Some thoughts on weaving prosocial futures in an antisocial dystopic present

Living in a perpetual state of outrage isn’t healthy.
And yet…

I don’t know how to NOT exist as a canary in the coal mine or as a Cassandra saying “Hey, they’re saying the quiet part loud and it feels like people aren’t listening!!!” over and over and over.

I volunteered with and wrote grants for nonprofits in Galveston for years before Covid, and because of that work, I knew that there were groups of people on the Island that would be disproportionately affected by the shutdown, many of them immigrant families. My response to that knowledge was to reach out to the organizations that I’d worked with to try to make things better for those people. My pre-teen daughters helped translate things for the families. I was never afraid for us; I was always worried for the families who, in that moment, were struggling. My soul is just cracked open in this present moment trying to reconcile the prevailing rhetoric about immigrants and my experience with real, live, kind, loving, sometimes hilarious, sometimes cranky, always generous human beings that I met through that experience.

And I’m not saying this to say, “Oh my, look at me and how great I am”… I’m saying this because I think I’m normal. I think that most of us have, at our core, a base level of empathy and kindness and desire to help others, and sometimes we don’t know how to use what we know and what we have to do something meaningful and good and kind, but sometimes we do and when we use what we know and what we have and who we know, we can make life a little bit better for others and that makes the world a little bit better overall.

I think that the people in power right now have created an immersive experiential design future full of fear and shame and powerlessness and manufactured scarcity and are offering these vile, horrifying, inhuman choose-your-own-adventure stories to people who feel disaffected and unseen and unheard.

I have little to no patience for the people propagating this present dystopia and only the thinnest thread for the people who are rushing to inhabit it.

But I do think those of us who find the present horrors and the glimpses of this alternative future unacceptable need to begin to weave something better. I find myself longing for someone else to do it. I keep looking to Elizabeth Warren because she always had a plan, but neither she nor any of the other politicians who once gave me hope are casting any sort of vision of “better.”

It feels a little pretentious to say this, but being a futurist is, for me, a vocation. Like being a teacher or a pastor, the theory and praxis of my profession seep into my whole life, not just in my job as a research director. And because of that, I’ve had to conscientiously and deliberately orient myself toward the prosocial aspects of the field.

One of the important stages in our research framework is developing scenarios that present snapshots of alternative futures. Typically, there is a baseline future, where the rules of the present system stay the same… it’s what most people expect the world to look like in 15-20 years. Then, there’s collapse, in which the rules of the system are in a state of dysfunction. It’s not always complete dystopia, but it depicts a system in which the rules did not hold. There’s new equilibrium, in which the system experiences a significant disruption and adjusts to meet the challenge; some rules change, but the overall system remains intact. And then there is transformation, in which the rules of the system fundamentally change. Historically, this is often depicted as a system transformed by technological advances like the printing press or the internet, but values shifts, response to catastrophe, response to collapse… anything that fundamentally shifts the rules of “how things are” to something new can be a transformation trigger.

What I hope to do as a person and as a futurist is to, in my small corner of the world, begin to lay the groundwork for prosocial transformation. The system as it is cannot hold. I refuse to live in a world where people suggest that we apply the most exploitative version of capitalist plunder to the deportation of families living in our communities. I refuse to live in a world where students are punished for interrogating the necessity of war or its unfathomable atrocities. I refuse to live in a world where unidentified, purported agents of the government that represents me kidnap students, and mothers, and children from the street, from their homes, from their cars.

In my final semester of grad school, my capstone project morphed into a bit of a manifesto calling for futurists to use our research, tools, and frameworks to create more hopeful narratives. Gramsci’s idea of “interregnum” was particularly compelling to me; from imprisonment in the early part of the 20th century, he wrote:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear

Postmodern sociologist Zygmunt Bauman expanded on the idea:

[Gramsci] attached it instead to extraordinary situations: to times when the extant legal frame of social order loses its grip and can no longer keep burgeoning
social life on track, and a new frame, made to the measure of the newly emerged conditions….is still at the design stage…

I believe we are at that design stage. This interregnum sucks. A great variety of morbid systems have appeared. I am longing for the new to be born.

And I think that we all, futurists and activists and teachers and researchers and literally everyone, together, can frame something new. We need to think bigger than falling back into the old ways of thinking and doing because those old ways can’t keep us on track, and really, they were only ever giving the appearance of doing so, and only for some of us.

Futurists, we need to be proactively watching for prosocial signals of change, proactively manifesting emerging prosocial drivers of change, writing prosocial systems into our scenarios, designing the best possible prosocial futures. We have the tools and the disposition to recognize and maybe believe in impossible, crazy, amazing, prosocial futures. And we need to pull back the curtain release these beautiful possibilities into the world to take root in minds and grow into even better framings and systems.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to share some of the tools that I use to give myself hope, some of the places I look for prosocial signals of change, and most vulnerably, I’ll share some of my design future narratives that provide glimpses of possible futures in which I want to live.

I hope that sharing these things gives friends and readers a little bit of hope, yes. Goodness knows we all need it. But more than that “thing with feathers” kind of hope, I believe that we, truly all of us, have the relationships, the resources, and the heart to choose to embrace a gritty hope that gives us something to work for, tangibly. Something is going to emerge out of this interregnum. I think that almost everyone wants it to be something prosocial, something beautiful, something truly good, but I think we are all longing for someone to show us the framing, to give us directions. I don’t have that, but I can do foresight research and I can tell stories. Other people can share wisdom from their lived experience. Others can make connections and share resources.

My gritty, mucky, emerging-from-the-interregnum hope is that all of us working together to reject the systems that didn’t really work but that somehow still feel like “the only way” can cast so many complementary prosocial images and narratives of the future that not only that old system, but all of these dystopian visions of tech-bro, christofascist, 1% futures also crumble into dust and are swept back into the muck.

I know it sounds like nothing more than storytelling.

I know it feels like just a little.

And maybe it is.

But I believe that stories matter, that dreams matter, that visions matter. And I believe that people fundamentally want to be good, and that they want good for others. We just have been fed some very, very dysfunctional stories.

So. I’m trusting in the and yet… of it all and daring to imagine better.