fields

Gaps between Futures

A series of rich presentations and conversations aligned over the last few weeks to extend the question: Do we have the data sets to move toward a Regenerative Future? This time the question was triangulated by talks that explored the gap between futures – Futures mundane, and Futures imagined.

During her keynote talk at the Society 5.0 Ethics – A Festival of Ideas conference, Annette Markham recovered Arjun Appadurai (2013) who posited that “anticipation functions within an ethic of probability rather than possibility” and used Schüll’s analogy of dominoes falling to explain that “we anticipate them tumbling down in order, unless something goes wrong.” Extending this to how we might imagine different futures, people foresee a future outcome as a matter of probability and if the past and present continue on the same track, the outcome can be anticipated. See Annette’s paper The limits of the imaginary: Challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithm for more.

Sarah Pink’s keynote on day two further opened the gap between the futures introduced by Governments as they ask us to consider the consequences of global temperatures rising above 1.5 degrees, and our weekly routines that we repeat day by day. Paraphrasing Sarah: “the question is, what happens in our real Mondays, and the Mondays that we are encouraged to imagine? and how are they different?”

You get a sense of the gap that Sarah is talking about in the Smart Homes for Seniors trailer below. Produced by her team at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash, using digital ethnographic documentary film making as method. Full movie available here: https://vimeo.com/630504939

My own contribution to Society 5.0 simplified previous work with Chris Elsden and Martin Disley from DRS2022 by placing histories and futures back into the money.

In order to make money flow (giving it currency), modern banking stripped all histories and futures from money. However, as platforms for digital economies, contemporary banking has the opportunity to retain where and who money has come from (histories), and to add values of where we might want it to go (futures). Of course, such a proposition would challenge the very possibility of fungibility or ‘value without strings attached’. Whilst a modern economy relies on fungibility to support the interchangeability of economic units, any consideration of social or environmental values associated with a transaction could represent significant ‘strings’ that impede its ability to flow.

To make tangible this principle I’ve recently been giving out one dollar coins (Australian and USA) to members of audiences and have asked them to place stickers on to each coin and write on them:

1. Give a dollar some historical data – where it had come from.

2. Give a dollar some conditions of what it can be spent on in the future – where it can go.

Taken away to be ‘spent’ back into circulation, the rather simple hack tries to introduce an agency that we might have between the future mundane, and the future that we would like to pay for.

Thanks to Professor Lisa Given, in partnership with the University of Utrecht, who led the Society 5.0 Ethics – A Festival of Ideas conference at RMIT.

Image: Zahra Zainal