Future Now
The IFTF Blog
2009 Ten-Year Forecast: The Future is a Chance to Be New
The 2009 Ten-Year Forecast Annual Retreat, "Superstructing the Next Decade," took place in historic Cavallo Point in Sausalito, CA on April 20th & 21st. Materials, found here, from this meeting are available for download, including:
The Handbook
Begin by looking at the Handbook for an overview of the ecologies and the strategies. The handbook will also provide you with simple
directions for how to go about reading and analyzing the ecologies and the strategies. Once you have read the handbook, dive into the
ecologies and the strategies!
The Superstruct Ecologies
Illustrating the links among the many superstructures created by our 7000+ Superstruct players, the ecologies begin to depict possible future institutional landscapes.
The Appleseed Ecology
Starting from a game that taps real-life gardens to advance urban
farming through “simfarms”, this ecology describes a new infrastructure for securing food, repurposing waste, and creating new forms of exchange.
The Natural Currency Ecology
This ecology re-envisions our capital systems as tied, not to gold or GDP or other commodities, but to environmental measures, linking
sociability to sustainability.
The Community Works Ecology
Recognizing thet “large-scale problems do not require large-scale
solutions,” this ecology creates superstructures for replicating local solutions across large-scale systems.
The Open Fab Initiative Ecology
The Open Fab Initiative is the starting node for a densely
interconnected ecology of superstructures that explicitly link new very small-scale fabrication tools and practices to solving the problems of distressed communities-creating new local material and economic realities.
The Quantum Governance Ecology
Building on the desire to create a new post-Newtonian model of
governance, this ecology is thick with superstructures that help
citizens make sense of the world-bridging across realities.
The Superstruct Matrix Card
Begin the Superstruct Strategies by reading the Matrix Card. It will give you 5 simple rules to follow as you look at Superstructing your own organization or life. The Matrix card will also help know what to look for as you discover the separate Superstruct Strategies.
The Superstruct Strategies
The Superstruct game is not only a forecasting game designed to
anticipate new kinds of superstructures. It’s also an experiment in
superstructing. Out of the experiences of both the designers-the IFTF team-and the people who have played the game, seven basic strategies for superstructing have emerged.
Evolvability
Nurture genomic diversity and generational differences.
Extreme Scale
Layer micro and massive scales for rapid adaption.
Ambient Collaboration
Leverage stigmergy with environmental feedback.
Reverse Scarcity
Use renewable and diverse resources as rewards.
Amplified Optimism
Link amplified individuals at massive scales.
Adaptive Emotions
Confer evolutionary advantage with awe, appreciation, and wonder.
Playtests
Challenge everything and everyone in fun, fierce bursts.
The Perspectives
The perspectives take a closer look at 5 of our forecast from our 2009 Map of the Decade. Each perspective includes an analysis of the forecast, an interview with an expert, and examples of what
superstructig this perspective looks like.
Design: Post-Newtonian Governance
The Newtonian politics that emerged at the end of the 18th century were a triumph of human ingenuity and foresight, applying the latest technologies and a scientific understanding of the universe to the design of governance. However, there has been little true innovation in governance since the creation of the U.S. Constitution. All that is about to change.
Civil Society: Networked Citizens
The citizen of the future is a native of the network; and that changes everything. It tempers border-based identities. It refocuses political action on issues that are both more local and more global at the same time. It links expressiveness to empowerment and turns the smart consumers of the early Internet era into activist citizens of the coming decades.
Environment: Geoengineering
With broad scientific consensus that global warming requires deep cuts in carbon emissions, what remains unanswered is the question of whether we’ll have enough time to implement the economic, social, and technological changes necessary to reduce our carbon footprint. In the face of massive, irreversible changes in our living ecologies, a growing number of scientists have a backup plan: large-scale geoengineering.
Culture: Superstructed Realities
As physical and digital realities are seamlessly integrated, cyberspace is not a place that people go; it’s a new layer in their reality. It’s a superstructure of that will serve as our outboard brains and senses, remaking the basic concept of self and changing how we keep ourselves physically sound.
Cognition: Beyond FOXP2
It’s been at least 40,000 years since modern humans-Homo sapiens-became the only sapient life on earth, set apart by a critical mutation in the so-called language gene, FOXP2. But that isolation won’t last much longer. In a quest to augment our own intelligence with biotechnology and digital tools, our first experiments are re-engineering animal brains. What happens when we “uplift” our fellow species and potentially create a new cross-species politics?
Map of the Decade
This year’s map blends forecasts of innovation and disruption with a handful of Superstruct Ecologies-along with dozens of signals on the horizon-to create a map that features five big shifts: Extreme-Scale Collaboration, Alternative Wealth, Superstruct Ecologies, Mega-Structures, and A Governance Renaissance.
Overview
The Future is a chance to be new. This year’s TYF research delves into issues from a collapsing economy paving the way for new kinds of value to a new voice rising from the Global South plotting a new path for the next big economy to extreme climate conditions wiping the landscape clean to a new neuroscience presenting an extrodinary new picture of humans, and much much more.
The Overview gives an intro to the Perspectives, Superstruct Handbook, Signal Survey, and the MOTD.
50-Year Outlook
The Choices we make make in the next decade will set the course for the century. Likewise, our visions of what the world could be in 30 or 50 years shape the decisions we make today, both directly and indirectly. Looking long, we offer the following three scenarious:
The long Crisis plots a path of slow response, resistance to change, and attempts to maintain current power relationships.
Emergence follows a course of rapid adaptation from the bottom-up, without much unifying direction.
The Great Transition envisions a world re-made by technology, a challenge to the planetary dominance of humans as a species.
TYF Signals Survey
Using more traditional survey research methods, this year’s Signal
Survey probed the edges of innovation with questions about personal
avatars in online virtual worlds, about mobile health practices,
sustainable medicine, new forms of political engagement, and the kinds of bonds that form so-called “new diasporas.” The survey results point to the waves of social innovation we can expect in the coming decade.
Agenda Booklet
Take a look at the attendees and researchers involved in the
conference, along with how we went about unfolding our research over two days.