A year of imagination
Happy New Year's Eve!
As we end 2020 and begin another year, I want to encourage us to all to find ways to flex our imaginations a little. We’re told so often that the things we want, that could make life better for us and for our communities, are impractical, impossible. “It just can’t be done.” But this is often a failure of imagination.
Just a warning, this one is a little long. If you'd rather read the blog post version: it's up on my public Notion space.
Otherwise, buckle up.
Rent forgiveness for those unable to work due to COVID is impossible, but we found money to round up homeless people who were sheltering in vacant homes. And of course, we can always buy a few more helicopters or subsidize the production of corn. Student loan forgiveness though? Impractical, impossible! It simply isn’t done.
We can’t imagine it any other way. Without police, who would we call? Without Jeff Bezos as a Billionaire, how would we shop at Amazon? Without subsidies, family farmers would go broke! Walkable carless cities? But then how would we drive to the grocery store???
“Abolish prisons and racist policing” became “defund over militarized police departments” becomes “retrain those few bad apples” becomes “they’re doing their bests can’t you see?”
But 2020 has taught us that the impossible is really just a matter of framing. Things that were unimaginable happened, things that were unthinkable became real — often real fast. Some of these things didn’t actually happen, but they became real enough that they could have. Or might still.
Faced with a pandemic and a complete failure of our governmental institutions to act, we basically threw normal out the window. When cops kept gunning down black and brown people, we burned shit down. Abolition became something we could discuss as if it was possible (it is), defunding police departments became something we talk about in concrete terms. In some places the police actually got defunded. Other communities are working on it. We started taking care of each other in new (and old) ways.
So often we set our imaginations to the side. We think of imagination as childish fantasy, naive escapism. We tell ourselves and each other to live in the real world. The reality is we’re surrounded by visions made real. Visions of so many people, often who don’t have even the remotest shred of our best interests at heart or in mind.
There’s a field of practice that sits adjacent to design and research called strategic foresight. It’s used to envision what might be coming, scanning for trends and signals to see what’s possible, and sketching out scenarios of the plausible, probable, and preferable. Large companies employ foresight strategists and researchers to create visions of the future. Sometimes this work is just called “futuring.” Corning’s A Day Made of Glass is a wonderful example of this type of work.
Watch on youtube
In the video, they tell a compelling story built atop trends and scientific breakthroughs. An exciting way to live, for sure. It’s not unlike science fiction.
We forget sometimes, that under underneath all the page-turning, eye-popping entertainment, science fiction isn’t about mindless diversion or escapism. No literature truly is I don’t think.
But science fictions, as practiced by foresight strategists at Corning, have a central, unshakable component. These fictions are expressly intended to inform reality — by, for, with Corning’s interests at the core.
Apple does this too, and so do most big companies. Visions of the future from Apple and Corning can be quite compelling. Beautiful futures of driverless cars and fluid interfaces between humans and computers. Cities of glass and steel, no pollution. Instant access to the world’s knowledge, global connection to those people you hold dear. Better living through chemistry.
Apple and Corning do it well, but so do Google, Facebook, Raytheon, Target, private equity and venture capital.
These visions form the blueprints of reality. Possible, plausible, probable, preferable... for whom? Preferable for those who control the imagining of it.
Astrology points out that Saturn has been hanging out in Capricorn, bringing an energy of wild rebellion that questions and dismantles and makes big changes to institutions and norms. Now Saturn is moving into Aquarius, a combination of community and collective power, of putting people first, of being lose and maybe a little weird.
Whether astrology is your thing or not: this is a time for imagining. For envisioning what could be. For scheming and dreaming together.
In several places in her work, movement facilitator and author adrienne maree brown talks about imagination battles: the forcing of an idea onto someone as if it was the truth. This is happening all around us, all the time. It’s happening when we’re told that something we’ve imagined is impossible or that our dream of a better way is impractical. In an interview with the publication Deem, brown also mentions a related concept: imagination collaboration, the act of co-imagining something with another person, letting their ideas shape your ideas and letting that interaction grow into a vision of something that could be.
After a year of challenging assumptions and testing norms, of throwing out old ways of working, let’s make 2021 a year of imagining (hopefully the first of many). Instead of accepting the visions of others as unquestionable truth, let’s envision new and better futures. Futures that will exceed our wildest imaginations. For us, for each other.
We keep us safe, let’s imagine together.
Some recommended reading and resources for a year of imagination
Dawn, Octavia Butler
Foresight Primer: An introduction to futures and foresight, Dr Joseph Voros
Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown
In Other Worlds, Margaret Atwood
Flash Forward [podcast], Rose Eveleth
Experiments in Feral Futuring, Anab Jain & Alex Taylor for Public Books
...and I have many, many more niche suggestions — reach out and I'll probably have something I can recommend based on topics you're interested in.
This is nowhere near the last thing I'll be writing on the topic. I struggled to keep this piece to being only mildly disorganized. There were so many threads I wanted to include but couldn't without writing a literal book. I've not been diligent about sending emails, but that will change as I make more time to writing moving forward.