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I read Heart of Darkness, an amazing book

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and one passage in particular just lept out and smacked me between the eyes

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and I can't remember it all by myself so I'll just read it to you

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"It is impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one's existence.

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That which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence.

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It is impossible. We live as we dream: alone."

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And that's haunted me since the age of 18.

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I don't know what it was in my 18-year-old mind that resonated with that passage,

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but I think you know perhaps it's just the resonance of any

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strongly articulated existentialist loneliness.

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But I wondered, you know, Can we really be that alone? All of us? Together?

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It didn't make sense. We'll come back to that.

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So, on the plane on the way here, I was listening to an audio book

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of Arthur C. Clarke's: Childhoods' End.

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It's the first Arthur C. Clarke's book I have actually read.

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It's an amazing work, but of course I don't need to labour this point with this audience,

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that there's nothing so characteristic of an age's thinking as its science fiction

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and, I mean, of all the science fiction writers, Clarke is remarkable

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for the extent to which his imagination was able to sort of achieve an escape velocity

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from the culture of is time, to really think way ahead into different times and places

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and to take us there.

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But I it got me thinking about the fact of imagination

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and that our brains are, our brains are not [temporaly bound?]

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It's what we scaffold them with that limits us.

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In other words, to the extent that we are able to imagine the present that we live in,

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which Clarke and others of his age couldn't foresee,

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we are capable of imagining entirely different worlds in the future

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that we just don't at the moment.

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And I find that an interesting contradiction.

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So what's the relevance of all that for governance futures?

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Well, the relevance is that basically I think this is a massively missing piece

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from our public culture,

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that there is essentially no public culture of imagination.

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Yes, there's Dick Tracy, and there's Star Trek, and there's Arthur C. Clarke,

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and there's plenty of stuff since all of that.

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But our conversations about the future, and about the future of governance,

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and about the worlds we could be choosing among,

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we do not have a culture of imagining those in any concrete way

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and then choosing among them wisely.

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We agonize over procedural details like

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deliberation (the weighing of alternatives)

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and decision (which is the killing of alternatives)

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when we make a choice.

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But where in that, I mean, that essentially becomes meaningless

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or close to meaningless, when the alternatives are underimagined

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or drab or cliched or simply absent from the picture overall.

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And so my friend Natalie German Janko, who is an engineer and an artist

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has a wonderful phrase which I learned from her a couple of years ago:

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"structures of participation".

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[Her] art is about creating structures of participation for people.

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And I love this frace because I think it summarizes to me

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what good futures' work does: create structure of participation for co-imagining.

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And so, as I see it, governance (at least the design side of it) is about

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designing structures of participation for collectively shaping the common good.

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And that can look like the design of an event like this one,

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or the design of a system like the United States of America,

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or the design of an intervention like the one that I'm about to describe.

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Because my favorite experiential futures intervention is a perfect instance

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of the kind of collective imagination that I'm describing,

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and it comes from the Arab Spring.

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So, in January 2011, Tunisia ousted its dictator

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somebody [rather] Ben Ali.

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And the economy started tanking.

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The revolutionaries hadn't expected to succeed,

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they didn't know what was gonna succeed [as in "go after"] the overthrow.

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And what may ensued could have been actually much worse

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than what had been there before.

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You know in these kinds of political vacuums anything can happen.

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But a month later, on the 16th of February 2011, for a day,

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on newspapers, television and radio,

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they reported from the 14th June 2014: 3 years and 3 months into the future.

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By the end of the day that was the number one hashtag, [something in French]

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in Twitter was beginning to trend in France,

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and it began to change the public conversation to make a future for Tunisia imaginable,

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which catalysed an actual change and a recovery in the wake of that revolution.

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So, to bring it back to our starting point,

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I'm I no longer believe that we are condemned to dream alone.

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I think that we can dream together.

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And to the extent the 21st century government succeeds

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that's what we'll be doing on a regular basis.