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--- future_fabulators:the_futures_of_everyday_life [2014-03-03 08:29] – nik
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 Ambient foresight nodes
-    To create an enduring society, we will need a system of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable
+<blockquote>
-    and restorative. Business will need to integrate economic, biologic, and human systems to create a sustainable method of commerce.
+To create an enduring society, we will need a system of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable  and restorative. Business will need to integrate economic, biologic, and human systems to create a sustainable method of commerce. As hard as we may try to become sustainable on a company-by-company level, we cannot fully succeed until the institutions  surrounding commerce are redesigned. Just as every act in an industrial society leads to environmental degradation, regardless of intention, we must design a system where the opposite is true, where doing good is like falling off a log, where the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of
-    As hard as we may try to become sustainable on a company-by-company level, we cannot fully succeed until the institutions
+course, not a matter of conscious altruism
-    surrounding commerce are redesigned. Just as every act in an industrial society leads to environmental degradation, regardless of
-    intention, we must design a system where the opposite is true, where doing good is like falling off a log, where the natural,
-    everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism
-Paul Hawken in his book The Ecology of Commerce
+--Paul Hawken in 'The Ecology of Commerce'
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+It is the business of the future to be dangerous...
-It is the business of the future to be dangerous... ~ Alfred North Whitehead
+--Alfred North Whitehead
+</blockquote>
 rather than a simple binary Logic of Truth (‘is’ vs ‘is not’), when it comes to human thought and experience, it’s better thought of as a continuum. 528 There are those propositions that we take to be true, there are those that we treat as if they were true (however sound, or not, our basis may be for believing that they are), and there is the domain of speculation, where we let ourselves off the ontological hook a little, and allow ourselves to explore possibilities or imaginings of various kinds, even if we don’t necessarily have evidence for them.
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 spectrum of representations ranging from completely real to completely imaginary. The three key markers to plot are the reality bedrock ‘ is ’ at one end, the pure supposition of ‘ what if ’, at the other end, and the mimetic ‘ as if ’ in between. We’ll call this the ontological spectrum .
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 None of this is intended to lament the hard fact that hard facts are so hard to come by. Quite the opposite: in the pragmatist tradition, 531 or that of the Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger, 532 I am suggesting that we can afford to be much less hung up on the distinction between certified truths on the one hand, and fictive possibilities on the other. The attitude suggested here is to drop both unreflectiveness and embarrassment about our situation, to deliberately embrace and exploit the quirks of our human processing system instead. Where we have to resort to workarounds or ‘mind hacks’ to deal with the future more effectively than we have in the past, so be it. Whatever it takes .
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 to become adept hackers of the historical process we must first master hacks of the mind, at first our own, and then those of others whom we may wish to engage in conversation.
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 The ‘creative leaps’ Eagleman mentions were captured under the heading of ‘abduction’ (as opposed to the traditional logical operations of deduction and induction) by the American pragmatist C.S. Peirce. In Peirce’s philosophy of science abduction is the first phase in the scientific method, the formulation of an hypothesis as to what is going on. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001.)
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 Indeed, brain science has revealed that most of the time , our thoughts are not carefully attending to the present moment, but are instead time-travelling into recalled past and fantasised future states, plumbing what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls ‘the dark network’. 536 Any futurist should cultivate an awareness of these categories so they may be put to good use, and the guerrilla futurist in particular is bound to become an expert on charting new reaches of her own, as well as our collective, dark network.
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 Simulation is an activity which belongs in as if , between the abstract what if of the scenario and the concrete is of supposed reality. A simulation may be thought of as an enacted scenario. When a building’s inhabitants are evacuated in a fire drill; when a pilot learns to fly a complex aircraft using a mockup that never leaves the ground; or when a trainee surgeon operates on a dummy; when actors rehearse a play in an empty theatre; or when a complex model of weather systems is run inside a computer to produce next week’s forecast -- all these things involve using a representation or simplified version of a ‘real’ situation or system, in order to produce insight as to the workings of that system, or to use a low-risk test run to found confidence in preparing for the ‘real’ version of it.
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 A hoax is a deliberate deception, which belongs at the is end of the spectrum. The defining characteristic of a hoax is the way it bifurcates actuality and perception. It engineers a false sense of what is . The thing that links it to scenarios ( what if ) and simulations ( as if ) is that it can be seen as a hypothetical that the audience does not know is a hypothetical.
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 To watch a film about war, or a love affair, or a death in the family, is obviously still a very long way from experiencing those things yourself. But it is closer to an evocation of those experiences than a mere mention of them, or a sketch outline, or nothing at all. Here’s that pragmatic ‘hacker’ sensibility again: no one is arguing that perfect simulation is available (even in principle, let alone in practice); the argument is that we can do better, and entertain scenarios at deeper levels unreached by purely cognitive exercises, by turning up the experiential concreteness.
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 However, it is shallow, moralising, and ultimately, intellectually indefensible to see all deception as equivalent. An optical illusion or trompe l'oeil , or magic trick may involve ‘deception’, but of a purely trivial kind. A great deal of humour is ambiguous as to what’s really going on, or sets things up to appear one way as a backdrop or precondition for the delight of seeing in another way
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 To recap our two candidate categories where this form of mimesis may be indispensable and yet its audience unaware: the first situation is where it may afford the subject herself with an insight or understanding that otherwise would have been unavailable to them (what Phoebe did for Rachel, concerning her pregnancy). The second is where it may serve a greater good to know how people really feel, think or behave in certain situations (an argument in support of Milgram’s investigation). We now see how the ‘is’ end of the spectrum may be vital to certain forms of inquiry, and its ethical status is not so black and white.
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 Hell Houses are an outreach tool, a way to change hearts and minds, aimed at advancing the theological mission of believers. This intense commitment, and its embeddedness in a wider ideological program, is reflected in the growth of Hell Houses into something of a national phenomenon. They have been staged and locally adapted over the past two decades across hundreds of communities in the US. 562 ‘It is not unusual for Hell House productions to average attendance figures of over 3,000 people per production night.’ 563 And they have become enough of a national phenomenon to be satirised in the 2007 Halloween edition of The Simpsons. 564 ‘Enormous amounts of time, money, energy, and emotion go into each dramatic production.’ 565 Evidently, as a strategy for evangelical Christians, this is a highly successful ‘media virus’.
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 Hell House dramas are designed to be intense and shocking, staging realistic incarnations of death. Many of the tactics employed are graphic, violent, and deeply disturbing—audiences bear witness to horrors not normally experienced up-close and first-hand. Spectators weep, faint, and become physically ill, ironically all indicative of a positive aesthetic response. Because Hell Houses strive for realism, role-players are often just as moved and affected as the audience by the event, especially the youth cast as the victims. 567
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 Neither WOTW nor Hell House are experiential scenarios per se, but their examples help to shed light on experiential futures. Intentions in the two cases are very different. WOTW was for entertainment, and Hell Houses are for evangelism. In both, however an important threshold comes into the picture as the scenarios portrayed begin to venture from the relative safety of what if and as if into claims, explicit or implicit, about how the world is , or how the future ‘will’ be. When this happens, two primary ethical considerations for those staging an experiential scenario may arise; that it is distressing , or misleading . Merely to assert or assume good intentions in any given case is not enough, of course, in the same way that an artist’s declared political agenda does not establish that their art actually has the desired impact.
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 As framed so far, we have considered only the ethical risks of futures intervention, neglecting the other side of the story. The exploration is incomplete without asking what are the ethical reasons for elaborating alternatives in this way? Or, to put it another way, what are the ethical risks of not exploring alternative futures, or of doing so with insufficient imagination and daring?
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 In probing alternative futures, then, and in encouraging others to do likewise, it is certainly possible to be reckless. It is also possible to be too careful. One cannot defend against all conceivable misunderstandings. And in the past our future projections have often been too narrow, shallow, and timid. Desperate times, sometimes, call for desperate measures.
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 This has some unsettling implications. ‘The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking. ... [O]nce an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it any other way. Thus, the generation of a specific scenario may inhibit the emergence of other scenarios, particularly those that lead to different outcomes.’ 200 (Note that here, ‘scenario’ has a specific meaning; ‘stories that lead from the present situation to the target event’, 201 and that target events in this research were temporally much closer than the longerterm ‘futures’ of interest to us.)
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 ‘Where’s my jetpack?’ with an intellectual veneer
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 Success for futures is surely more than being recognised as a legitimate field of inquiry that is not too often or too grievously misunderstood. There are, as the spectres of the ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unimaginable’ remind us, bigger fish to fry. Futures may be ‘losing’ the battle of disciplinary recognition, 581 but the war for a wider shift in culture is still on. The veteran Canadian futurist Ruben Nelson makes the important point that futures, the field as such, is not ‘the work’; changing the world for the better is ‘the work’, and futures is a set of instruments to try to do this.
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 To my knowledge, the most comprehensive effort to articulate such a vision, in terms of an ideal for the eventual impact of the futures field, comes from a 1996 essay by (then Professor of Foresight, now full-time consultant) Richard Slaughter, in which he describes the potential emergence of a social capacity for foresight (later shortened to ‘social foresight’, the term we will use hereinafter)
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 We turn now to the theoretical side of Slaughter’s argument. He proposes that all forward-thinking efforts, however formal or informal, can be situated in a conceptual framework comprising five layers or levels of ascending sophistication. 586 At base, level one, lie the ‘raw capacities and perceptions of the human brain-mind system’. Level two is where ‘futures concepts and ideas enable a futures discourse’. At level three, ‘futures tools and methodologies increase analytic power’. Level four is marked by futures processes, projects and structures being ‘embodied in a variety of applications’. The fifth and final level imagines a ‘social capacity for foresight as an emergent property’
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 One is ‘future shock therapy’, the other is ‘ambient foresight'