The Future We Deserve - 100 essays

[Cain]

Passing this on because someone I enjoy reading - counterculture security consultant, Vinay Gupta - contributed a few essays and is pimping the project.

Also because it is free.

http://thefuturewedeserve.com/

So what can I tell you? As you know, a hundred people wrote for the book. I wrote a couple of pieces, one or two other people wrote a couple of pieces, but it's basically a hundred different perspectives. It's shocking, jarring, powerful stuff. The common experience is that it's so dense (the pieces are a page each, more or less) and the ideas so packed that after reading a couple of pieces you need to put it down and do something else while it assimilates. I feel like we might wait most of a year before decent reviews come out because it takes that long to assimilate it.

I waited. This is the hard part to explain. We had most of the material in place a year ago, and I had some grand ambitions. They were twofold. Firstly, I wanted to write a long sense-making introductory essay picking out common threads and deep ideas, spinning a coherent narrative from the pieces people had given us. Secondly, I wanted to run some workshops on the book, using the ideas in it as starting points for conventional futurism.

I failed in both of these, and that's why you should read the book. Here's the lesson: when you actually talk to people in depth about what they want in life, it's not possible to approximate a useful truth from it. You blur it, you build categories, you can pretend the pieces join.

But when you read the source data, the world stops for a while. The experience is gazing at the world through a hundred different lenses, peering into hopes and fears, closely held, tightly expressed, beautifully composed in many cases, and slowly dawns the insight.

We have no idea where we are going or what is going on.

There's the stuff we know about global warming and population and resource scarcity, that part of the future we understand. But there is a human factor beyond all that, something within us that you have to ask the right questions to see. I did not know, when I said "the future we deserve" that I'd hit on a key which empowered people to get in touch with their deepest hopes (and fears) for humanity and the world, and speak with authority for themselves and our race.

This book has soul.

It's free. Please read it and pass it on.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Anyone know how we go about convincing them to do an audiobook copy? I know a picky reader who could really use this one.

[Cain]

For a minute, I thought they had anticipated that, when I found this file on the site http://files.howtolivewiki.com/the_future_we_deserve/the_future_we_deserve_2.ogg

Sadly, it's not the case. 

[Doktor Howl]

Thanks, Cain.  I'm definitely getting this one.

[Cain]

No problem.  I have the free one, but I will buy a hard copy when it's on Amazon - I can always leave it in a library or second-hand bookstore for someone else.

[Doktor Howl]

No problem.  I have the free one, but I will buy a hard copy when it's on Amazon - I can always leave it in a library or second-hand bookstore for someone else.

I can't stand e-books, so I'm going to get the hardcopy.

[LMNO]

Another book joins the queue.

[Scribbly]

This is great.

I was amused to see the seasteading guy is in there. Plugging away his vision of a future with a competitive market for nation states.

[Scribbly]

Number 12 - There is No Future - Eleanor Saitta is where I stopped for today and that one so far has stood out the most. It has some common themes in line with modern Discordian thinking - the overall message being 'don't reject reality just because it isn't comfortable, it is still happening whether you like it or not'.

Seasteading has been the weakest so far, IMO (though the one talking about tomatoes was laughable as well). I'm not sure whether the idea you don't have to fight anyone to claim a lump of ocean and start living there, or the claim that we'll all go back to eating only locally produced food in the future because it is more rewarding (I think  ) is more ridiculous.