab 3: Hospicing<>Midwifing Change (Sept-Nov)
Hypothesis: We struggle with transformation because we don't know how to properly tend to both endings and beginnings.

In Action: Through hospicing and midwifing practices, we'll learn to hold space for both death and birth - developing skills for working with the messy middle of change rather than rushing to premature resolution.

Each lab builds on the previous:

1. First we build capacity to name and enable futures differently

2. Then we learn to see and act at human scale

3. Finally we develop skills for larger transformation

Building Together: Ways to Participate

Our journey from yearning to building needs different kinds of expertise and energy. Here's how you can be part of it:

Foundational Work

• Signal Garden Tending: Keep feeding our collective intelligence, helping us spot where potential gets stuck and where it breaks through. While our labs explore the 'how' of change, the Signal Garden gives us the vital fodder and context that makes those experiments meaningful – that's why we're especially excited about its role in 2025. If you've been meaning to jump back in, now's your moment.

• Lab Participation: Join any (or all) labs, helping test and refine practices as we build these muscles together. Each lab builds on the next, taking us from new ways of seeing to new ways of doing. No expertise required, just curiosity and a willingness to explore what's possible.

Deeper Engagement

• Possibility Pilots: Take our tools into domains you care about deeply. Whether you're working on sustainability, care economics, or new forms of governance, your practical experiments help us refine what works.

• Possibility Archivists: Help capture and make sense of what we're learning. Work with our team to develop creative documentation methods, lead synthesis sessions, and shape how we share learning publicly.

Making the Magic Last

Through our labs and experiments, we're developing new ways to document and share not just insights, but practical magic. Our Possibility Archivists will help lead this effort, ensuring we're building infrastructure that lasts rather than just creating fleeting moments of transformation.

This year, we're adding a new dimension to our research practice with the launch of the Hope Census - our first longitudinal study tracking how futures thinking actually changes how we see what's possible. Working with a behavioral scientist, we'll study something we've long suspected: that thinking about futures together shifts how we think about what's possible. Not in a wooly, wishful-thinking way, but in ways that actually change how we see our own agency and ability to affect change.

We're starting close to home, studying our own community (partly because academic rules are wiggly, but mostly because we believe in learning from what we know). Through surveys and conversations over time, we'll track how engaging with futures in multiplayer mode impacts everything from personal agency to belief in possibility to feelings of hope and efficacy.

This isn't just research for research's sake. By understanding how collective imagination actually works to expand what feels possible, we can better design tools and infrastructure that help turn that expanded sense of possibility into real momentum.

Multiplayer Maximalism: Our Evolving Ethos

As we step into this next chapter, our core beliefs remain constant: the future belongs to those who think about it, multiplayer futures beat single-player prophecy every time, and simply imagining that things could be different is the most accessible unit of change there is.

While the specific mechanisms have evolved (from web3-centric tools toward broader approaches), our commitment to real stake and real say in the futures we're building together only deepens.

You might notice that our emphasis on collective decision-making looks a bit different this year. That's by design. 2025 is about developing new muscles and methods together – which means focusing our energy on emergent co-creation rather than formal governance structures.

If you've read our not-so-litepaper, you'll remember we talked about how multiplayer futures require different approaches at different moments. Sometimes that looks like building consensus on big decisions. Other times, like now, it's about creating space for more fluid, experimental collaboration.

This doesn't mean we're any less committed to building better futures together. If anything, it's a doubling down on our multiplayer ethos – trusting that the most powerful possibilities will emerge from the ground up as we test, learn, and grow new capacities together.

So while you may not see as many community-wide votes this year, know that your participation and perspective have never been more vital. Each lab is an open invitation to steer our experiments, contribute your unique magic, and shape the practices that will define this next chapter. In stepping into the unknown together, we're exercising a different kind of collective agency – one that's messy, alive, and full of surprises.

This evolution isn't just in our work – it's in how we operate and organize ourselves.

Our beloved purple orb Fancy is stepping sideways, focusing on building deeply aligned platforms and tools that will help RADAR's vision for multiplayer maximalism succeed. Meanwhile, Keels and Caitlin are stepping up to guide our community exploration, building on the insights they've gathered through a year-or-so of hijinks spent looking closely at where possibility gets stuck and where it breaks through.

Key Moments in Our Journey

The Drop (July-ish) Something that emerges from our first two labs to help transform yearning into action. We don't know its exact form yet, but we know its purpose: building bridges between imagination and possibility.

The Great Yearning Event (November-ish) A collective experiment in crossing impossibility's waters. Form TBD, but the intention is clear: creating space to share tools, test methods, and make the seemingly impossible crossable together.

Possibility Hours Monthly(ish) gatherings where we share what's emerging, let ideas cross-pollinate, and discover unexpected connections – like your favorite late-night conversations.

Events with Friends Spontaneous moments of experimentation when energy and opportunity align, keeping our multiplayer spirit alive between more structured moments.

Looking Forward Together

Look ahead with us to December 2025. That tension you feel in the air? It's different now. The Great Yearning has become The Great Crossing. We can see it in our experiments and discoveries, our late-night conversations and spontaneous connections. All those moments where we didn't just dream about better futures but found practical, sometimes strange, always meaningful ways to build them.

2025 isn't about resolving The Great Yearning in one magnificent sweep. It's about developing muscles we can all use to work with that yearning - to help it become something more than wistful dreams.

Welcome to 2025. Time to get wonderfully weird together.

Love,
RADAR