Obsessions With Futures Is Bad
‘It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth’ p6 le-guin-1982-non-euclidean-view
a central thread of the essay is that utopias are reductive, limited spaces that align with ideas of constant progress, of which this trajectory is currently responsible for a lot of damage in the world. This make me think that in my thining for the phd research I should perhaps consider other words when imagining alternate realities than ‘possible futures’ as it has a negative connotation and within the sphere of computational/technology research there is a unfortunate obsession with ‘techno-optimism’ which is incredibly damaging, as it is extractive and obsessed with functionality and metrics. I don’t want to contribute to that.