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future_fabulators:future_fictions_quotes [2014-07-30 15:01] – alkanfuture_fabulators:future_fictions_quotes [2014-08-05 15:58] (current) – alkan
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 The best attitude for a serious futurist is not pessimism or optimism, but a deep sense of engagement. -Bruce Sterling The best attitude for a serious futurist is not pessimism or optimism, but a deep sense of engagement. -Bruce Sterling
  
 +The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. - William Gibson
 +
 +If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother teaching them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. -Buckminster Fuller
 +
 +Integral Theory suggests that four irreducible perspectives (subjective, inter-subjective, objective, and inter-objective) should be consulted when attempting to fully understand any topic or aspect of reality. -Terry Collins & Andy Hines 
 +
 +At the heart of Embodied Foresight is the development of capacity to sit with uncertainty and not- knowing, to develop tolerance and acceptance of the discomfort that comes with doubt. A healthy relationship with doubt is seen as central to good practice within a conceptual understanding of the future as non-predictable and in-determinant. -Alex Burns
 +
 +Zen is strongly grounded in practise; there is a program of training that supports the development of the practition- er rather than development of the practitioner's power to manipulate her or his circum- stances. The Zen practitioner learns to see with new eyes, and I think this is something that we strive for as futures practitioners also, to learn the uncovering of new potential futures through making our very way of seeing things transparent to ourselves. -Josh Floyd
 +
 +Future studies give us in the Southern world a chance to break out of this shell of progressivism. Or, if you prefer, developmentalism or modernism. It gives us a chance to think about the future in our own terms, and without the constraints imposed by nineteenth century social theories and the categories popularised by social science disciplines, particularly developmental economics and history. - Josh Floyd, Alex Burns and Jose Ramos
  
 Translating global insight, the forte of futures studies, into local action, the forte of action research, would seem to be a promising challenge yet social change as structure and agency are integral to each other. Foresight without action is meaningless, and action without foresight can be dangerous. -Jose Ramos Translating global insight, the forte of futures studies, into local action, the forte of action research, would seem to be a promising challenge yet social change as structure and agency are integral to each other. Foresight without action is meaningless, and action without foresight can be dangerous. -Jose Ramos
  
 Critical futures studies is clearly a challenge to the distortion of meaning within society, seeking to be an agent for human emancipation. -Jose Ramos Critical futures studies is clearly a challenge to the distortion of meaning within society, seeking to be an agent for human emancipation. -Jose Ramos
 +
 +In the late twentieth century, systems thinking developments in the form of chaos and complexity theories enhanced understanding of the dynamics of intertwined human and planetary systems. These theories provided a paradigm of change as an emergent property of complex, adaptive living systems, explorable but rarely predictable. -Wendy Schultz
 +
 +Some have assumed that key to successfully dealing with uncertainty is to take a deep dive into the long-term future. Even when the difficulty of prediction is acknowledged, effort is still devoted to imagining alternative possible futures. (…) There is, in fact, a fundamental flaw in such approaches: it assumes that we can somehow successfully imagine the central aspects of the future. There is ample evidence, however, that this is not true. We do a terrible job imagining the future, sometimes with dreadful consequences” –Silberzahn & Jones 
 +
 +How can you craft strategy in nonlinear environment? […] instead of putting effort into better prediction (no matter how modest), in many cases strategists must take the opposite approach and learn to focus their effort purely on a better understanding of the present. [By] mitigating the impact of surprises [and] anticipating the consequences of their own actions. –Silberzahn & Jones
 +
 +Ultimately, strategy is about a desired future and how to get there. So don’t ask what the future will be, but rather what future you desire, and how you will bring it about. –Silberzahn & Jones
 +
 + Regardless of the quality of organizational forecasts, there is space for surprise to result from emergence. (...) In a world full of surprises the capacity to react must be considered a vital capability for the competitive capacity of an organization. -Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart R. Clegg and Ken Kamoche
 +
 +The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.-Paul Saffo
 +
 +Cherish failure . Preferably other people's. We fail our way into the future. -Stuart Brand 
 +
 +My work is that of a limited man who must deal with a limitless situation –Paul Virilio 
 +
 +The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is. We ignore the risks that are hardest to measure, even when they pose the greatest threats to our well-being. We make approximations and assumptions about the world that are miuch cruder than we realize. We abhor uncertainty, even when it is an irreducible part of the problem we are trying to solve -Nate Silver
 +
 +When designing for the future, designers regularly design for the hero, a trickle-down aspirational superuser intended to give us all something to hope for. But perhaps we could, for once, design for those innumerable, un-named characters of Hollywood, the extras, or background talent. - Nick Foster
 +
 +All politics is design fiction, incrementally calibrating the message - Scott Smith
 +
 +Disasters can open up weird little autonomous spaces of solidarity, shared adversity - a platform on which we start building stuff. - Justin Pickard
 +
 +If it is too weird, it will be dismissed as art, and if too normal, it will be effortlessly assimilated - Dunne & Raby
 +
 +I have realised that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. - Alan Watts
 +
 +The way you live today reflects the kind of future you want to live in tomorrow - Justin Pickard
 +
 +The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. -Winston Churchil
 +
 +If I had an hour to solve a problem, and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper questions to ask, for if I knew the proper questions, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes. -Albert Einstein
 +
 +A good scenario grabs us by the collar and says, “Take a good look at this future. This could be your future. Are you going to be ready?” -Peter Bishop, Andy Hines and Terry Collins
 +
 +Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous (Dator’s 2nd Law of the Future) - Jim Dator
 +
 +These depictions are not predictions: while based on probabilistic forecasts, their primary purpose is to guide exploration of possible future states. Their goal is to “disturb the present,” in Gaston Berger's words (1967). -Wendy Schultz et al
 +
 +Essentially we put ourselves at an imaginative future vantage point and describe what is going on right now as if we were looking at what is happening today from the perspective of a future historian. – Kees van der Heijden
  
 De 'alsof-strategie'. Die bouwt op een dubbele beweging. Enerzijds verplaatst een kunstenaar zich spelenderwijs in een specifieke maatschappelijke praktijk door het nabootsen van een set rollen, activiteiten, procedures, discoursen, attributen en ruimtes eigen aan die praktijk—net genoeg om er de dominante metafoor in het werk van te maken. Anderzijds wordt deze praktijk binnengeloodst in het domein van de kunst, waar ze—vrijgemaakt van haar eigen conventies —kan worden gemanipuleerd en bevraagd.(…) Alleen mogen we van dit potentieel van maatschappelijke innovatie geen sluitende antwoorden of oplossingen verwachten. Iets in de kunst blijft het denken en de verbeelding altijd openhouden. En even lijkt het alsof alles anders kan…  - Sébastien Hendrickx De 'alsof-strategie'. Die bouwt op een dubbele beweging. Enerzijds verplaatst een kunstenaar zich spelenderwijs in een specifieke maatschappelijke praktijk door het nabootsen van een set rollen, activiteiten, procedures, discoursen, attributen en ruimtes eigen aan die praktijk—net genoeg om er de dominante metafoor in het werk van te maken. Anderzijds wordt deze praktijk binnengeloodst in het domein van de kunst, waar ze—vrijgemaakt van haar eigen conventies —kan worden gemanipuleerd en bevraagd.(…) Alleen mogen we van dit potentieel van maatschappelijke innovatie geen sluitende antwoorden of oplossingen verwachten. Iets in de kunst blijft het denken en de verbeelding altijd openhouden. En even lijkt het alsof alles anders kan…  - Sébastien Hendrickx
 +
 +Next generation futures systems will therefore have to address the synthesis and interpretation of results in a way that is more substantial and useful than most crowdsourcing solutions today. -Noah Raford
 +
 +The only thing that is predictable is change - Pema Chödrön
  
  
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 <blockquote> Later, when I had lost this happiness, I clearly understood these connections without deriving the slightest benefit or comfort from them. When something precious and irretrievable is lost, we feel we have awakened from a dream. In my case this feeling is strangely correct, for my happiness did indeed arise from the same secret as the happiness in dreams; it arose from the freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre. And as we League brothers travelled throughout the world without motor-cars or ships, as we conquered the war-shattered world by our faith and transformed it into Paradise, we creatively brought the past, the future and the fictitious into the present moment. <blockquote> Later, when I had lost this happiness, I clearly understood these connections without deriving the slightest benefit or comfort from them. When something precious and irretrievable is lost, we feel we have awakened from a dream. In my case this feeling is strangely correct, for my happiness did indeed arise from the same secret as the happiness in dreams; it arose from the freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre. And as we League brothers travelled throughout the world without motor-cars or ships, as we conquered the war-shattered world by our faith and transformed it into Paradise, we creatively brought the past, the future and the fictitious into the present moment.
  
--- [[https://www.zotero.org/alkanc/items/itemKey/6MWVPDKT/q/hesse|Hesse, //Journey to the East//, p. 44]]</blockquote>+-- [[https://www.zotero.org/alkanc/items/itemKey/6MWVPDKT/q/hesse|Hesse, Journey to the East, p. 44]]</blockquote> 
 + 
 +It is spoken (...) of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them. –Aleister Crowley  
 + 
 +...A work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic… -Italo Calvino 
 + 
 +There is freedom of nothing solid and secure - egolesness, inquisitiveness, adaptability, playfulness & joy - where all usual schemes fall apart. -Pema Chödrön 
 + 
 +Whenever there is doubt, that creates another step on your staircase. Doubt is telling you that you need to take another step. Each time there is an obstacle, you go one step further, beyond it, step by step. -Chögyam Trungpa  
 + 
 +Each breath corresponds to one year of human time; and each breath corresponds to a century in the various pathways of the long night of ignorance -Lü, Tung-pin 
 + 
 +<blockquote>All these images – the starship, the space colony, the lapis – are precursory images. They follow naturally from the idea that history is the shock wave of eschatology. As one closes the distance with the eschatological object, the reflections it is throwing off resemble more and more the thing itself. In the final moment the Unspeakable stands revealed. There are no more reflections of the Mystery. The Mystery in all its nakedness is seen, and nothing else exists. But what it is, decency can safely scarcely hint; nevertheless, it is the crowning joy of futurism to seek anticipation of it. 
 + 
 +– Terrence McKenna, "New Maps of Hyperspace", pp. 101-2 in //[[https://www.zotero.org/groups/foam_library_brussels/items/itemKey/G33EJ5JJ/q/archaic|The Archaic Revival]]//</blockquote> 
 + 
 +<blockquote> 
 + 
 +In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of that period's life-forms. It would enter the organism's brain and set up therein its own vibrations, while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter's body till a reverse process was set up. 
 + 
 +The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques. 
 + 
 +Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that language. 
 + 
 +If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument. 
 + 
 +The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-foot bases. 
 + 
 +– H. P. Lovecraft, //[[http://www.sacred-texts.com/nec/hpl/hpl50.htm|An H. P. Lovecraft Anthology]]// 
 + 
 +</blockquote> 
 + 
 +<blockquote> 
 + 
 +As a matter of fact, in reality our relation both to the past and to the future is far more complicated than it seems to us. In the past, behind us, lies not only that which really happened, but that which could have been. In the same way, in the future lies not only that which will be, but everything that may be. 
 + 
 +The past and the future are equally undetermined, equally exist in all their possibilities, and equally exist simultaneously with the present. 
 + 
 +By time we mean the distance separating events in the order of their succession and binding them in different wholes. This distance lies in a direction not contained in three-dimensional space, therefore it will be the new dimension of space.
  
 +This new dimension satisfies all possible requirements of the fourth dimension on the ground of the preceding reasoning.
  
 +– P. D. Ouspensky, //[[http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/to/to07.htm|Tertium Organum]]//
  
 +</blockquote>
  
 Related: [[future_fictions_references]] Related: [[future_fictions_references]]
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