It can be really hard explaining something that seems so incredibly obvious to oneself. I have little problem unpicking the thread of an intricate story of causal connections and showing their significance but it can be daunting trying to explain the significance of something that until that point had seemed entirely understood, at least to me.

Imagination Stagnation

This is hardly an original or staggering suggestion but in a couple of conversations this week about the metaverse etc. etc. I was just really struck by the profound lack of imagination that the supposed visionaries, and movers and shakers have. It also I suppose follows from last week’s post that what I’m really interested in, and always have been is in shaking up and broadening the imagination of what could be. The complete stagnation or deflation of future imaginaries in popular culture is sometimes overwhelming. It’s quite difficult to articulate the ways in which ‘the future’ feels like a sad and disappointing place. We seem to be caught in a downward spiral, race-to-the-bottom, low-stakes-high-return imagination infrastructure. One in which novelty for its own sakes is rewarded, the offset of future returns become an object of speculation and the present is packaged as the past of the inevitable future.

An easy part of this story of imagination collapse is the dogged pursuit of science fiction technologies at the cost of, and in preference to, the imagining of new things. Re-wrapping vintage ideas or things borrowed from science fiction, either directly or by collective osmosis is used as a cover for the actual imagining of new things. By this process old ideas are recycled into a new form, often detached from the critical context in which they were meant to exist and be given meaning. I’ve talked about this loads using Minority Report as an early example. Minority Report, a 2001 film critiquing the hubris of predictive technology and surveillance became a guiding star for the development of surveillance and predictive technologies. More recently we see Neal Stephenson’s metaverse, Ready Player One and The Matrix signposted as imaginative hallmarks of the future being brought into being by big tech money. Like Minority Report, these are all stories bewaring or critical of exactly the vision being promulgated yet they have been re-gifted as opportunities for real social and technical futures. Jay Springett, referencing Andrew Dana Hudson calls this ‘cultural fracking’ – ‘mining the past for new material.’

It’s new so it must be good

This re-wrapping, fracking, whatever you want to call it goes hand-in-hand with another strategy; a prevailing novelty bias. Things are presented as important or valuable simply because they are new rather than because they have any innate practical purpose; novelty itself has become a valuable property of innovation. Now, this has somewhat always been the story of innovation. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker have written extensively about the issue of ‘problem definition’ – the way that most new inventions are emergent or coincidental rather than intentional and so secondly have to find a problem that they solve in order to become valuable. But it seems increasingly that part two can be skipped altogether, that defining a problem and demonstrating how your invention solves it is no longer necessary for it to accrue enormous social and financial value. This is easy to see in web3/crypto/metaverse where, as so many have pointed out, the problems of wealth and social inequality in web 2 aren’t being solved so much as accelerated to their worst conclusion under the pretence of newness.

But even outside of the insanity of crypto, in the establishment of Silicon Valley there are signs of the well of imagination running dry: The Apple release schedule was, for a time, the hallmark of genuine innovation. Cult-like reverence aside, the release of the iPhone brought a genuinely significant shift in culture as did, to lesser degrees, new iOS’, MacBooks, watches, and so on. But Apple releases now are just marginal improvements on the products before; better camera, claims of better battery life, faster processors. Watch any Apple keynote and count the times the presenter says ‘most up-to-date processor,’ or ‘newest battery’ or ‘latest screen’ as if the passing of time itself is somehow a remarkable innovation that the company has mastered.

This particularly stuck out to me in the 2020 keynote in which Apple covered their commercially convenient separation from Intel as an innovative opportunity to create new M1 chips by showcasing how well a seven-year old game now played on their computers. This big video game statement piece from Apple, defying all reasonable marketing sense, came just a month after the launch of that Unreal 5 trailer (ok that was a a genuine jaw-to-the-floor thing.) By this logic, Apple should be able to run Unreal 5 by 2028. Despite this remarkable out-of-datedness in their actual usefulness, they are still ‘new’ machines and so are valued simply for being the latest rather than actually being any good.

Everything will be alright on the night

But why is newness or novelty so alluring to the popular imagination? In the case of Apple, brand loyalty is a piece of it but that doesn’t excuse or explain the explosion of crypto scams. No, to turn newness into value you have to add potential: That new Apple camera with machine learning in it has the potential to make you a great photographer. This potential does not solve any of the problems of terrible battery life and wasteful product lifecycles but it sells you a future of potential.

Newness itself, even when it’s not actually anything new at all is endowed with value because newness has been equated with the ethereal quality of the promise of potential. For example, NFT token launches appear to be indiscernible from each other; a selection of hastily produced cartoon avatars, a discord ‘community,’ notional promises of a game and movie franchise all followed by a promise of vast returns to everyone who got on board early at some future point. There’s nothing fundamentally imaginative or actually novel in any of them. In fact they are almost entirely indistinguishable without any unique qualities whatsoever, but their newness is their most valuable property. Their ‘freshness’ is the only delineating factor. Each one is only valuable as long as it’s new because as long as it’s new it has the potential to be actually valuable (as a handful of others have before) and it’s this speculative potential that seizes the imagination of buyers rather than any actual utility.

Which leads to one of the final factors; ‘promissory rhetorics,’ a phrase I borrow a lot from elish and Boyd. This is the use of rhetorics by proponents that excuse or distract from failures, shortcomings or issues in the present because of the promise of inevitable success of the future venture. You can see this all the time in the ‘potential’ of crypto in what ‘will’ happen as a cover for the actual failures and deception that is going on now. Even so-called ‘utility tokens’ are ‘potentially’ going to change the world even as they actually do very little and there appear to be no (again I’ve asked but people tell me to ‘do my own research’ – so please send links) actual examples of blockchain-associated technologies that aren’t deployed for the pursuit of profit. In this rhetorical framework, the actual lived-experience of the present as well as present tendencies, biases and motivations (which are mostly to get rich as quickly as possible) are excused because at some point in the future will be a massive technological and attitudinal shift in which we all live in a web3 utopia. You most often hear this refrain in some form of; ‘Yes it’s not great at the moment but the potential is amazing.’

If we’re to expand on the Pinch and Bijker’s ‘problem definition’ (1: Invent thing. 2: Figure out what it solves) then now we have 1: Invent thing. 2: Cause more problems/make things worse overall. 3: Convince people that those problems are a necessary and painful hurdle of a much better, long-term outcome that will arrive at some point, some how. I’m sure some people genuinely believe and are invested in this imaginative potential but the mechanics of how this transition happens are almost never discussed.

There’s usually very little critical reflection on why an entire culture built around the premise of being able to get rich incredibly quickly would suddenly change its entire moral stance toward the accumulation of profit. Or further, how this system would revolutionise or overturn the existing institutions and companies that are doing just fine as things are.

Promissory rhetorics also have the effect of offsetting the need to work on imagining new things because at some point someone else will do it for you and everything will fall into place: The entire value system of web 3 will shift from profit accumulation to some sort of system of social value creation one day, the technology required to prevent fraud and deception will be developed, the mechanisms that encourage them will be dismantled. (See also how long Ethereum has been promising to move to proof of stake.) (The Portuguese sometimes call this Sebastianism – that’s a whole other thing though.) We are convinced we live in the past of a pre-destined future.

I would argue, however, that the most characteristic [future visioning] does not seriously attempt to imagine the “real” future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.

Jameson, F. (1982). Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future? 
Science Fiction Studies.  9(2). p.153

Imagining the Worst

So, faced with a foreclosure of imagination brought about by the reverence of the new, the promise of inevitable success and a sort of muted set of expectations, are there ways to tactically counter-imagine?

..there is a widening gulf between what humanity is able to create and what humans are able to imagine… Anders believed that people had to imagine not just floating cities and space rockets, but irradiated ruins and nuclear missiles. After all, imaging the future and realistically predicting the future are quite different things. 

Source

Cue this article in Real Life about the work and philosophy of Gunther Anders’ futurism – ‘The Balance of Terrors.’ Anders, who was forecasting through the Cold War and the very real threat of nuclear apocalypse advocated for fear and for imagining the worst. He resisted protests that it was weak, defeatist or pessimistic to imagine the worst outcomes but advocated that it gave a richer understanding of possibility. Importantly, he pointed out that disaster scenarios were much more likely than the utopian stories meant as a distraction from them but popular imagination struggled to imagine them:

Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing.

Source

This is a variation on the foreclosure argument; that by bombarding the popular imagination with the sales pitch of your future vision you obscure and obfuscate any alternatives. Anders’ pitch was that you should imagine the very worst outcome to challenge the Utopians.

To do this, in the specific examples of nuclear weapons, he developed an interesting philosophical framework – ‘the reprieve.’ Essentially, the extinction of humanity is a guaranteed future event. It is going to happen. The aim is then to put it off for as long as possible. This is in the same way that web 3 will liberate us all from the oppression of institutions or will liberate the web but suddenly the project of survival demands much more personal and real investment and action than the offsetting of some utopia that no one actually wants to will into being because they’re all so busy profiting off the present. In other words, while being happy and making lots of money in the present, people will act to put off imagined disaster but won’t act to bring forward imagined utopia.

Is this justification for doomsaying? There’s a feeling I get whenever someone chastises me for being pessimistic or negative that, you know, maybe I am. Maybe my imagination isn’t mature enough to grasp the incredible possibilities of this web 3 future. But then, the optimists never actually have to be right, they just have to convince everyone else that one day they will be right while the pessimists have to hope that they might be wrong, which sounds like more meaningful work.

As usual, I don’t know how to end my diatribe. There are other dimensions to this other than pessimism. I’m increasingly buoyed by the imagination of abundant and optimistic futures coming from outside of the tech space. I’m also eager to see what happens with Cassie Robinson’s work on imagination infrastructure. I like this idea that imagination should be a public utility, not something that is the preserve of big tech.

Recent

had a follow-up interview with Scratching the Surface talking about my new role and job and reflecting a little more on higher education. It’s up for Patreons to Jarrett’s amazing project here. The original interview I did is up here or at any podcast host.

Short Stuff

I’m deep in Severance and like many of you, entranced by it. The problem with great TV is it has to end and that inevitably means disappointment because there’s an imperative to reveal the mysteries for narrative resolution and closure. But what if like Control, they don’t? What if it’s just ‘this world is weird and your human brain is too small to understand why so you just call it weird?’ What if it didn’t ever resolve but just kept spiralling into more and more strangeness?

Also the similarities to Control, even aesthetically, are too numerous for it not to have influenced Severance.

• I’ve ordered Danah Abdulla’s new book ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing.’ The title, I imagine is a clever barb to Nigel Cross, somewhat responsible for the risible omnipresence of design thinking. It’s a literal litany of things designers should know. Why is ‘designerly’ not a recognised adjective?
• Via Cameron Tonkinwise, this plant that can mimic other plants can also mimic fake plants which throws everything up in the air really.
• Some alleged, maybe real, research into whether you can inject advertising into people’s brains while they sleep. All very Spotless Mind.
• I still like quantum tech, it’s not yet been absorbed by the prosaic emphasis of tech companies on production, advertising and consumption. Now it might charge cars faster. Great. Love it. Still think the solution to cars is just to get rid of cars but great.
• Molly White, doing most of the heavy work on lifting and critiquing crypto narratives has organised an edited and annotated repudiation of a 14,000 New York Times fluff piece.
• Check out Memory Work and their speculative monuments to future heroes of regeneration.

Ok that’s it. This one started short, went long, is incoherent and messy but that’s why this is a blog and not a journal article. Love you of course, and I hope you know that.