bloomer

"I've been to the future, we won."

This quote on a t-shirt was brought up in this podcast episode and it made me tear up in the bus. A pretty powerful reaction. The quest in this episode is Rob Hobkins who has written a book called How to Fall in Love with the Future. which is essentially a book that invites us to travel to future worlds we would actually want to live in.

The podcast episode is sort of lib and idealist, but imo it reaches something very important. It for example goes over possible future soundscapes and places like carless cities but the important part is the whole idea of why we should spend time imagining better futures. It made me think about how Marx points out that humans make things first in their mind and how this also applies to the futures we build. We imagine them first.

And if we can only build things that we can imagine and can only imagine doom and despair, then only those get cultivated.

I feel like this might sort of explain the China bloomer/doomer mentalities we now see or the hard crackdown on the solidarity that tried to spring up at the start of covid (it did show some people a possible better world). The machines of conservativity like LLMs also only serve to destroy our ability to dream better futures imo.

So I thought it would be lovely to hear others stories of the futures they imagine. I'll add my own once I've really thought about it. I'd suggest listening to the podcast episode as a primer if your cupboard of better futures is all empty.