Posts tagged “forecasting”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from julienorvaisas] What’s with Steampunk? [More Intelligent Life] – [Subculture alert!] Inspired by the early science-fiction writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, steampunk has a romantic, fantastical sensibility. It's not just a look, but an embrace of a nearly mythical era of mad science and weird contraptions at a time when most people rarely use their hands to make or discover anything. It is a subculture that uses virtual tools to honour the more crude and tangible kind. "Steampunk manages to be both conservative and progressive, backward-looking and forward-looking at the same time."
  • [from steve_portigal] What Futurists Actually Do [GOOD Blog] – When looking at the multi-variable, massively complex confluence of more than six billion free actors responding to (and continually creating) cultural, economic, and political forces, it is virtually impossible to plot a path to a definite and unambiguous future. And yet, we still use the singular—the future. Moreover, the future is not an end state. Tomorrow will someday be today, which will fade into yesterday. As our world moves through this unyielding passage of time, how people act in our world will determine just which of many possible futures we end up with. When we transform our notion of "the future" into visions of alternative futures, we transform our relationship to the very idea of change. We move from thinking we are heading toward an inevitable destination to seeing the world as a dependent, contingent, and therefore actionable, possibility space for us to design. Pluralizing "the future" makes us both more empowered and more responsible for our ultimate outcomes.

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