A/UK at Demos Helsinki’s “Untitled” event. Engaging both imagination and experimentation makes for real change
Image from Untitled
We are excited to be speaking next week at Demos Helsinki’s Untitled online festival, Thursday September 23rd, at 10.00am (BST), on the idea of a parallel polis (it’s invitation only, to start off, but rest assured we will report back to you!).
The Untitled project is one of the most expansive and ambitious visioning exercises we’ve come across for some time. To give you a flavour of it, we reproduce their opening statement below:
Human beings find it easy to imagine an apocalypse or a disaster. But we struggle to imagine the positive alternatives: what education, welfare, workplaces, democracy, or neighbourhoods might look like in 40 years, or how we could make them radically better.
If we are only able to imagine something radically better, it remains a fantasy. To consciously yet radically transform society, we need to engage with the two sides of any conscious change: imagination and experimentation. That’s what Untitled is about.
Humanity is standing at the precipice of a profound change. The socio-economic and political trends of the last few decades have been indicative of how our well-established systems are broken. Now, the Covid-19 pandemic might have been a tipping point that threw us off the cliff. Instead of falling, could we fly together instead?
Certainly, the early 2020s mark the end of an era. But, what sort of period in history are we beginning?
Times of transition are hard. The current one is especially challenging given the tectonic shifts. The world as we know it might be a thing of the past soon – with only a few recognisable bits remaining.
To verbalise such gigantic changes is not easy, so we use cryptic phrases such as ‘the crisis of capitalism’, ‘post-capitalism’, and ‘surveillance capitalism’ ; as well as ‘digital transformation’, ‘exponential era’, and ‘the 4th industrial revolution’; along with, ‘the crisis of liberalism’, ‘post-truth politics’, post-scarcity economy and ‘meritocratic autocracy’.
In addition, ‘ecosystem collapse’, ‘the sixth wave of mass extinction’, and the emergence of the ‘anthropocene’ that require us to move towards a ‘climate-neutral society ’, ‘rewiring society’, ecological reconstruction ‘post-fossil era’, posthumanism or deep adaptation.
A jawbreaker, isn’t it?
In simple terms, we are living through a decimation of our own making. Therefore, it is up to us, and us alone, to shape a new world to replace the one that we have left behind.
While we tend to perceive the crises and trends of our times as parallel developments, they cannot be meaningfully understood separately. This does not mean that everything is connected. Still, the future is not a meaningful place if we approach each issue as an individual crisis to be dealt with so we can return back to normal. This is why we suggest looking at the bigger picture.
Seeing them collectively changes our approach from constantly predicting the near future and from solving problems as they come, to that of a proactive imagination of a better tomorrow. A longer term view, if you may.
Notions such as a ‘nation’, ‘worker’, ‘science’ and ‘money’ are used as if they have always existed in our lexicon. In reality, they are just concepts that were made a reality due to previous historical transformations. It is but obvious that our current transformation will throw up new concepts and realities that stem from them.
But, we are often prisoners of what we aim to leave behind. The challenge is to be able to reimagine without falling into the conceptual traps of the past.
For instance, the idea that an individual’s materialism is good for collective wellbeing has lately been magnificently disproven. Although some politicians and corporations may parrot the simplistic idea that doubling GDP will double wellbeing, it is neither true nor ecologically viable.
One can argue that this deep interconnection between the crisis and our most deeply held beliefs can also be a good thing. They present us not only with a opportunity to fix problems as they arise, but with a responsibility to flip the system. Consciously that can only happen through imagination.
Since we have focused so much on fixing problems in the existing system we have done a poor job of imagining a new one. Consequently, we are not sure how to title the story of our future. This is why, we believe, the future is Untitled.
We, however, can attempt to get a sense of which direction to head in by refusing to abide by the current normal. In the foreseeable future, we attempt to imagine the unimaginable and experiment with what we imagine – the Untitled.
Geoff Mulgan, Professor of Collective Intelligence at Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London points out that human beings find it easy to imagine an apocalypse or disaster. Most science fiction is filled with such ideas.
“But we struggle to imagine positive alternatives: what our care or education systems, welfare, workplaces, democracy or neighbourhoods might be like in 30-40 years. And we appear to be worse at doing this than in the past,” writes Mulgan, in his essay on social imagination, titled The Imaginary Crisis.
Why are we so inept at this? Well, not everyone is. There are numerous, powerful examples of wise imaginations of our collective futures.
At Untitled we attempt to do just that.