WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.611 I read Heart of Darkness, an amazing book 00:00:04.611 --> 00:00:08.186 and one passage in particular just lept out and smacked me between the eyes 00:00:08.186 --> 00:00:11.274 and I can't remember it all by myself so I'll just read it to you 00:00:11.274 --> 00:00:16.274 "It is impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one's existence. 00:00:16.274 --> 00:00:21.746 That which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence. 00:00:21.746 --> 00:00:27.474 It is impossible. We live as we dream: alone." 00:00:27.474 --> 00:00:30.743 And that's haunted me since the age of 18. 00:00:30.743 --> 00:00:35.295 I don't know what it was in my 18-year-old mind that resonated with that passage, 00:00:35.295 --> 00:00:38.692 but I think you know perhaps it's just the resonance of any 00:00:38.692 --> 00:00:44.244 strongly articulated existentialist loneliness. 00:00:44.244 --> 00:00:50.698 But I wondered, you know, Can we really be that alone? All of us? Together? 00:00:50.698 --> 00:00:53.185 It didn't make sense. We'll come back to that. 00:00:53.185 --> 00:00:56.750 So, on the plane on the way here, I was listening to an audio book 00:00:56.750 --> 00:00:59.486 of Arthur C. Clarke's: Childhoods' End. 00:00:59.486 --> 00:01:03.805 It's the first Arthur C. Clarke's book I have actually read. 00:01:03.820 --> 00:01:06.513 It's an amazing work, but of course I don't need to labour this point with this audience, 00:01:06.513 --> 00:01:11.324 that there's nothing so characteristic of an age's thinking as its science fiction 00:01:11.324 --> 00:01:17.464 and, I mean, of all the science fiction writers, Clarke is remarkable 00:01:17.464 --> 00:01:22.194 for the extent to which his imagination was able to sort of achieve an escape velocity 00:01:22.194 --> 00:01:27.052 from the culture of is time, to really think way ahead into different times and places 00:01:27.052 --> 00:01:28.797 and to take us there. 00:01:28.797 --> 00:01:33.017 But I it got me thinking about the fact of imagination 00:01:33.017 --> 00:01:38.940 and that our brains are, our brains are not [temporaly bound?] 00:01:38.940 --> 00:01:41.934 It's what we scaffold them with that limits us. 00:01:41.934 --> 00:01:45.611 In other words, to the extent that we are able to imagine the present that we live in, 00:01:45.611 --> 00:01:50.320 which Clarke and others of his age couldn't foresee, 00:01:50.320 --> 00:01:54.359 we are capable of imagining entirely different worlds in the future 00:01:54.359 --> 00:01:56.291 that we just don't at the moment. 00:01:56.291 --> 00:01:58.122 And I find that an interesting contradiction. 00:01:58.122 --> 00:02:00.733 So what's the relevance of all that for governance futures? 00:02:00.733 --> 00:02:05.833 Well, the relevance is that basically I think this is a massively missing piece 00:02:05.833 --> 00:02:07.788 from our public culture, 00:02:07.788 --> 00:02:12.884 that there is essentially no public culture of imagination. 00:02:12.884 --> 00:02:15.797 Yes, there's Dick Tracy, and there's Star Trek, and there's Arthur C. Clarke, 00:02:15.797 --> 00:02:18.671 and there's plenty of stuff since all of that. 00:02:18.671 --> 00:02:21.836 But our conversations about the future, and about the future of governance, 00:02:21.836 --> 00:02:23.951 and about the worlds we could be choosing among, 00:02:23.951 --> 00:02:26.885 we do not have a culture of imagining those in any concrete way 00:02:26.885 --> 00:02:29.028 and then choosing among them wisely. 00:02:29.028 --> 00:02:31.383 We agonize over procedural details like 00:02:31.383 --> 00:02:34.965 deliberation (the weighing of alternatives) 00:02:34.965 --> 00:02:38.018 and decision (which is the killing of alternatives) 00:02:38.018 --> 00:02:39.889 when we make a choice. 00:02:39.889 --> 00:02:44.538 But where in that, I mean, that essentially becomes meaningless 00:02:44.538 --> 00:02:48.375 or close to meaningless, when the alternatives are underimagined 00:02:48.375 --> 00:02:54.098 or drab or cliched or simply absent from the picture overall. 00:02:54.098 --> 00:02:58.502 And so my friend Natalie German Janko, who is an engineer and an artist 00:02:58.502 --> 00:03:02.553 has a wonderful phrase which I learned from her a couple of years ago: 00:03:02.553 --> 00:03:04.192 "structures of participation". 00:03:04.192 --> 00:03:07.150 [Her] art is about creating structures of participation for people. 00:03:07.150 --> 00:03:09.778 And I love this frace because I think it summarizes to me 00:03:09.778 --> 00:03:14.937 what good futures' work does: create structure of participation for co-imagining. 00:03:14.937 --> 00:03:18.615 And so, as I see it, governance (at least the design side of it) is about 00:03:18.615 --> 00:03:24.177 designing structures of participation for collectively shaping the common good. 00:03:24.177 --> 00:03:27.742 And that can look like the design of an event like this one, 00:03:27.742 --> 00:03:30.188 or the design of a system like the United States of America, 00:03:30.188 --> 00:03:34.889 or the design of an intervention like the one that I'm about to describe. 00:03:34.889 --> 00:03:40.296 Because my favorite experiential futures intervention is a perfect instance 00:03:40.296 --> 00:03:44.643 of the kind of collective imagination that I'm describing, 00:03:44.643 --> 00:03:46.470 and it comes from the Arab Spring. 00:03:46.470 --> 00:03:49.965 So, in January 2011, Tunisia ousted its dictator 00:03:49.965 --> 00:03:53.451 somebody [rather] Ben Ali. 00:03:53.451 --> 00:03:54.912 And the economy started tanking. 00:03:54.912 --> 00:03:56.893 The revolutionaries hadn't expected to succeed, 00:03:56.893 --> 00:04:01.770 they didn't know what was gonna succeed [as in "go after"] the overthrow. 00:04:01.770 --> 00:04:06.372 And what may ensued could have been actually much worse 00:04:06.372 --> 00:04:08.031 than what had been there before. 00:04:08.031 --> 00:04:10.994 You know in these kinds of political vacuums anything can happen. 00:04:10.994 --> 00:04:15.824 But a month later, on the 16th of February 2011, for a day, 00:04:15.824 --> 00:04:20.115 on newspapers, television and radio, 00:04:20.115 --> 00:04:24.442 they reported from the 14th June 2014: 3 years and 3 months into the future. 00:04:24.442 --> 00:04:28.773 By the end of the day that was the number one hashtag, [something in French] 00:04:28.773 --> 00:04:30.961 in Twitter was beginning to trend in France, 00:04:30.961 --> 00:04:35.345 and it began to change the public conversation to make a future for Tunisia imaginable, 00:04:35.345 --> 00:04:40.072 which catalysed an actual change and a recovery in the wake of that revolution. 00:04:40.072 --> 00:04:44.434 So, to bring it back to our starting point, 00:04:44.434 --> 00:04:49.662 I'm I no longer believe that we are condemned to dream alone. 00:04:49.662 --> 00:04:53.001 I think that we can dream together. 00:04:53.001 --> 00:04:55.612 And to the extent the 21st century government succeeds 00:04:55.612 --> 00:04:59.000 that's what we'll be doing on a regular basis.