This project is focused on collaborating with people and communities to design future systems for living.
It is a lifelong project to create a world for future generations to inherit. One that is about improving the life and wellbeing of all people.
For the past century the collective psyche has been primed with fear to see the worst of the possible futures. This has been a dominant theme. Amplifying our fears. Extending our sense of hopelessness in creating a better world. A sense of inevitability towards a future we don't want. Narratives and novels. Movies and TV shows. 1984, Brave New World and in more recent decades, movies like Terminator, The Matrix and the TV series black mirror.
I'd undertook a subject while a mature age student at university in 2010 called Utopias and Dystopias. What this gave me was an insight into the dark and light narratives that have evolved throughout human history. Now we can't have one without the other. Yin and Yang or the dualistic nature of human existence and our psyche. But where we are at, as a collective organism, the human species, is a major turning point. Never before have so many people had access to so much information and knowledge. The world wide web has been the most significant technological and social innovation ever created. Connecting people across space and time. Enabling information and knowledge to be accessible in seconds. Bridging divides, and creating them. Fast tracking global commerce. Supporting new governance and decentralised communities.
On the other side, yes, we do have a "black mirror", with our darker side in the reflection.
Control and authoritarian rule. Mass surveillance. Personal data harvesting. Machine learning algorithms reflecting the human biases. Censorship and repression. A propaganda machine that would make Goebbels envious. We could of course go on and on about these darker things.
But that is point. The dark side is easy.
When you look in the mirror what do you see? What do you want to see?
It takes some effort to hold both these opposing possibilities in mind and continue on creating the world we want to live in.
It is an initiative to bring people from many walks of life together. To imagine. To co-design and architect a blueprint of the world we want to live in and most importantly leave for future generations to inherit.
A consolidation of ideas, great thinkers and innovators, utopian projects and inspiring and empowering creations to liberate people. It can be a portal into learning, not only about the possibilities, but also the real work of passionate people changing the world in the creative, intellectual and physical work they do.
Over the coming months I will be building out this site and calling on people in my network and others to contribute to this initiative.
Think of it like crowdsourcing the vision and blueprint for the future, and decentralising and distributing the practical work to make it a reality.
Well I don't know, absolutely, if it will work.
There are lots of approaches we can take. There are even more that will be suggested and given the due consideration. One of the reasons I am using github for this is that it is collaborative and versioned. It is used by the open source software community to create and work together across time and space on things they are interested in and passionate about, and at times have direct utility for their work. The Free/Libre Open Source Software movement is inspiration for this project. It represents a creative outlet that is about collectively creating things with no core desire for commercial gain. For the commons.
In the coming months activities will kick off including a podcast series with guest speakers, a community forum and regular blog content.
As the project grows it may warrant it's own platform, I envision it will. The aim will be to evolve this into a decentralised platform to enable people to contribute ideas, thoughts, skills, knowledge, time and resources to giving us as a species clear direction about what world we are actively creating and leaving as a legacy of our time here. We may decide to use existing open source tools to collaborate. This is a lifetime project so there is no rush on this.
The principles and values that underpin this initiative are open sourced. They can be contributed to, improved upon for clarity and translated by anyone willing to offer their energy. You can find them here.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OurDecentFuture