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We Need to Tell a Better Story Than Cyberpunk

We have a lot of pro­pos­als on how tech­nol­o­gy should work in this soci­ety, how we want to avoid all the dan­gers we can see that oth­ers can­not see. But we do a very very bad job at com­mu­ni­cat­ing it.

The Conversation #55 — Ed Finn

The Center, one of our core goals, our mis­sion state­ment, is to get peo­ple think­ing more cre­ative­ly and ambi­tious­ly about the future. What I mean when I talk about that is that we need to come up with bet­ter sto­ries about the future. If you want to build a bet­ter world you have to imag­ine that world first.

Virtual Futures Salon: Radical Technologies, with Adam Greenfield

I am pro­found­ly envi­ous of peo­ple who get to write about set­tled domains or sort of set­tled states of affairs in human events. For me, I was deal­ing with a set of tech­nolo­gies which are either recent­ly emerged or still in the process of emerg­ing. And so it was a con­tin­u­al Red Queen’s race to keep up with these things as they announce them­selves to us and try and wrap my head around them, under­stand what it was that they were propos­ing, under­stand what their effects were when deployed in the world.

The Conversation #50 — The Future of The Conversation

We’ve got so many new con­ver­sa­tions. The project is real­ly involved in a lot of ways. You know, we talk all the time about con­nec­tions we’re see­ing. And we want to talk now about con­nec­tions that we’re not seeing.

Margaret Atwood on Fiction, the Future, and the Environment

We have already changed the world a lot, not always for the bet­ter. Some of it’s for the bet­ter, as far as we human beings are con­cerned. But every time we invent a new tech­nol­o­gy, we like to play with that tech­nol­o­gy, and we don’t always fore­see the consequences.

The Conversation #40 — Mary Mattingly

It’s inter­est­ing and scary to think about an Earth that could be com­plete­ly con­trolled by humans, but it seems like it’s def­i­nite­ly pos­si­ble. I could find fun think­ing about liv­ing under the sea or all the places that humans real­ly haven’t been able to sus­tain them­selves in very well. Like, if we could real­ly get con­trol of that. I mean, it’s def­i­nite­ly a dark future, but I think some­thing that I could embrace if we did go there.

The Conversation #34 — Douglas Rushkoff

I would say a bet­ter place looks like…having din­ner with the per­son who lives next door to you. Knowing who they are. A bet­ter place is shar­ing the same snow­blow­er on your block. The bet­ter place is eas­i­est to imag­ine, and ulti­mate­ly get to, if we look at it in terms of our incre­men­tal moment-to-moment choices.

The Conversation #32 — The Conversation and the Election

It’s like we’ve got all these proxy wars going, where peo­ple are fight­ing bit­ter­ly over these things. And if you could sort of go back to the orig­i­nal glob­al con­flict almost, of ideas, I think you’d get to some inter­est­ing ara­tional assump­tions. Some of which would be dif­fer­ent. Some of which might be very sim­i­lar. And then you’d won­der why the hell are these proxy wars going on?

The Conversation #31 — Claire Evans

I think if there are peo­ple who are able to take a step back­wards, take that prover­bial zoom out, and real­ize that every­body’s kind of doing the same thing in dif­fer­ent ways, and be able to step from one per­spec­tive to the oth­er and ask dif­fer­ent kinds of ques­tions based on where they are at any giv­en moment time, then it just becomes a game. I think it becomes joy­ful and engag­ing. I mean, I’m not inter­est­ed in find­ing the answer to any­thing. I don’t think there is the answer to anything.

The Conversation #18 — David Korten

I like to think that we are an intel­li­gent species. I mean, actu­al­ly the peo­ple that often get this most quick­ly are the peo­ple who are poor­est, because they know the sys­tem does­n’t work. But so many of our sup­pos­ed­ly bright­est peo­ple pick this up and don’t ques­tion it. And then we have the all the whole field of eco­nom­ics, which is an ide­ol­o­gy built on assump­tions that if you exam­ine them are absurd. Because you know, econ­o­mists sim­ply look at the econ­o­my as a pric­ing sys­tem. They’re not sys­tem thinkers. Part of the cause our cri­sis is that we’re not edu­cat­ed to think in terms of systems. 

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