“Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment… Humanity is in a final exam as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in the Universe.” — R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion Fuller wrote this back in 1969, an incredibly productive year […]
EO Wilson was a genius: The Half Earth Project
The Good Future, An Infinite Game By Juliana Tranjan
A Good Future is an infinite game… “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play”. This is how James Carse begins his book “Finite and Infinite Games”, […]
Our Good Future By David Houle
I believe that the 2020s are the most disruptive decade in history. It is also perhaps the most historically important decade as well. What humanity does this decade will shape the trajectory of civilization at least through 2060 if not to the end of the decade. It is the time to reorient our efforts toward the Good Future. I have written six books about this decade transition from what was to what will be.
What’s Old is New Again By Ken Hubbell
I have sitting on a shelf in my workshop an iOS 7 model smartphone. It no longer holds a charge. No one remembers the original passcode (and we only have one chance remaining before it bricks itself, never to be accessed again). You may be wondering, why on earth is he saving a 6-year old […]
The Death of Scientific Independence by James Lovelock
As the planet lurches towards a climate emergency and its life support systems falter, the need for visionary thinkers with fresh insights and big ideas has never been more pressing. No wonder, then, that the world mourned the death earlier this year of James (‘Jim’) Lovelock, whose Gaia theory provided a new framework to think […]
The Good Future Project Live-Stream Event: Why a Good Future is possible
The Good Future Project, initiated by Futurist Gerd Leonhard and supported by the Futures Agency, is a global, non-profit network of like-minded individuals and supporters who focus on making ‘The Good Future’ (TGF) a reality. TGF’s concept is based on Gerd’s 2021 film ‘The Good Future’. TGFP’s blogs, video-channels and live-stream sessions serve as a […]
Talking Across Differences: A Paradigm for Raising Consciousness by William Halal
This article focuses on one of the great challenges facing all of us today – how can we resolve the raging conflicts fomented by social media?
Conflict has always been a problem, but the digital revolution has raised it into one of the great challenges of our time. Facebook and other social media platforms inherently provoke the differences that drive today’s wave of “post-factual” nonsense. Statistica reports that 70 percent of Internet users think fake news causes confusion, and 83 percent say disinformation harms politics. One analyst framed the problem this way: “In the past, wars were conducted with weapons. Now it’s through social media.”
Leading with Hope by Jackie Nagtegaal
In 2018, Bill Gates guest-edited an edition of Time Magazine, which focused on optimism. According to Gates, “being an optimist doesn’t mean you ignore tragedy and injustice. It means you’re inspired to look for people making progress on those fronts, and to help spread that progress more widely” (Gates, 2018). In the same year, Steven Pinker published Enlightenment Now and the Roslings published Factfulness; both of which make a clear case that the world is better than we think. These were all attempts to counteract the paranoid pessimism of our time.
When things go Meta by Jackie Nagtegaal
And off the Gen Zs go! They speak at a thousand words a second, clambering over each other to share their insights. Multiple tirades, trying to juggle a future of mental health concerns, wealth gaps and the complexity of conceptualising the merger of digital and real worlds.