Visionary thinking - The Venus Project · article “Visionary Thinking”, ... Klaus Æ. mogensen,...

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fo012010 the Utopia issue FO/futureorientation #1 2010 Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies Instituttet for Fremtidsforskning Visionary thinking Nudging utopia Orwell Was a Pessimist The World According to Fresco Utopian Spaces

Transcript of Visionary thinking - The Venus Project · article “Visionary Thinking”, ... Klaus Æ. mogensen,...

Page 1: Visionary thinking - The Venus Project · article “Visionary Thinking”, ... Klaus Æ. mogensen, klm@cifs.dk layout: Karina bjerregaard illustrations: Jacque Fresco,

fo012010 the Utopia issue FO/futureorientation #1 2010

Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies Instituttet for Fremtidsforskning

Visionary thinking

Nudging utopia

Orwell Was a Pessimist

The World According to Fresco

Utopian Spaces

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DesigneD by Jacque Fresco, www.thevenusproJect.com

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A vision is to a business as a lighthouse is to a ship at sea – a signpost and a guideline for futu-re direction. A utopia can be roughly the same thing, albeit on quite another scale. A utopia describes a future society that is substantially different from the present. Thus, it distinguishes itself from a vision in its magnitude and in its radical nature

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EDITORIAL

UtopiaUtopia comes from Greek. U = ‘no’ + topos = ‘place’, so ‘utopia’ means a non-existing place.1 ”This is utopian,” we say, meaning that something is farfetched and unrealis­tic. In this way, the concept of utopia has become part of our daily language and influences the way we think. However, it is worth noting that utopias are not always unrealistic, nor does the original meaning of the word imply they should be. On occasion, they could easily be realized, if we could just agree to do so. In his article “The Difference Between Utopias and Visions – and the Fear of the Totalitarian Nature of the Utopia”, on page 9, Martin Kruse writes about the realistic utopia, and in particular the origin of the utopia in the history of ideas. Read it to learn more about what a utopia really is. Perhaps the modern interpretation of the word ‘uto­pia’ is to blame when the Renaissance man and futurist Jacque Fresco says in the article on page 15 that he doesn’t want to call his life work, The Venus Project, a utopia. However, this visionary idea of a future society has many characteristics in common with the utopia. As Nikolina Olsen­Rude points out in her article, page 37, the word utopia carries a double meaning, since in Greek it can mean both the good place (eutopia) and the non­existing place (outopia). A good place is precisely what Fresco has devoted his life to describing and fighting for. Read more about his ideas in the article and see the futuristic photos of the project that Fresco and his wife, Roxanne Meadows, have kindly allowed us to print. The flip side of the utopia is the dystopia. One of the best­known fictional dystopias is the classic George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948. Klaus Æ. Mogensen deals with this novel in two articles in this FO, ”Orwell Was a Pessimist” and ”Orwell Was an Optimist”. As the sharp reader may have figured out, you can – depending on your viewpoint – argue that our present­day society is both far better and far worse than the future society Orwell describes in his book. Has the nightmare of Big Brother from the novel become a rea­lity today? Has the surveillance society won? Read the articles and decide for yourself. The relationship between utopias and dystopias is inte­resting. What is a paradise to some will be hell to others. History has taught us that people are simply different and that we can’t formulate a single, universal idea of ‘the good society’ or ‘the good life’ that will satidfy every­body. It is hence interesting when the three philosophers Kyle Whyte, Evan Selinger and Søren Riis, the latter an associated researcher at CIFS, discuss the phenomenon of nudging in their article Nudging Utopia (page 29).

Nudging is a matter of providing “small, gentle nudges” in the right direction without making us really notice it. This is achieved by designing and organizing our sur­roundings to influence our behaviour in a certain way. It is worth learning about this method regardless of which medium you want to influence behaviour through e.g. design. However, as usual, the question remains: What is the ‘right’ direction? What is the right behaviour? Here, too, the readers must decide for themselves. For, as with surveillance technologies, it is the intended goal when using nudging that must be debated. There is much more about utopias in this issue of FO, which also offers a number of interesting contributi­ons outside of the theme. Read, for instance, the first part of an article series by CIFS’s Nestor, Johan Peter Paludan, about future strategy in the present (page 53). Or read the business philosopher Morten Paustian’s article “Visionary Thinking”, page 61, which uses Hans Christian Andersen’s character Clumsy Hans to take us on a philosophical trip to recreate “the fairy tale in our lives”. Happy reading!

In conclusion, I can inform you that right now you are reading the last issue of FO/Futureorientation in its old form. We are on the street again in May with a big dou­ble issue (#2­3), marking the shift to a brand new FO. Among other things, the magazine will get a new design, and we will move from publishing thematic issues to writing about different themes and subjects in each issue under the headings

DEVELOPMENT · VISIONS · IDEAS · TRENDS.

I am looking forward to presenting you with the new format. Morten Grønborg, Editor

notes1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/utopia

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characterized by complex structures and globalization, it is easier to speak of individual responsibility than of a common dream, which we all must struggle to realize

UTOpiAns - OUr clOsesT cOlleAgUes?by Johan peter paluDan ......................................................46

OUTside OF Theme:

nine Trends And nine invenTiOns ThAT will shApe The FAce OF The 21sT cenTUryby marcel bullinga ...............................................................49nine trends and nine inventions will shape the face of the 21st cen-tury. they will have a similar impact on our lives as the car, the tv and the airplane had on the lives of our parents. take a sneak peak at marcel bullingas upcoming book Futurecheck

FUTUre sTrATegy in The presenT – pArT 1by Johan peter paluDan ......................................................53the historian and the futurist can be said to study two sides of the same matter, specifically the present, writes Johan peter paludan in this first article about the phenomenon of futures studies and its role in organizational and strategic planning visiOnAry Thinking – A philOsOphicAl Trip wiTh clUmsy hAnsby morten paustian ...............................................................61thoughts aren’t just isolated in the human skull, but contain im-pulses with ideas that fly around among other people. the thoughts vibrate out in the world and attempt to guide people forward to each other, so that encounters and events can become inspiring transactions

cOnTenTs

Theme: UTOpiA

ediTOriAlby morten grønborg .............................................................5

The diFFerence BeTween UTOpiAs And visiOns – And The FeAr OF The TOTAliTAriAn nATUre OF The UTOpiAby martin Kruse .......................................................................9what is the difference between a utopia and a vision? what is the origin of the utopia in the history of ideas? and what role does futures studies play in it all? take the time to read martin Kruse’s article and get wiser

The wOrld AccOrding TO FrescOby morten grønborg ...........................................................15with the venus project, 93-year-old Jacque Fresco, a multi-discipli-narian and futurist, has created an all-encompassing alternative to the society we live in today. Fresco recently visited copenhagen as part of the event cop Kreativ, where he talked about designing the future. if you weren’t near copenhagen, or if you happened to miss his lecture, you can read here about his ideas of how we can create a better world

Orwell wAs An OpTimisTby Klaus Æ mogensen:..........................................................20“big brother is watching.” this is how george orwell described the surveillance society in nineteen eighty-Four. the novel depicts a dystopian society where the state closely watches everyone and strikes down hard on any activity that can be viewed as subversive. ‘big brother’ often shows up as a grim spectre in contemporary debates about surveillance, but reality is actually surpassing fiction: we are under surveillance everywhere, often without being aware of it, and the information collected about us is kept for years and may be used against us. hence, orwell could be seen as an optimist

Orwell wAs A pessimisTby Klaus Æ mogensen:..........................................................24“big brother is watching.” this is how george orwell described the surveillance society in nineteen eighty-Four. the novel depicts a dystopian society where the state closely watches everyone and strikes down hard on any activity that can be viewed as subversive. ‘big brother’ often shows up as a grim spectre in contemporary debates about surveillance, but reality isn’t as bad as the fiction: we may be watched everywhere, but we can remain calm, because the surveillance is there to protect us. orwell was a pessimist

nUdging UTOpiAby søren riis ............................................................................29the nudge technology can lead to better design, more desirable behaviour and a better world … all without your noticing it. the method is based on the fact that human beings are far less rational and intelligent than we like to think. hence, we can benefit from small, gentle, imperceptible nudges in the right direction

UTOpiAn spAcesby niKolina olsen-rule ........................................................37in order to understand the more philosophical ideas behind the uto-pia phenomenon, a more concrete approach may be necessary. For this purpose, a society’s physical organization is an obvious thing to watch. take a look at three perfect cities

FAiTh in The FUTUre in A wOrld OF dysTOpiAsby sara Jönsson ....................................................................43utopias are big words and thoughts. but in a world increasingly

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eDitor: morten grønborg (responsible under Danish press law), [email protected] eDitor: Klaus Æ. mogensen, [email protected]: ellen mauri, [email protected] aDaptation: Klaus Æ. mogensen, [email protected]: Karina bjerregaardillustrations: Jacque Fresco, www.thevenusproject.com cover: portrait of Jacque Fresco. www.thevenusproject.com and Karina bjerregaard

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The Difference Between Utopias and Visions – and the Fear of the Totalitarian Nature of the Utopia

by martin Kruse

What is the difference between a utopia and a vi­sion? What is the origin of the utopia in the history of ideas? And what role does futures studies play in it all? Take the time to read Martin Kruse’s article and get wiser

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the DiFFerence between utopias anD visions - by martin Kruse

laws, predict the future (prévision rationelle). Comte’s desire was to transfer the positivist approach from natu­ral science to sociology. Modern simulations and data models of societal economy are rooted in this conviction.

Karl vs. Karl

In his book The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945, the philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902­1994) attacks the idea of progress as it manifested itself from the Age of Enlightenment forward. The criticism is directed mainly at the idea of Utopia and in particular at Karl Marx. Popper’s main argument is that the idea of progress, as manifest in Marx and others, has totalitarian elements. The book is a defence of liberal democracy and contri­buted to a debate that was central in the post­War years. Popper’s criticism of deterministic holism, which charac­terizes the macro­historical view often termed historicism, is closely tied to his contempt for the anti­democratic form of government, of which he sees Communism as one example. Popper’s criticism of historicism must hence be viewed in light of the totalitarian form of government, which during his time was seen as a threat by many, particu­larly by Popper himself. Popper viewed the idea of a Communist future, in which the world population is unified in an equal community, and in which the means of production is common property, simply as a propagan­dist attempt to control the populace. Popper’s distinction between the concepts of holistic social engineering and piecemeal social engineering expresses the ideological difference between change brought about in totalitarian and democratic forms of government respectively. At the same time, it expresses the difference between visions and realistic utopias on the one hand, and the utopias that lead to totalitarianism and oppression on the other hand. Holistic social engineering aims to transform soci­ety as a whole. The goal is to realize what is seen as a realistic utopia. Clear parallels can be drawn with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Sartre’s lectures from his later period also express a desire for such a change in society. Unfortunately, some of Sartre’s students took his ideological outbursts seriously and went to Cambodia with their newly gained ideology. More than one million people were killed in Cambodia in the attempt to achieve a particular societal model. According to Popper, it is unrealistic to think that an entire society can be recon­structed according to pre­made plans. Such an attempt cannot be made without an ideological basis, which necessarily seems oppressive to people with a different view.

u In the sociologist Anthony Giddens’ most recent book, The Politics of Climate Change (2009), Giddens focuses on the realistic utopia as a method to change the world. From a different perspective, a wide range of current management books stress the importance of visions. A vision is to a business as a lighthouse is to a ship at sea – a signpost and a guideline for future direction. A utopia can be roughly the same thing, albeit on quite another scale. A utopia describes a future society that is substan­tially different from the present. Thus, it distinguishes itself from a vision in its magnitude and in its radical nature. Historically, the utopia is intimately connected to the understanding of progress and hence to historical research, sociological history, and normative futures studies. The idea of an ideal society has taken different shapes through the ages and has been used for different pur­poses. When Thomas More (1477­1535) wrote his book Utopia, it was – as so many other works of the time were – a way to bypass censorship and a way to criticize those in power. The original description of Utopia differs from the descriptions of Elysium and Eden in the Greek and the Christian­Judean traditions, respectively, by placing the ideal society on Earth, but at the same time making it a non­existent place. In many of the descriptions that follo­wed, the realistic Utopia is described as the end point of history – a tradition in the history of ideas of which the American writer Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is a part. The idea of Utopia is thus also connected with changes in the understanding of progress; in particular phase studies, which explain the linear progression from a bar­baric phase to a developed society: a viewpoint that has dominated historic understanding up to our time. Plato, Aristotle and Protagoras all viewed progress as a gradual development towards a higher, final state. In the Christian tradition, the Greek and the Judean traditions are united, and the medieval thinkers Roger Bacon (1215­1294) and Bernard de Chartres (1130­1160) thus see pro­gress as an accumulative gathering of knowledge leading to Utopia. With the Age on Enlightenment, this final stage is changed. For Auguste Comte (1798­1857), who can be seen as the father of sociology, the final stage is under­stood as the world entering a state of true positivism, in which rationalism is consummated and a society based on principles of natural science can be realized. Like John Stuart Mill (1806­1873), Comte sees progress as an absolute trend, which according to Mill is anchored in the human drive to vie for greater material wealth. Comte’s positivist position is founded in his conviction that one can, with a basis in the past and through general

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the DiFFerence between utopias anD visions - by martin Kruse

in France. The method was (and is) used in planning edu­cation, the environment, urbanization, regional planning, and more. The basic premise of the French tradition is that a so ciety consists of powerful actors in groups with diffe­rent motives, who influence each other and the political process in society. When politicians must consider the long­term political and social future of a nation, the lob­bying and general influence of these actors can become decisive for the nation’s future. The famous futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903­1987) hence thought it important to create ideal images or realistic utopias for the nation’s future and show a way to reach these futures, which could improve life for the nation’s populace as a whole, not just for a few powerful interest groups. The French tradition is thus characterized by succes­sfully using the realistic utopia for society as a whole while conducting piecemeal social engineering. Somewhat caricatured we can say that, where the futurist tradi­tion in the United States has been about optimising a company’s income, the French tradition is about handling the influence of organizations in a way that benefits the entire population. Hence, these traditions in futures stu­dies echo the ideological differences between Capitalist and Social Democratic social structures. Realistic utopias are important, as Giddens point out, because they express as possible what would otherwise seem impossible within the framework of current prac­tice. The International Energy Agency’s scenario Bright Skies is an example of a future vision that points the way towards something that is possible, though unlikely. Great visions, however unlikely, are a strong driving

Hence, Popper concludes that this kind of utopian­ism is a societal viewpoint that naturally leads to totalitarianism1. Instead, Popper advocates what he calls piecemeal social engineering ­ a concept that denotes a gradual development of society. This means that one ought to establish visions for particular areas of the existing society and work to achieve these visions – rather than overthrowing the entire social structure. Piecemeal social engineering is the goal that we in futures studies aim to achieve through formulating and realizing normative scenarios.

Normative futures studies

Unlike explorative scenarios, normative scenarios don’t ask the question “what could happen?” but rather the question “how do we achieve our goal?” The COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009 were an example of this. Here, the world’s nations gathered to agree on a climate treaty. Normative scenarios are strategic. Futures studies in the United States are most commonly used in connection with strategic development of companies, helping to find new markets or assess the risks of company strategy. In contrast, the French futurist tradition in particular has traditionally been strongest within politics, where the systematic study of future political scenarios is common­ly used. In this sense, the French tradition comes closest to what Popper criticizes as anti­democratic. Since the 4th French National Plan was constructed for the years 1960­1965, the normative method has spread2, not least becau­se of Pierre Masse, who led national economic planning

A vision is to a business as a lighthouse is to a ship at sea – a signpost and a guideline for future direction

The realistic Utopia is described as the end point of history – a tradition in the history of ideas of which the American writer Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is a part

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these brief moments we experience what it means to live in Utopia.

martin Kruse has a ma and is employed at the copenhagen institute for Futures studies. he works, among other things, with creativity, inno-vation and methods in futures studies

force because they are often accompanied by great per­sonalities who manage to create faith that the unlikely is possible. For example, the American president Barack Obama has already become a cult figure, and many people believe that he can make a difference. This was underscored very clearly when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 after only nine months as president. I don’t think I will insult anybody by stating that the prize was given to Obama primarily for his intentions rather than his results3. He also divides his critics, just as presi­dent J.F. Kennedy (1917­1963) did in his time. It is when these impossible possibilities are shown to us that we experience greater community and everyday trivialities are reduced to what they are … trivialities. It is when a wall falls somewhere in Europe or a man makes his first steps on the moon that we experience an entire world moving together from one epoch to another. In

the DiFFerence between utopias anD visions - by martin Kruse

instead, popper advocates what he calls piecemeal social enginee r­ing - a concept that denotes a gra-dual development of so ciety. This means that one ought to estab-lish visions for particular areas of the existing society and work to achieve these visions – rather than overthrowing the entire social structure

realistic utopias are important, as giddens point out, because they express as possible what would otherwise seem impossible within the frame work of current practice

notes1 sartre’s discussion with camus about the sanctity of man as opposed to the necessity of social change stands witness to, among other things, this understanding in the post-war european cultural life.2 bradfield, r. et al: “the origins and evolution of scenario techniques in long range business planning” in Futures vol. 37, nr. 8, p. 795- 812, 2005.3 the official reasons for giving the prize can be read here: http://nobel- prize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/press.html

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by morten grønborg

With The Venus Project, 93­year­old Jacque Fresco, a multi­disciplinarian and futurist, has created an all­encompassing alternative to the society we live in today. Fresco recently visited Copenhagen as part of the event COP Kreativ, where he talked about de­signing the future. If you weren’t near Copenhagen, or if you happened to miss his lecture, you can read here about his ideas of how we can create a better world

The World According to Fresco

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the worlD accorDing to Fresco - by morten grønborg

u There aren’t many alternative, thoroughly conceived societal models left, nor are there many practical idea­lists. The Venus Project and its creator, American Jacque Fresco (1916­) are examples of both. The Venus Project is at once futuristic architecture, technological futures studies, a sociological project, and an all­encompassing model of how we can improve the world on many levels, in particular the economy and the environment. It is the brainchild of multi­disciplinarian and futurist Jacque Fresco – who is now 93 years old – and uses words, images, videos, photos, and architectonic models to describe a potential future. The work has been developed by Fresco himself together with his wife, Roxanne Meadows, and a large number of volunteers worldwide. It is a life’s work in the true sense of the word – a work that both has been the centre of the creator’s life and has taken most of a life­time to realize. At the same time, the word gesamtkunst-werk is appropriate, for just like Arne Jacobsen – who, among other things, designed SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen from its exterior shape down to details like door handles, chests of drawers, and coffee spoons (as well as the famous chair the Swan) – Fresco has thought about everything. The Venus Project is a single, unified idea for a better world and hence very close to what we normally call a

utopia. However, according to its creator, it is something else: “The Venus Project is not a utopian concept,” Jacque Fresco clarifies1. “We do not believe in the erroneous notion of a utopian society. There is no such thing. Societies are always in a state of transition. We propose an alternative direction, which addresses the causes of many of our problems. There are no final frontiers for human and technological achievement.”

The idea

Fresco recently visited Copenhagen as a part of COP Kreativ2, a climate event for Danish design and architec­ture students, where he talked about designing the futu­re. If you weren’t near Copenhagen, or if you happened to miss his lecture3, you missed his explanation of what the Venus Project is really about. Is the project architecture? Design? Politics? Sustainability? Economy? The answer is: all of the above! The Venus Project presents an alternative design of our culture. It suggests an achievable path to a bet­ter future through connecting the latest technological developments directly to the social system. The idea is that through education, research and using what we already know, we can abolish poverty, war, starvation, crime, and even taxes.

The venus project presents an alter-native design of our culture. it sug-gests an achievable path to a better future through connecting the latest technological developments directly to the social system. The idea is that through education, research and using what we already know, we can abolish poverty, war, starvation, crime, and even taxes

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began a life­long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project.”5

The changing political and economic realities in Fresco’s adult life have not made his project less rele­vant. Now, in his advanced age, Fresco has faced another economic mess, namely the global financial crisis, which by several economists has been compared precisely to the situation in 1929. However, the financial crisis could hardly have surprised Fresco, as for many years he has criticized the system that produced it. The Venus Project presentation video tells us: “The American free enterprise system does generate incen­tive. However, it also creates greed, corruption, crime, stress, and economic insecurity The consuming pursuit of money that grips many in our society has a dehuma­nising effect and has led us to our present self­centred values.” Fresco asks rhetorically what would happen if we, for example, continued to automate production around the world and in doing so got rid of more and more human labour. His response is that we very quickly would find ourselves in a situation in which the majority of Americans, and people everywhere, would lose their purchasing power to buy products. “So what good is a factory that is turning out all the wheels, if it is making all the cars automatically – who will be around to be able to buy those cars? What will they use for money? So what happens? Our system dies. The free enterprise system was terrific 50 years ago, maybe 30 years ago, but it is no longer adequate. So if an automobile factory, or any other factory, goes complet­ely automatic, and most people lose their jobs, and they don’t have the purchasing power, you tell me how the free enterprise system can function. It comes to an end.

”There is no place to hide today,” Jacque Fresco says, in good accordance with the Institute’s ideas about No Comfort Zones, ”because you can’t hide from human instability. War, weapons, corruption seem to dominate everywhere. Our primary goal, and our primary reason for the project, is to make these things belong to the past.” As stated in one of the many presentation videos about the project that you can find on YouTube4, “These goals are not merely a paper proclamation. They can be trans­lated into physical reality if, as a society, we choose to do so. A democracy that doesn’t ensure the basic necessities of life is meaningless.”

The economic system is collapsing

The aim of the Venus Project is first and foremost to ensure social stability, which requires among other things high­quality health services, a clean environment, and access for all to the amenities that a well­functioning soci­ety must provide. However, there is no doubt that economics, in particu­lar a different economic system, plays a key role in the project. The Venus Project was founded in the 1970’s, but Fresco has repeatedly stated that his upbringing in the United States after the Great Depression of the 1930’s influenced his social conscience and enabled him later to devise his vision: “Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the Earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn’t have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This

the worlD accorDing to Fresco - by morten grønborg

There is no place to hide today,” Jacque Fresco says, ”because you can’t hide from human insta-bility. war, weapons, corruption seem to domina-te everywhere. Our primary goal, and our primary reason for the project, is to make these things belong to the past.

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to repair the old. This is exemplified in the idea of the circular city: a fully conceived, sustainable and efficient city consisting of concentric circles around The Central Dome, with recreational areas at the outer rim. Inside is everything a modern society needs. The idea isn’t unlike Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow, see page 38, though naturally it is infinitely more modern. After all, there’s 75 years between the projects. Fresco recommends connecting cybernate system computers to automated machinery, coordinating all the city’s functions and processes. This can be compared to the brain and nervous system of an organism. In the city’s housing areas, the system monitors environmental management and the recycling of waste. It also monitors and adapts supply and demand between fabricators and consumers, balancing production and distribution accor­ding to demand. Hence, according to the idea, excess pro­duction and scarcity can be eradicated. Cybernation (cybernetics + ­ation), which means the automated control over a production or process through computer control, is a keyword. Fresco maintains that only when this cybernation is fully integrated into our culture can computers sensibly serve humankind and its needs: ”No technological civilization can ever operate efficien­tly and effectively without the application of cybernetics to the social system. This dynamic approach only acts to enhance human lives – it doesn’t monitor or dictate their

And when it comes to an end, there will be gangs and riots, and crime begins to rise. I’m not advocating this, I’m not for this; I’m just describing what most likely will happen,” he says and continues: “If that happens, a military dictatorship will come in, in which people will tell you how to live and what to do. That’s called a dictatorship. It comes about when you can’t manage the vast majority of your people. This dic­tatorship is something I have a tremendous fear of, and we are trying to do this Venus Project in order to show people a possible alternative to social chaos.”6 The Venus Project hence recommends a resource­based economy that makes all the basic amenities of life avail­able to all. This can only be achieved through intelligent application of research and technology – not by going on in the same groove, the same system. The idea is that the true value of any society is its resources, both poten­tial and developed, as well as the individuals that work towards eradicating resource scarcity. “80 percent of all jobs will be phased out. We will no longer need politicians, businessmen, bankers, soldiers, and lawyers,” Fresco told a Danish newspaper7 when he visited Copenhagen.

The key word is cybernation

The tight­knit metropolitan society is the key to the pro­ject, which proposes a tabula rasa approach (see page 39), whereby you build new cities rather than trying

the worlD accorDing to Fresco - by morten grønborg

The venus projectthe 25-acre research center of the venus project is situated in venus, Florida. this constitutes the first phase of the project’s realization. here, you can find full-scale buildings as well as models that physi-cally show how nature and technology can co-exist. read more at www.thevenusproject.com.

Jacque Fresco Jacque Fresco (1916-) is a self-taught industrial designer, writer, futu-rist, and educator, and he is the founder of the venus project. his followers – many of them with roots in the Zeitgeist movement– call him ‘a modern Da vinci’. the movie Future by Design (2006) descri-bes Fresco’s life from when he experienced the wall street crash in 1929 and the following Depression until today. in spite of his 93 years, Fresco still teaches various subjects, including holistic design of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, and advanced technological automation. he has recently been a guest lecturer in copenhagen. read more about Fresco and his ideas at www.thevenusproject.com and www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

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lives. The idea is to create so good living conditions and so high standards of living that everybody will be free to choose the lifestyle they find the most fulfilling.”

Culture

Even though the city core’s production units are auto­mated, they are non­polluting, silent and clean, with easy access to the cities. Goods and products are transported on boats along canals, while people are transported cen­trally from the Dome (e.g. by automated monorails8 desig­ned for transportation between cities, or by air or sea between states.) Fresco also has suggestions for undersea housing units in which the view from your window wouldn’t be surface nature, but fish and other marine life. However, technology and design of the physical world alone won’t cut it. The culture must also be designed and the population educated for a better world. We are limited by our past. ”Perhaps the greatest limi­ting factor of our present­day pre­scientific culture can be traced to our language, social customs and values, which were conceived in earlier times,” the argument goes9. However, any similarity to earlier totalitarian regimes is resisted:

“The design of The Venus Project will not only be applied to cities, industrial processes and the environment, but to education as well. The aims of The Venus Project have no parallel in history, not with communism, socialism, fascism or any other political ideology. This is true becau­se cybernation is of recent origin. With this system, the system of financial influence and control will no longer exist.””10

morten grønborg has an ma and is editor of Fo/Futureorientation

we are limited by our past. ”perhaps the greatest limiting factor of our present-day pre-scientific culture can be traced to our language, social customs and values, which were conceived in earlier times

Photos in this issue of FO are used with permission of The Venus Project as visual illustration of this article. Thanks to Roxanne Meadows, Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project.

notes1 Faq at www.thevenusproject.com2 read more at http://copkreativ.dk/3 see Fresco’s cop Kreativ lecture at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dwilpqkpJf44 http://tinyurl.com/ydrjqk85 interview at www.thevenusproject.com6 see note 4.7 http://www.information.dk/2053028 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/monorail9 see note 410 ibid.

the worlD accorDing to Fresco - by morten grønborg

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Orwell Was an Optimist“Big Brother is watching.” This is how George Or­well described the surveillance society in Nineteen Eighty­Four. The novel depicts a dystopian so cie­ty where the state closely watches everyone and strikes down hard on any activity that can be view­ed as subversive. ‘Big Brother’ often shows up as a grim spectre in contemporary debates about surveil­lance, but reality is actually surpassing fiction: We are under surveillance everywhere, often without being aware of it, and the information collected about us is kept for years and may be used against us. Hence, Orwell could be seen as an optimist.

This is one of two articles that illumi-nate each side of the phenomenon of ‘surveillance’ as explored in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Read “Orwell Was a Pessimist” to hear the other side of the story

by Klaus Æ. mogensen

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DesigneD by Jacque Fresco, www.thevenusproJect.com

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orwell was an optimist - by Klaus Æ. mogensen

set up and operate the surveillance cameras. So why is it done? Is it because of a collective delusion about the cameras’ efficacy? Or is it something more sinister? Surveillance cameras are the most visible form of surveillance and the one that we – partly because of Orwell – are most aware of. However, in our daily lives, we are watched in many other ways, some of which take much closer peeks at our private lives than the cameras do. The problem is that we aren’t aware of this surveil­lance because it is invisible. One example is when we use our credit or debit cards. Every time we withdraw cash in an ATM or use a card to pay in a shop, the banks register where we are and how much money we use. If we use our customer card in our local supermarket, the supermarket chain keeps an account of our day­to­day purchases in order to create a profile of our consumption – a process called data mining4 – and this information is used to make us consume more. The British supermar­ket chain Budgens secretly takes photos of everybody buying alcohol or cigarettes in order to compare them with a national database of minors that previously have attempted to buy such products5. Do you carry a mobile phone on you? If so, your telephone company knows at all times where you are – even when you aren’t using your phone. Telephone companies must keep records of phone calls for at least three years, and your text messages are typically saved for 30 days – even if you delete them on your phone. There are examples of divorce cases in which the spouse’s text messages are used as evidence of infidelity6. The next step in fighting internet piracy may very well be to force telecommunications companies to analyze all data packages sent over the internet to check if they contain pirated material7. Once such a system is in place, it can easily be expanded to look also for political mate­rial or other unwanted activity. However, you shouldn’t feel too safe now, either. When you go on the internet, there is a considerable risk of your computer becoming infected with ‘spybots’, a type of computer virus that

u In Great Britain, you can buy a popular t­shirt with the text “Orwell was an optimist”. This is not a word usually associated with the famous British writer. His works tend to be gloomy, and his science fiction novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) contains one of literature’s most fear­some descriptions of a despotic society. The t­shirt’s mes­sage still reverberates today because surveillance of our everyday lives has progressed far beyond what Orwell could foresee in his wildest imagination. Our every action is mapped in detail by the state and by large corporati­ons, but because we aren’t always aware that this sur­veillance is taking place, we generally don’t worry much about it. Perhaps we should worry, for surveillance is only going to increase in the future. The most familiar type of surveillance is through surveillance cameras, also known as cctv (closed­circuit television)1. These surveillance cameras are particularly common in Great Britain, where there are an estimated five million of them – one for every 12 citizens2. The best are good enough to recognize people up to 75 meters away. The authorities aren’t alone in conducting surveillance; many of the cameras are set up by private companies in shops and parking garages, outside banks and goldsmiths, or in residential areas. Most recordings are kept for a month or longer – sometimes far longer. In Orwell’s novel, surveillance was limited by how many people you could instruct to watch others (and who should watch the watchmen?), but we are moving bey­ond that limitation. Today, computers can analyze video images and recognize not just individual people, but also suspicious behavioural patterns. A person can be follo­wed from camera to camera in order to map the indivi­dual’s movement in detail. The defence offered for the many surveillance came­ras is that they help to solve crime. However, according to a study conducted by the British police in 2008, only about three percent of all crimes are solved with the help of cctv3 – hardly enough to justify the billions it cost to

every time we withdraw cash in an ATm or use a card to pay in a shop, the banks register where we are and how much money we use. if we use our customer card in our local supermarket, the super-market chain keeps an account of our day-to-day purchases in order to create a profile of our con-sumption - a process called data mining

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data? Experience suggests otherwise; for instance, in 2007, the government of Great Britain lost two hard disks containing confidential data about 25 million citizens11. There’s cause to be worried. Very worried. Orwell was an optimist.

Klaus Æ. mogensen has a ba in physics and astronomy and works at the copenhagen institute for Futures studies. he works with the pos-sibilities of technology and their significance for our society and lives, with future culture and lifestyles, consumption and media, and ipr (intellectual property rights).

monitors your internet activity and reports back to some private – or public? – body8. Recent measures for improving traffic in our cities also lead to more surveillance. Many metropolises have introduced – or are introducing – payment systems with personal cards that are registered by RFID readers when you enter or exit buses and trains. The system means that your movement is registered in detail, and this informa­tion is saved for at least as long as you, as a customer, have the opportunity to complain about your bill9. But can’t paranoid travellers who don’t want to be regi­stered just drive their own car instead? Perhaps, but not for long. Several countries, including Denmark and Great Britain, are considering introducing road pricing through GPS or the forthcoming European positioning system Galileo10. Again, your movement will be registered in detail. The conclusion is obvious: Our actions and decisions are monitored and registered almost constantly, no mat­ter if we are in a public place, at work, in a shop, or sitting in front of our personal computers. The ways in which we are watched will most likely multiply in the future, and with the developments within information and communication technology, we can count on all sorts of data about us being exchanged and analyzed to an ever­increasing degree. It may be that we, at the present time, trust the authorities not to abuse their knowledge about us. But are we willing to maintain that trust fore­ver? Besides, can we trust the authorities to protect our

orwell was an optimist - by Klaus Æ. mogensen

surveillance of our everyday lives has progres-sed far beyond what Orwell could foresee in his wildest imagination. Our every action is mapped in detail by the state and by large cor-porations, but because we aren’t always aware that this surveillance is taking place, we gene-rally don’t worry much about it

notes1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/closed-circuit_television2 paul lewis: ”every step you take”, the guardian 2. marts 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/02/westminster-cctv-system-privacy3 ibid.4 www.tech-faq.com/data-mining.shtml5 www.boingboing.net/2008/05/14/london-supermarket-s.html6 www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/24/french-divorce-ruling- all_n_267043.html7 paul marks: ”net piracy: the people vs the entertainment industry”, www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427375.2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spybot_worm9 see eg. www.tinyurl.dk/1286310 www.tinyurl.dk/1247411 www.tinyurl.dk/12481

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this is one of two articles that illumi-nate each side of the phenomenon of ‘surveillance’ as explored in george orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. read “orwell was an optimist” to hear the other side of the story

Orwell Was a Pessimist

“Big Brother is watching.” This is how George Orwell described the surveillance society in Nineteen Eighty­Four. The novel depicts a dysto­pian society where the state closely watches every­one and strikes down hard on any activity that can be viewed as subversive. ‘Big Brother’ often shows up as a grim spectre in contemporary debates about surveillance, but reality isn’t as bad as the fiction: We may be watched everywhere, but we can remain calm, because the surveillance is there to protect us. Orwell was a pessimist.

by Klaus Æ. mogensen

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orwell was a pessimist - by Klaus Æ. mogensen

were printed. Surveillance of restaurants and the food industry regularly uncovers foul and unhealthy business practices. The world is a safer place when surveillance techniques protect ordinary people. Surveillance isn’t just a matter of protecting us, but also of making our lives easier and ensuring justice. In the near future we are likely to introduce road pricing through satellites13, which will ensure a fairer traffic tax that reflects each driver’s actual use, and will provide the opportunity to give discounts for driving outside the peak hours or using lesser­used roads. Once the move­ment of all cars is registered continually, it also becomes easier to warn about congestion and suggest alternative routes. At the same time, such a system will make it easier to find stolen cars, and that is surely something good (unless you are a car thief!) A society entirely without surveillance, where every­body can act anonymously, isn’t a utopia, but a dystopia. Everyone would be able to commit crimes with impunity, whether violence, fraud, terrorism, or child pornography. Arguments about the sanctity of privacy have their place, but if atrocities such as the Austrian Josef Fritzl’s impri­sonment and rape of his own daughter for 24 years can take place under the cover of privacy, we must ask our­selves if privacy really should be so sacrosanct14. If you

u George Orwell was a great writer, but we must blame him for creating an overblown fear of surveillance. After all, by far the majority of surveillance is there to protect us, and few people should mind this. It isn’t “Big Brother is watching”, but rather “Big Mother is watching over you”. Be honest: When you enter an empty parking garage or an underground station late at night, aren’t you glad that there’s a camera that keeps an eye out in case you’re mugged? Aren’t you glad that your bank makes a list of your credit card purchases? Isn’t it nice that the super­market has cameras that watch out for pickpockets and shoplifters? It may well be that a lot of surveillance today is of too poor quality to solve very many crimes, but the technology keeps improving. By now, image software can recognize people’s faces even when they wear beards and dark glasses12. We should also remember that it is not just private citizens that are watched, but also companies and fringe political and religious groups. The current financial crisis might not even have taken place if we had more surveil­lance of the financial sector, and surveillance of radical Moslem groups recently uncovered a planned armed attack on the Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and the newspaper Jyllands­Posten in which the cartoons

A society entirely without surveillance, where everybody can act anonymously, isn’t a uto-pia, but a dystopia. everyone would be able to commit crimes with impunity, whether violence, fraud, terrorism, or child pornography

it isn’t “Big Brother is watching”, but rather “Big mother is watching over you”

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haven’t got anything to hide, you shouldn’t mind surveil­lance. Society only works as long as we can watch each other and hence keep each other on the path of virtue. The good news is that surveillance in our society is increasingly decentralized and laid in the hands of the individual citizen. We are living in an increasingly trans­parent society where few atrocities can be kept hidden. Private photos and videos taken with mobile phones are increasingly used to solve crimes – even crimes com­mitted by authorities, as when citizens record examples of police violence15. Misconduct by big companies is more and more often uncovered through surveillance by private citizens, as when the billionaire swindler Stein Bagger was brought down by the blogger Dorte Toft16. Dictatorships’ aggression against their own people are documented on the internet the same day, as when the Iranian student Neda Salehi Agha Soltan was shot by Iranian security troops in June 2009 during a protest over the re­election of Ahmadinejad17. Little Brother keeps an eye on Big Brother. The surveillance of the big by the small has become so effective because it has become harder for the big to con­trol the media to the same extent as before. Anybody can in a few minutes put a video recording on the internet, and if it is important enough, it will be seen by millions of people – as happened with the video of Soltan’s death. In connection with the protests in Iran in 2009, Twitter also turned out to be a communication platform that was hard for the authorities to control, and during later pro­tests, the Iranian authorities found it necessary to close

down the entire telephone system18. Without absolute power of the media, an absolutist regime as described in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot exist for long. For this reason alone, we shouldn’t worry too much about the surveillance society. Orwell was a pessimist.

Klaus Æ. mogensen has a ba in physics and astronomy and works at the copenhagen institute for Futures studies. he works with the pos-sibilities of technology and their significance for our society and lives, with future culture and lifestyles, consumption and media, and ipr (intellectual property rights).

without absolute power of the media, an absolutist regime as described in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty­Four cannot exist for long. For this reason alone, we shouldn’t worry too much about the surveillance society. Orwell was a pessimist

orwell was an optimist - by Klaus Æ. mogensen

notes1 www.technologyreview.com/computing/22234/?a=f2 www.tinyurl.dk/124743 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case4 http://hothardware.com/news/nypD-wants-your-videos-to-help- Fight-crime5 www.computerworld.dk/blog/redbord/16126 www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6557858. ece7 www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6902427. ece

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DesigneD by Jacque Fresco, www.thevenusproJect.com

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DesigneD by Jacque Fresco, www.thevenusproJect.com

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Nudging Utopia The Nudge technology can lead to better design, more desirable behaviour and a better world … all without your noticing it. The method is based on the fact that human beings are far less rational and intelligent than we like to think. Hence, we can benefit from small, gentle, imperceptible nudges in the right direction

by søren riis, evan selinger and Kyle whyte

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nuDging utopia - by søren riis, evan selinger and Kyle whyte

thinks in the short term, if he thinks at all, and is also rather lazy. Human beings aren’t as intelligent as we would like to think, and we repeatedly make bad choices. The world in which we live isn’t as logically coherent or as just as we can imagine in our dreams. Studies that deal with human choice and reasoning have shown that we often make a number of common mistakes.2 In gene­ral, we ar e unreasonably optimistic. Among other things, Thaler & Sunstein refer to studies for which a number of entrepreneurs were asked two different questions: a) Typically, how likely do you think it is for a company like yours is to succeed? b) How likely are you to suc­ceed? For question a, where the participants had to evalu­ate the general likelihood of success, most answered “50 percent chance of success”. However, when they had to evaluate the likelihood of their own success, most answe­red “90 percent” or even “100 percent”. You see the same erroneous estimates when you ask newlyweds about the likelihood of a future divorce. Most estimate that it is basically impossible that this should happen to them, while US statistics show clearly that about 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. Our starry­eyed optimism may have the function that we don’t all end up becoming depressed about the wor­ld’s true dystopian state – but this optimism also means that we repeatedly make mistakes and are cheated. For instance, we expect big lotto winnings that we’re never going to get, and we think we will float on top if (or when) climate change really kicks in. If we connect this optimism to our various methods for conscious reasoning, things don’t look much better, quite the opposite, in fact. In our everyday lives, we tend to use a number of rules of thumb that are random and often quite misleading. The basis of our reasoning is often guided more or less arbitrarily by the given context. For example, a study asked a group of university students two questions in this order: 1) How happy are you? 2) How often are you on a date? When the questions were asked in this way, there was hardly any correlation between the answers. However, when another group of students were asked the same questions in the opposite order, a different pattern emerged. The students who hadn’t had a date for a long time used this fact as a basis for answering question number two, and suddenly felt rather miserable. Hence, they rated their general level of happiness lower than the first control group. We also use another ‘method’ to make our choices and decide our future actions, and this is no less random than the example above. The extent to which the individual worries about the risk of, for example, nuclear power, terrorism, Creutzfeldt­Jacob disease, H1N1, driving a car, sunbathing, and air travel depends on how easily examp­les of the given dangers emerge in our minds.

u If you are male, you are probably already familiar with a form of ‘nudge technology’ – at least if you have used a urinal in the Schiphol airport near Amsterdam. By pla­cing an image of a fly close to the urinal drain, cleaning needs in the airport toilets have been reduced drastically. Without giving it much thought, most men aim directly at the fly, which leads to about 80 percent less ‘spills’. In their controversial and noteworthy book Nudge, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein look at this phenomenon and suggest a range of solutions for the financial and climate crises as well as for the design of user­friendly products.

Homo Simpson and the dystopian society

In Thaler’s & Sunstein’s book, nudges are promoted as an ingenious middle road between freedom and paternalism. Through nudges, bans and injunctions can be minimized while our freedom is optimised in a responsible way. For example, a nudge could be useful in a modern supermar­ket to make customers buy healthier food. In this context, nudging may mean that you organise a supermarket to make fruit and vegetables easily available and placed at eye level. At the same time, candy should be placed out of the way to ensure that it escapes the attention of those who don’t have sweets on their shop­ping list. However, it is well known that supermarkets often place candy at eye level near the cash registers so that everybody is confronted with it. This temptation should be seen in relation to the obesity epidemic, which each year costs companies and the health care system bil­lions because of related diseases1. This is a nudge desig­ned to promote the customer’s willingness to purchase, though one that promotes poor rather than good health. However, the principle is the same. It is a matter of pro­viding a ‘nudge’ to promote a particular behaviour. Before we take a closer look at the paradisiacal vision behind the nudge technology, we would first like to explain how, why and where nudges work. The idea behind nudges is that people aren’t fully rational beings (homo economicus) who, through deliberation, knowledge and a good memory make wise, well­considered choices. In fact, most of the time we act on mental autopilot. We don’t really think things through, or we are influenced by our senses. For example, we are not making a fully ratio­nal decision when we put a chocolate bar that we didn’t really plan to buy in the cart at the supermarket cash register. Only a relatively small fraction of our time do we spend the time and energy to reflect on our choices. In a somewhat caricatured but highly illustrative fashion, Thaler & Sunstein compare our everyday ‘self’ with Homer Simpson from the American cartoon series The Simpsons (1989­). In many ways, homo simpson is the direct opposite of homo economicus. Homo simpson

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other. In other words, the dystopian background, which requires nudge technologies, is the society we are living in. If we are to sort out the ways of the world and make real progress, we should start by nudging ourselves into more appropriate behaviour.

Towards paradise on autopilot

Once we become aware of our typical mistakes, we can use nudges to organize the world in a way that com­pensates for them. The vision is to make the world an in spired, paradisiacal place for people to live. The mis-sion is to turn the environments we live and work in into secured cribs, in which it requires extra effort to fall over and hurt oneself. In this light, we can see nudges as physical and mental training wheels of a sort. In order to design the ideal user­, citizen­ and customer­friendly environment, we need a type of expert, which Thaler & Sunstein call a ‘choice architect’. These architects must be well versed in the science of human decision theory and must construct environments and user interfaces so intelligent that we make as few mistakes as possible and generally act more in accordance with our personal interests. In this way, we don’t really need to think much. Through the work of the choice architects, we will be more or less automatically nudged in the right direction. The authors repeatedly compare these experts to grand masters of chess: able to foresee when various moves will lead to unavoidable loss. By giving us a due nudge in the right direction, the choice architects will make our lives

If, for instance, there has recently been a major plane crash, we generally become far more afraid of flying, even though air safety in general is improving. If there has recently been an earthquake, far more people buy insurance against earthquake damage than they other­wise would. In 2001, many people were very afraid of Creutzfeldt­Jacob disease. But when two planes cra­shed into the Twin Towers in New York, the fear of Creutzfeldt­Jacob practically disappeared and was repla­c ed by an epidemic of fear of terrorism and hatred of Muslims. If we connect these irrational decision procedures with the familiar human trait of laziness, we reach the sad, godforsaken place where most are in need of a nudge in the right direction. According to the authors of the book Nudge, human laziness shows itself in how our behaviour has a certain degree of inertia. It takes a lot before we even consider changing the status quo. Hence, we often accept the default settings on various products. When buying a new mobile phone, adults rarely change the ringtone. Once we start subscribing to a newspaper, we don’t cancel it for months or even years after we stop rea­ding it regularly. It is in this state of mind that we act in our everyday lives. The satirical portrayal of Springfield, Homer Simpson’s hometown, may seem distant from most people’s images of their own world; but it seems that in reality Springfield is just a slightly exaggerated image of our own society, which delivers one major crisis after the

By placing an image of a fly close to the urinal drain, cleaning needs in the airport toilets have been reduced drastically. without giving it much thought, most men aim directly at the fly, which leads to about 80 percent less ‘spills’

if we are to sort out the ways of the world and make real pro-gress, we should start by nudg-ing ourselves into more appro-priate behaviour

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nuDging utopia - by søren riis, evan selinger and Kyle whyte

happier step by step. The subtitle to Thaler & Sunsteins book, Nudge, is in perfect harmony with this overall paradisiacal vision: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. The nudge vision has found great popularity with leaders on the political right and left. Both David Cameron in the UK and Barack Obama in the US have shown great interest in ‘nudging’ for a better society.

Nudging in practice

Let us now take a closer look at some of the concrete sug­gestions for nudges that Thaler & Sunstein make in their book ­ nudges that can help us realize the overall positive vision of an effective and happy society. Most agree that the primary cause of the financial crisis was the prevalence of subprime mortgages. As we now know, these mortgages are often exempt from repayments for a period of time and have particularly low interest rates the first few years. They can be rather opaque and difficult to compare. In this context, a nudge could consist of ‘default’ mortgages being fixed­rate bond loans, which – according to the above insights and expe­riences – will lead more people to choose this more secu­re type of financing. Another financial nudge could be transparency and standardization of the banks’ commu­nication of repayment rates, interest rates and fees. This will make different products easier to compare, so that we – even with our normally limited mental capacity – can make the best possible choices. In addition, studies of retirement schemes show that many people, if asked, are willing to spend a certain fraction of their future wage increases on savings. Analogous to this, the banks’ ‘default setting’ in relation to exempt­from­repayment mortgages could be that future wage increases would automatically lead to greater down payments on loans unless you explicitly want something else. This is particu­larly important if the customer has a subprime mortgage that is exempt from repayment, since the aforementioned optimism can easily contribute to unrealistically high

expectations of future income. Through these nudges, our society would become more stable, private budgets would be healthier, and the fortunes of the market would be unimportant – all without the individual citizen having to do much. Thaler & Sunstein also suggest possible nudges to ensure a green and sustainable future. Basically, we don’t need substantial legislative changes, but simply gentle nudges, in order to achieve a more efficient and sustaina­ble society. As the authors point out, energy is mainly invisible to users; hence, it is unclear to them how much they use. For this reason, a clear visual indicator of energy use will often have a positive effect. Thaler & Sunstein refer to a study that showed that, if consumers were equipped with a globe that glowed red when they used a lot of energy and glowed green when their energy use was low, they reduced their energy consumption by 40 percent in the test period. In China, individual homes don’t even have electricity meters, so there is little inducement to save energy. In Denmark, we have to pay individually for electricity use, but our electricity meters aren’t pretty, nor do they have a particularly smart inter­face. Hence, they tend to be hidden well away where they can’t nudge us in a more sustainable direction. A society with ubiquitous nudges would run like a well­oiled engine with a clear course towards a ‘para­disiacal’ state. In this dream society, people get out of bed at the right time in the morning because everybody has a fine nudge alarm clock on wheels, which means they can’t easily hit ‘snooze’, but instead are forced out of bed in order to catch and stop the alarm clock3. Once they get up, the citizens eat low­calorie meals and drive to work in electric cars (which of course in their default setting drive by themselves, so they neither collide with other cars nor cause damage to pedestrians). Work is foolproof, so to speak. If the employee does anything unusual, they are asked several times if they are sure, and a number of alternative choices will automatically be offered – just like when we attempt to delete a file on our

The idea behind nudges is that people aren’t fully rational beings (homo economicus) who, through deliberation, knowledge and a good memory make wise, well-considered choices. in fact, most of the time we act on mental autopilot

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nuDging utopia - by søren riis, evan selinger and Kyle whyte

richard h. thaler & cass r. sunstein: nudge: improving Decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. penguin books, usa 2009. søren riis has an ma in philosophy and german and a phD in phi-losophy. he is an associated employee at the copenhagen institute for Futures studies and assistant professor at roskilde university centre (ruc). evan selinger has a phD in philosophy. he is associate professor of philosophy at rochester institute of technology, usa. Kyle whyte has a phD in philosophy. he is assistant professor of philosophy at michigan state university, usa.

computer. If an employee gets home at night after a hard day, during which he or she somehow managed to make an error, and then starts a loud fight with the girlfriend or boyfriend, the wall microphones recognize the high­pitched, unusually unfriendly tone and immediately start streaming a calming piano concert through the home lou­dspeakers. At the same time, a text message is sent from the digital psychiatrist to the effect that you should try to think of the best thing that happened that day. Because of the deterrent effect – and just in case something bad occurs – everything is taped on video. After having cal­med down, the citizen can go peacefully to bed and be well rested for the next day’s challenges. To many, such a society is probably not a paradise at all. Yet we accept some nudges and strive towards a safe and efficient society. Technological medicine for healing society’s ailments doesn’t come without possible side effects. It is up to future citizens and politicians to draw the lines and implement a range of nudge technologies in tomorrow’s diverse society. However, in the spirit of enlightenment, we would first like to have some debate about the phenomenon.

it is up to future citizens and politicians to draw the lines and implement a range of nudge tech-nologies in tomorrow’s diverse society. however, in the spirit of enlightenment, we would first like to have some debate about the phenomenon

notes1 in this connection, read also riis, søren: ”overvægt: en tungtvejende trend”, børsen, 20082 e.g. psychology, game theory and economics3 thaler & sunstein refer to this alarm clock, which already exists

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DesigneD by Jacque Fresco, www.thevenusproJect.com

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Architec-ture is the will of an epoch translated into space.Mies van der Rohe

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Utopian Spaces In order to understand the more philosophical ideas behind the utopia phenomenon, a more concrete approach may be necessary. For this purpose, a so­ciety’s physical organization is an obvious thing to watch. Take a look at three perfect cities

by nikolina olsen-rule

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utopian spaces - by nikolina olsen-rule

Utopia is a sort of prototype of an ideal society where everybody has equal rights and thrives in a harmonic community. Later, the French sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault, among others, dealt with the concept of utopia in his essay Of Other Spaces – Heterotopias (1967). Here, he presents the utopia as closely linked to the heteroto­pia: “Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.”

Looking from a present­day perspective, the question is why we have anxiety when it comes to utopia and the idea of an ideal society. Perhaps it is because history has taught us about the big, fallen utopian societies. As the Slovenian philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek points out, the fall of the Wall marked the end of the Communist utopia, and the 9/11 attack in New York kil­led the idea that the world was heading towards a liberal utopia. Finally, the deification of the global market (the forces of free enterprise) was wounded fatally in 20083. However, in order to understand some of the more complex philosophical and socio­critical discourses sur­rounding utopia, a more concrete approach may be neces­sary. Here, a society’s physical organization is an obvious thing to watch in order to understand how conceptual ideologies are turned into reality.

The perfect city

Three utopian schools in particular have influenced city planning in the 20th century. The first of these is the garden city, invented by city planner Ebenezer Howard, who in the same year as he published his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898) founded the Garden City move­ment in Great Britain. The garden city reflects the utopia

u Imagine a world without poverty or wretchedness, or simply a society where everyone can feel safe and well adjusted, and where there is meaningful work and bright, spacious housing for everyone. This may sound like pure utopia, but is it? A closer examination of utopian influ­ences on modern city planning may give new hope to the utopia. Why do we find it hard to embrace the notion of uto­pia today? The answer may be that we require a rational explanation for everything. However, it seems that we are seeing a change in attitudes towards utopia. We do not embrace utopia blindly, but because we modern individuals today are facing new challenges that make us extremely vulnerable. Many things suggest that the soci­etal structures we have so long taken for granted are now being shaken to the core. If you aren’t already worried about the financial crisis, there’s the climate or the war in the Middle East, not to mention poverty. But what is our call to action? A so­called Zeitgeist movement has grown from the ashes of the global crisis. But in order to be able to believe that we human beings can change the world, we must understand utopia as an alternative, radically different business model1.

The etymology of utopia

The concept of utopia cannot be boiled down to a single thing. The word utopia has a double meaning, since in Greek it can mean both the good place (eutopia) and the non­existing place (outopia). The opposite of utopia is dystopia – a concept that refers to a hostile place. Finally, there is heterotopia, which means ‘the other place’2. The West’s encounter with utopia goes back all the way to Plato’s The Republic, circa 400BC. Utopia was re­encountered in about 1515, when the writer and Renaissance thinker Sir Thomas More published his novel Utopia. Here, More describes a journey to an ima­ginary island society that, unlike the Europe of his time, was characterized by egalitarian rule (based on equal distribution of society’s riches, e.g. equal wages). More’s

Futurism’s 100th birthdayFebruary 2009 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Futurist manifesto by the movement’s founder Filippo tomassi marinetti (1876-1944). Futurism was an italian avant-garde move-ment that included literature, art and architecture. the movement celebrated human-made motion, the future, and technology. objects like machines and cars were often used as symbols of the ideology of Futurism. some of the artists that adopted the Futurist ideology were giacomo balla (1871-1958), umberto boccioni (1882-1916), carlo carrà (1881-1966), gino severini (1883-1966), and the architect antonio sant’elia (1888-1916)7.

Brasillia – the realized utopian citybrasilia is the capital of brazil and has about 3.6 million inhabitants. the city is situated in the central parts of brazil’s highlands and was planned and developed from 1956. the brazilian architects lúcio costa and oscar niemeyer were the main people behind the architec-tural design. originally, brasilia’s road network was planned in a spe-cial loop system that made normal traffic lights obsolete. the city is included in unesco’s list of world heritage sites8.

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of a city in the midst of nature, designed like a satellite city consisting of a centre encircled by green belts or zones. The clever thing about the garden city is that it is constructed from a modular system wherein small self­sufficient cooperatives and village units are planted like smaller satellites. Each garden city is limited to a certain number of citizens and, if this maximum is exceeded, a new satellite city is founded. This method has been the model for a number of garden cities such as the British Letchworth and Welwyn, and has generally influenced the way suburbs have been developed and expanded in Post­War times. The second school arose from the idea of ‘the city with­out walls’, introduced by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who is also known for his Japan­inspired, horizontal building style. With his utopian city Broadacre City he intended to build a city where all inhabitants would have a lot of 4000 square metres each. In many ways, the city resembles Howard’s garden city, and the ideals behind it are similar to More’s egalitarian society, Utopia. Broadacre City was meant to be a society without specialists where everyone took turns at being farmers, workers or whatever was needed. Instead of paying with money when trading, the citizens were expected to barter raw materials or services. As the name Broadacre implies, the intent was that all the city’s houses should be built with plenty of distance between them. However, Wright’s visions have instead turned into the densely populated, decentralized suburbs seen in the USA today.

A tribute to the metropolis

The third school is rooted in the works of the Swiss­French architect and designer Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris. He is better known as Le Corbusier and is perhaps one of modernism’s most original and controversial architects. He launched a range of extremely detailed, diagrammatic and modular architectonic principles, and his systematic and holistic approach characterized every­thing he worked with – from design to architecture to

city planning. In his plans for a large­scale urban project, La Ville Radieuse (or The Radiant City), developed in the 1920’s, he introduced his ideas of a monolithic city of generic and gigantic skyscraper blocks, designed to house three million inhabitants. The idea was to create a more efficient form of housing and at the same time improve the standards of each housing unit. Le Corbusier’s radiant city, which was never realized, was also an implicit criti­cism of the social structures of society. The radical type of city planning and architecture of which Le Corbusier was an exponent, and by which many other modern city planners have been inspired, is often called tabula rasa architecture. This means that the slate of the ideal city is wiped clean of existing struc­tures, ideals and norms. The new city thus embodies all the hopes and dreams that its planner or architect might have for the future. The prerequisite for reali­zing Le Corbusier’s hypermodern city was that a large part of central Paris should be levelled to the ground, which meant that the city never came to be. However, Le Corbusier did build a number of building blocks, call­ed unités, where he carried out the principle of building small villages in a housing complex. These can be seen in, for example, Marseilles and Berlin4. Le Corbusier has been criticized heavily for his visions of better housing and cities, in particular for his radical approach and the way he divided everything – from a single housing unit to an entire city – into zones. Le Corbusier has been called rigid, bureaucratic, totalitarian, a devotee of concrete – and, yes, a utopian.

The tabula rasa cities of modernism

Common to the three schools is that they, each in their own way, provide ideas for a society that is viewed as better than the existing one. And even though all three cities have been described as utopian urban projects, they have nonetheless become important signposts for architects and city planners in the 20th and 21st centuries.

seen from the perspective of cultural and social history, the utopian concept has had a rough ride. As was clearly seen in the Un climate summit in december 2009, cOp15 in copenhagen, utopias are very much a mat-ter of power

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most central ones. Particularly in the field of environ­ment and climate, there’s been an explosion of good, fun, weird, and innovative ideas. But where is utopia? Or, to put it differently, where is the cohesive plan for a new society that meets global challenges such as poverty, human oppression and corruption? It is hardly news that the climate field is the new front of cities, architects and city planners. They compete vigorously to see who can invent the most sustainable and thorough plan for preventing the dire forecasts made by the world’s climate experts. The plans for the organic city Dongtan, near Shanghai, provide an example of a radical and comprehensive city plan that sets new stan­dards for sustainable cities. Dongtan’s master plan invol­ves a connection between housing and workplaces so that commuting is reduced to a minimum. Through this alone, 400,000 tonnes of CO2 can be saved. There will be access to vehicles running on electricity and biofuel, and power for the about 80,000 citizens and 50,000 workpla­ces will come from windmills, biogas from toilets, and waste from rice farming. There is just one problem: no city has been built yet. It turns out that Dongtan, like many other planned eco­projects in China, is too ambi­tious. In the media, some have raised the question of whether a green utopian city like Dongtan is too unreali­stic. Has the project been too ambitious and hence grown bigger than calculated? Will ordinary Chinese be able to afford living there? There is also the question of why you should build an entirely new city rather than making the many existing Chinese cities more environmentally friendly5.

Redesigning the world

The so­called Zeitgeist Movement bears witness to a radical example of a present­day utopia. One of the movement’s founders, Peter Joseph, says in an interview that the monetary economy and the capitalist consumer culture are slowly eroding from within: “It’s time that we wake up. The doomsday scenario, the big contraction,

Faith in progress and better times, and especially dis­satisfaction with the present state of things, is also the driving force behind many modern avant-garde move­ments. It seems difficult to avoid the concept of avant­garde when you view the cultural history of utopia. The so­called tabula rasa city plan, which has often been cri­ticized as totalitarian or dictatorial architecture, should, like other 20th­century avant­garde movements, be seen in the light of the two World Wars along with a number of other important factors such as urban growth, techno­logical invention, increased mobility, and urban estrange­ment (whereby the individual is lost in metropolitan ano­nymity). Hence, there are utopias that seek inner peace and harmony – away from the city – and there are some that, like Le Corbusier’s, pay homage to the metropolis, technology, and modern construction materials such as concrete.

Science fiction and utopia

Another, even more radical exponent of the tabula rasa city is the avant­garde Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia, member of the Futurist Movement (see fact box). He went to extremes in his attempts to consider the city as an organic whole. In his drawings for his city Città Nueva (1914), gigantic buildings tower in a science­fictional landscape that pays homage to the metropolis. Roadways, viaducts and buildings are connected in an ingenious architectonic system – a holistic design that transforms the urban landscape into an industrial organism. Even though this city was never built, its influence can be seen in cities such as Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, developed and built in 1956. The city became Brazil’s capital in 1960 and is today protected by UNESCO. It can be seen as a rare example of a realized architectural utopia. However, is tabula rasa architecture simply an expres­sion of insanity or the pure hunger for power? Or can we actually learn something from it today? Today’s globalized world faces new challenges, with war, global warming and the financial crisis being the

utopian spaces - by nikolina olsen-rule

The radical type of city planning and architecture of which le corbusier was an exponent, and by which many other modern city planners have been inspired, is often called tabula rasa architecture. This means that the slate of the ideal city is wiped clean of existing structures, ideals and norms

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attempts to create entire cities on the basis of ideas like ideal behaviour or ideal lifestyles, such as Le Corbusier’s grand vision of La Ville Radieuse. However, the idea of the perfect society isn’t dead. Perhaps the more success­ful utopias can be found on a smaller scale. In other words, we can find utopias in the ways we build onto existing cities, improve them, make them better, more environmental, sustainable and humanistic, more fun, and above all more inhabitable.

niKolina olsen-rule has an ma in modern culture and cultural communication from copenhagen university. she has taught as associate professor at Århus university and has worked as a communications advi-sor for design exhibitions and as a writer. today she is an advisor in the communication and design company bysted in copenhagen.

might be happening right now. The system of monetary exchange is – in the face of advancing technology – com-pletely obsolete”.6

The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist branch of a large and comprehensive project, The Venus Project (see the article page 15, ed.), which aims to change society radically through modern technology, among other things. For most people, the promise of the project sounds like an unattainable utopia, but if you examine it more closely, there are surprisingly many scientifically founded arguments that open up an entire new world of possibilities. The Venus Project is nothing short of a total redesign of the world as we know it – a promise to change the world’s imbalances through design.

Do we believe it ourselves?

Seen from the perspective of cultural and social history, the utopian concept h as had a rough ride. As was clear­ly seen in the UN climate summit in December 2009, COP15 in Copenhagen, utopias are very much a matter of power: whose vision of the future is the most rea­lizable, and who carries the strongest mandate in the climate struggle? These are just a couple of the many complicated and unresolved questions that, depending on what position you have, will determine which soluti­ons are more or less realizable and desirable. Regarding the utopian city, we can imagine that the scepticism we find today has something to do with the earlier (failed)

utopian spaces - by nikolina olsen-rule

The question is why we have anxiety when it comes to utopia and the idea of an ideal society. perhaps it is because history has taught us about the big, fallen utopian societies. As the slovenian philosopher and social critic slavoj Žižek points out, the fall of the wall marked the end of the communist utopia, and the 9/11 attack in new york killed the idea that the world was heading towards a liberal utopia

notes1 www.thezeitgeistmovement.com2 gyldendal’s open encyclopaedia and www.leksikon.org3 bredsdorff, thomas: utopiens anden død, politiken, 19.12.20094 www.marseille-citeradieuse.org, www.corbusierhaus-berlin.de5 www.chinadigitaltimes.net/china/dongtan/6 new york times, 16.03.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/ nyregion/17zeitgeist.html7 http://kunsthistorier.blogspot.com/2009/02/futurismen-100-ar.html8 http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/445

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Faith in the Future in a World of Dystopias Utopias are big words and thoughts. But in a world increasingly characterized by complex structures and globalization, it is easier to speak of individual responsibility than of a common dream, which we all must struggle to realize

by sara Jönsson

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u As a child, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut. The thought of wandering in space and exploring eternity was tempting, and I proudly spoke about my future plans to my friends and family. I didn’t quite understand why I was met with scepticism – why shouldn’t I be able to travel in space when there were other people who did? Once I started school, I developed other interests, and the astronaut dreams quietly faded away and were replaced by dreams of clothes, boyfriends and travel: the things that conferred status among my friends at the time. We all have dreams about the future. Some of the dreams are about ourselves and our nearest environment, but others are about the society we live in. Our societal dreams are often connected to political or religious ide­als and convictions as well as moral and ethical norms, which tell us how things should be if we were able to make them so. Many such dreams could be called utopias – future visions that are on the edge of what is realizable, but which are a part of our efforts to develop as indivi­duals and as a society. For some, a utopia is an unattaina­ble goal, a dream that can never be realized and which functions in the same way that visions do for companies – a drive to go forward, even if the goal will never be reached. Today, now that I’m grown up and sensible, my dreams consist of both what is realistic and what is just a distant fantasy, like an overly romanticised Hollywood movie.

Can the distant fantasies come true?

If you are pragmatically minded, you may ask yourself what the point is with distant, unrealistic utopias when you instead can occupy yourself with something that

actually can be changed. If a utopia is unattainable, how does it differ from a dystopia: i.e., a vision of a negative society? Is a utopia simply a reminder of something we will never be able to achieve? In order to move to even richer philosophical ground, we can ask, for example, whether the classical utopia of ‘peace and equality’ could exist if it were possible to achieve. The concept of ‘peace’ only exists in opposition to the concept of ‘war’ and implies ‘the absence of war and conflict’, among other things. But if war and conflict don’t exist, the concept of peace would be meaningless, because then peace would be the normal state. To put it another way, there is to my knowledge nothing called a ‘dead society’, since all societies are de facto living. If they are not, they turn into something else – a ruin or a ghost town. In our language, we often group words in opposites when describing social phenomena: war and peace, integration and segre-gation, democracy and dictatorship are classical examp­les of dichotomies that clearly illustrate the contrasts be tween various societal states, which can’t exist without their opposites. In spite of this, utopias aren’t simply pipe dreams we never will be able to attain. In some places, there is even faith that the most unlikely utopias not only make sense but also could be brought into existence. For example, religions such as Christianity contain a number of reli­gious ideas that can be compared to utopias: among others, the faith in life after death. Today, Christianity is the world’s most widespread religion, and even though we can perceive a trend towards secularization in some parts of the world, it is alive and well. Randall Collins, a professor of sociology from California, thinks that in all

Faith in the Future in a worlD oF Dystopias - by sara Jönsson

in a world that is increasingly characterized by complex structures and globalization, it is easier to speak about individual responsibility than about a common dream, which we must all struggle to realize. perhaps this is why the selection of orga-nic food on our supermarket shelves has become significantly larger and why the swedish pirate’s party, which fights for file sharing and greater personal control, is now the third-largest party in sweden

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religions the phenomenon of ‘God’ is a symbol of society. Society gives us life, and it can also kill us – hence, reli­gions express the basic conditions of human existence in the same way that utopias often do.

The future dreams of the young in a dystopian world

In 2008, the Swedish consultancy firm Kairos Future published the report ”Min bild av drömsamhället” (“My vision of the dream society”) with the results of a survey of 19,000 youths between 15 and 19 years of age. Among other things, it shows that the dreams of the young first and foremost revolve around their careers, partners and housing. The most important goal is ‘to feel free’, which no fewer than 93 percent named as important. The sur­vey also shows that the will to improve the world and become engaged in environmental debates has become smaller. Instead, the focus is on more individual needs and wants, and the greatest worry is not being able to get a good job. Thus, the long­term trend of individualization also influences our attitudes towards the collective, which gets less attention. In a world that is increasingly cha­racterized by complex structures and globalization, it is easier to speak about individual responsibility than about a common dream, which we must all struggle to realize. Perhaps this is why the selection of organic food on our supermarket shelves has become significantly larger and why the Swedish Pirate’s Party, which fights for file sha­ring and greater personal control, is now the third­largest party in Sweden. Modern literature and movies, particularly in the science fiction genre, more often depict dystopias than utopias. In a growing number of cult movies such as Blade Runner, Terminator, and Brazil, future society is shown as a hi­tech world filled with war and evil. Meanwhile, writers such as the English George Orwell (1903­1950) and the French Michel Houellebecq (1958­) have become famous for their socio­critical portrayals of the present and the future. In this age of climate change, war, social injustice, and bad consciences, it may not be surprising that it becomes harder for the young to create

collective utopias that they can believe in and fight for. Instead, in light of our post­modern existence, it becomes easier to focus on the job you want.

Will there be utopias in the future?

The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929­2007) invented the idea of ‘hyperreality’, which denotes a sort of invented reality produced by the media. Baudrillard thought that modernity is characterized by production, while post­modernity will be characterized by simula­tion and a sort of explosion in signs and symbols from various mass media. An example of this can be found in the book The Gulf War Didn’t Take Place, in which Baudrillard describes how, in a segment about the war, the American news channel CNN turned to their reporter live in Iraq to ask what was happening, only to discover that the reporter was himself watching CNN in order to find out. If the media produces reality, our utopias and desires will most likely also be found in the virtual world. Web 2.0, web 3.0, web 4.0. There is no limit to how far technology can go. New virtual networks can be built, and our dreams collected on Facebook among applicati­ons and fan pages. Utopias will always exist in one form or another, but the 1970’s flower­power era seems very distant. sara Jönsson has a ba in sociology and works as a research assi-stant at the copenhagen institute for Futures studies

Faith in the Future in a worlD oF Dystopias - by sara Jönsson

Utopias will always exist in one form or another, but the 1970’s flower-power era seems very distant

sources: Jean baudrillard: the gulf war Didn’t take place (1995)Kairos Future: min bild av drömsamhället (1998)the pirate party: www.piratpartiet.se/internationalrandall collins: sociological insight – an introduction to non-obvious sociology (1982)

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Utopians ­ our closest colleagues?

Johan peter paludan’s column

u In case the editor hasn’t already mentioned it else­where in this issue, the word utopia has its origin in Greek and means a place that isn’t real. The concept continues to play a big role in contemporary discourse, and this must be because it represents our aspirations to make not­real place real. There’s nothing wrong with that. When utopian visions are at times discredited, it is less because of their content than because of the way we seek to implement them. The end justifies the means, as Lenin and his cronies said – and we know the result of that. Utopias aren’t real, but if they are to be realized, it must be in the future. You don’t construct utopian visi­ons for the past, so utopias belong to the ‘futures people’. One way to systematize the ‘future people’ is to place them along two dimensions. First: do they approach the future with intuition or through methods? And second: do they view the future as something given, or is the future ‘something we create’?

This provides the basis for four types of ‘futures people’:1. They who think the future is given and can be

seen through intuition: prophets, such as the Old Testament kind. They were given visions of the future. So are business managers today, but it isn’t quite the same thing.

2. They who think the future is given and can be revealed through methods: fortune tellers. You may think what you will about crystal balls, tea leaves, etc., but they are methods of a kind.

3. They who think the future can be created and that you can be methodical in your approach to this future. In this group we find planners and their helpers: futurists.

4. Finally, they who think the future can be created and that you can determine the ideal future through intuition: utopians.

As can be seen, the future­oriented field is crowded. Fortune tellers are flourishing. When the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies was established 40 years ago, there were only a few willing to accept being described this way. Since then, the number has skyrocketed, and if we extrapolate the trend – and perhaps we should be reluctant to do so – it is possible to foresee the time when we all become futurists. There may be some poetic justice in that, since we should all think about the future. The

Old Testament isn’t as powerful as it once was, but for all the old prophets that have fallen, new ones have cropped up everywhere in the neo­religious movements. Vile ton­gues suggest that the climate debate has also spawned a number of prophets who, through more or less doctored studies, can see the future. And then there are the utopians: They who dream of a better world and know what it looks like. In this schema, futurists are placed between utopians and fortune tellers. As Your Columnist see it, futurists should stay away from constructing utopian dreams, but may take part in establishing scenarios for how such visi­ons could be realized. Futurists should also refrain from making cocksure statements about the future. Though Your Columnist generally praises a professional lack of opinion, I must remark that utopians are preferable to fortune tellers. Utopians dream. Fortune tellers deceive either themselves or their customers or both. Like so much else, utopias are time bound and are generally expressions of what is seen as the greatest lack in the time in which they are formulated. The Garden of Eden, and later Cockayne, are utopias formed during a time in which work was hard and there was too little to eat. Socialist utopias arise in societies with too little equa­lity and justice. The question of whether the utopia that focuses on access to a high number of virgins in paradise can be similarly explained we will leave unanswered. What, then, is the characteristic modern utopia? The answer is obvious, given the recently held COP15 con­ference in Copenhagen: a clean environment without climate changes. This is rather conservative, one could think. Another utopia is the one known at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies as OFF, which often accompanies ideas such as simple living. This utopia is a response to a perceived gross lack of leisure time, togetherness and quality of life. Both these utopias represent dreams of something that doesn’t exist (yet). We shall see if these utopias will remain merely utopian. Johan peter paluDan is the director of the copenhagen institute for Futures studies. he mainly works to communicate the institute’s results through lectures and courses in Denmark, the nordic countries, greater europe, and vthe united states.

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Nine trends and nine inventions that will shape the face of the 21st century

Nine trends and nine inventions will shape the face of the 21st century. They will have a similar impact on our lives as the car, the TV and the air­plane had on the lives of our parents. Take a sneak peak at Marcel Bullinga’s upcoming book Futurecheck

Nine trends that will reshape the world around us

1. We all live in a 3D mobile media cloud with no on/off button, replacing outdated communication devices. The virtual world and the physical world are becoming the same. Online is default; offline is a choice. Boundaries blur: there is no differ­ence anymore between a house and a database, between things and people: both can be control­led and manipulated.

2. Two economies exist at the same time: a global and virtual economy with a global reach that is hypercompetitive, and a local and physical econo­my with a shorter reach that is less competitive.

3. The economy is flat, with fewer barriers and fewer limits for doing transparent business and for the exchange of standardized forms of information.

4. You are at the heart and the centre of all logistical and cultural processes. Your own global personal dashboard empowers you to make better daily decisions, such as the choice of a mortgage or the choice of a school for your children.

5. ‘Self’ is a very powerful trend in every possible field: things and people, information and human behaviour, systems and materials. In your personal dashboard, you will have local, high quality, real­time information at your dispos­al. This huge personal power of access to informa­tion leads to self­service and self­control. In a flat world economy, the global extremes in social security flatten: less government­funded social security in the West, more in the East. The trends are: self­payment, self­responsibility, self­power, self­health, self­employment and self­management. You are responsible for creating your own pension fund, education savings and healthcare. Both materials and production systems are self­organising, self­healing and self­cleaning. Law enforcement is about self­regulation, self­security and self­enforcement. Local communities are self­sustaining. Things are self­conscious.

6. Mainstream information is local. Mainstream energy is local. Newly created local capital – capital with real value and no speculative aspect ­­ competes with the US Dollar, the Yuan and the Euro. The mainstream economy is local and self­reliant. It has limited mobility due to green tax­

by marcel bullinga

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Nine inventions that will change the face of the 21st century

1. We live in senior cities and in innovation villages. The difference between city and village is dimin­ished in a 75 percent urban world.

2. We produce only green and mainly local prod­ucts. We consume only green and mainly local forms of energy. It is either green profit or no profit at all. Green leaders are financial leaders.

3. We drive and live in energy­efficient cars and buildings, using local forms of energy. This will greatly reduce our geopolitical dependency on ter­rorist oil states and unstable regimes.

4. We drive more in virtual cars and less in real cars. This will curtail a huge amount of very expensive physical mobility.

5. We live in a consumers’ paradise, thanks to transparency and intelligent production systems. However, the future is more of a battlefield for workers and entrepreneurs.

6. We use cheap product printers – our own per­sonal factories – to produce small household products, spare parts, various energy sources and even buildings on the spot, using local resources and local raw materials. This will curtail a huge amount of long­distance transport, energy usage and failure costs.

7. We live in a mobile 3D media cloud, controlled by you, your mobile, and your own personal dash­board. In the media cloud, you are the boss of your privacy, your communication and your data: 100 percent privacy at last. The 3D mobile media cloud surrounding us will affect our children as well: the WiFi Generation. They will be growing up faster than ever before, reaching puberty and adult age earlier than ever

ing and the high price of transporting goods and energy.

7. You (and everyone and everything else) are trans­parent; you can be traced – that is, if you have given marketing agents permission to do so. You are the boss in this conditionally transparent media cloud; you set the conditions for the use of your data. Privacy is a (paid) choice. Transparency (ranking and benchmarking) of your professional achievements leads to a hyper­competitive labour market. Transparency of all services and goods leads to higher overall business quality and to a consumer’s paradise. Transparency is the secret weapon of all new­comers to a market; it distinguishes them from the old guard.

8. All products and processes become intelligent; that is, they have their own consciousness and can react to change. The best common example is the intelligent self­steering car. The best unknown example is intelligent money (yet to be invented).

9. We slowly move towards prevention in every possible field: the prevention of fraud and crime, the prevention of failure costs, the prevention of illnesses and healthcare usage, the prevention of physical transport of products and people, and the prevention of energy usage.

Do your own Futurecheck brainstorm

Take the product you make, the service you deliver, or the work you do, and put all nine trend before the word. Then see what happens. This will prepare you for the future.You make cars? Imagine the Intelligent Car, Self Car, Green Car, You Car, etc. What changes does this imply? How do you prepare for these changes?

nine trenDs anD nine inventions that will shape the Face oF the 21st century - by marcel bullinga

The 3d mobile media cloud surrounding us will affect our children as well: the WiFi Generation. They will be growing up faster than ever before, reaching puberty and adult age earlier than ever before. This is because they are exposed at a very young age to adult information not meant for children, and because they can be reached individually by anyone at a very young age. parents have less control over the information-intake of their children and lose sight of the people with whom they communicate

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Futurecheck twitters

TWITTER 1:Green Profit leads us out of crisis. Transparent Profit makes us excel. Ethical Profit ends perverted bonuses. Local Money creates real wealth.TWITTER 2:There is not 1 future, but many thousands. However, only 1 future will actually be delivered: your future. Imagining it will bring it closerTWITTER 3:9 inventions and 9 trends that will shape the face of the 21st century. With a similar impact on our lives as car, TV and airplane had beforeTWITTER 4:Business model of the Future: 0 x 2 x ½(T/L/C/E/S) = 0­misery products for 2 x current quality and ½ current {Time|Labour|Costs|Energy|Space}

before. This is because they are exposed at a very young age to adult information not meant for children, and because they can be reached indi­vidually by anyone at a very young age. Parents have less control over the information­intake of their children and lose sight of the people with whom they communicate.

8. In the 3D mobile media cloud of the future, you have your own personal global dashboard, con­taining all your finances, dossiers and transac­tions. It creates transparency and thus reinforces trust. Basically, it contains your past and your future.

9. In this media cloud and personal dashboard, we use intelligent money that knows its owner and its purpose, and knows to whom it may or may not be transferred. This reinforces trust, preventing a new financial crisis. It makes pyra­mid schemes impossible, prevents the majority of current fraud, and provides you with a solid mortgage.

nine trenDs anD nine inventions that will shape the Face oF the 21st century - by marcel bullinga

in this media cloud and personal dash-board, we use intel-ligent money that knows its owner and its purpose, and knows to whom it may or may not be transferred. This reinforces trust, pre-venting a new finan-cial crisis. it makes pyramid schemes impossible, prevents the majority of cur-rent fraud, and provi-des you with a solid mortgage

INsunlocal energy

culturel bordersgreen profitprior knowledgemediacloudData privacynoisetransparencyhigh skillsentrepreneurshipscrutiny and self checkingmobilelearning factoryprofessionalsmonocultural ritualspopulation decline

OUToilenergy that needs long distance transportationcountry borderswasteKnowing after the factipod, radio, tv, mobile phonevisual privacysilenceobscuritylow educationwagesblind trust and blue eyesFixedschoolmanagersmulticultural ritualspopulation growth

What is In and what is Out in the future

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by Johan peter paludan

Future Strategy in the Present – Part 1

The historian and the futurist can be said to study two sides of the same matter, specifically the present, writes Johan Peter Paludan in this first ar­ticle about the phenomenon of futures studies and its role in organizational and strategic planning

u The following observations are based on what is now 33 years of work at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. At this point I should probably note that the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies is a privately financed institute with the sorrows (financial worries) and joys (knowing that people need what you do enough to be willing to pay for it) that this implies. 33 years ago, the idea of privately financed futures studies was a provocation, perhaps even a contradiction in terms. The concept of futures studies was seen as a ludicrous activity, associated with crystal balls and tea leaves. The provocative effect is now almost gone, and more and more identify themselves as ‘futurists’. Well, it’s not a protected title. The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies occupies a special position in the gray area between universities and consultants. We lie closer to consultants given our customer­service focus (though I think university resear­chers can also be quite focused on grants), deadline requirements, lack of peer review (we are instead sub­ject to internal review and the review that lies in being dependent on a market), a philosophy that focuses more on being useful than on stringency, and fewer formali­zed documentation requirements. On the other hand, we lie closer to universities given our analytic, knowledge­intense and long­term approach. We even think we are better at cross­disciplinary work than the universities (some would suggest that this doesn’t say much!) Finally, we lie closer to the consultancy world in that our work is mainly teamwork, whereas the universities have more ‘lone riders’ who receive the glory – or the blame. This is not the case at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. A few (former) employees have had other views, but I would like to stress that the following observations are based on my many years as a member of the ‘team’ that was and is the Institute. According to its statutes, the mission of the Copen­hagen Institute for Futures Studies is to conduct futures studies with a particular focus on Danish business. This is, for example, achieved by contributing to the strategic development of Danish companies. It is hence relevant to know what futures studies is and is not. In the following, I will illuminate the nature of futures studies by compa­ring futurists with those who work at the other end of the temporal spectrum: historians.

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Pedagogical opening

Strategy is usually about the future. However, the past may also be seen in a strategic light. Take, for instance, recent interpretations of Denmark’s conduct between 1940­45 or during the Cold War. These periods of the past are reinterpreted in order to orient us in the present. Overall, after many years as a futurist, I must say that the relationships between past, present and future seem increasingly complex. As the writer William Gibson said, ‘the future is already here, but it is unevenly distributed’. My present is the past to some and the future to others. The future doesn’t exist; nor does the past; and the present is so transient or narrow that you could throw doubts on its existence, too. One can get lost in that sort of philosophical reflection, but life must be lived, decisions made, and we must move on. The working hypothesis is that we are always situated in the present and that what happens in the present is crucial to our perceptions of past and future. This hegemony of the present over past and future exists because it is always the present that asks the questions, and it is the questions that are asked that largely deter­mine the answers we receive. This is doubly true of our present society, which some call the information society. The information society means that there is an infinity of answers, which makes the ability to ask good ques­tions crucial – and it is the present that determines which ques tions are good. The present asks questions of the past regarding what once was, and new present contexts ask new questi­ons. This power of the present also governs the future. Decisions must be made in the present. You can’t make decisions in the past, though I can imagine that many in the financial sector might currently wish they had such an opportunity! Indeed, I even have a few things I would like to get fixed if it were possible to make decisions in the past, but this is unfortunately not the case. We are all limited to the present when making decisi­ons, but they must be implemented in the future. Hence, all decisions must necessarily be based on some assump­tions about the future in which they will be carried out. It may be tempting to conclude that ideas about the past are ‘nice to have’, while expectations of the future are ‘need to have’. This conclusion is true to the extent that, without expectations or notions of the future, we are

unable to act and unfit to make decisions. You don’t die from ignoring the past, though it is said that you then are doomed to repeat it. A somewhat more ‘futurist humble’ conclusion is probably that both extensions of the pre­sent (into past and future) are important. It is the past and the present that form the basis of the answers to the questions we ask of the future. ‘History learns everything and nothing’ is a quotation I distantly remember from a lesson in international politics by Erling Bjøl. This gives the futurist free range and perhaps points once again to the primacy of the present: we use the elements of the past that the present finds interesting to ask new questi­ons about the future. The historian and the futurist can be said to study dif­ferent sides of the same subject: the present. Because of this, a futurist may see an historian as colleague of a sort. I once suggested to a historian that there was a basis for a common trade union or at least professional associa­tion that could be called ‘time studiers’. The historian rejected this proposal with the argument that the study of the past was a science while futurists were charlatans. Historians may thus find it overbearing that the futurist compares himself to the historian, but this doesn’t pre­vent us from being inspired by them and their reflections over their discipline’s purpose. In an essay,1 Ian Mortimer outlines the three dialogues that a historian may participate in:· A dialogue with the past. This was originally seen as essential.· A dialogue with the historian’s own present. This dia­logue is not always acknowledged.· A dialogue with himself, which potentially can provide significant new insight.

Let us see where we get if we use the same systematic method in defining futures studies.

Dialogue with the past – and the future

First, the historian engages in a dialogue with the past. This is done using a meticulous investigation of historical sources and complex methods of analysis and criticism. New data and new techniques can change the historian’s view of the past. You have one view of history until new discoveries from the past eventually provide another. This is of course grossly simplified, but the basic task is

Future strategy in the present – part 1 - by Johan peter paludan

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that there is just one single past. While there may only be one past, at any given time there are many different ideas about the past. Therefore, a bundle of sticks might be a better metaphor than the broom, if fascism hadn’t patented this particular symbol.

Prognoses are what come closest to ‘wie es eigentlich sein wird’. However, prognoses, seen as clear and precise descriptions of the future, rarely make sense beyond the very short term. This is because prognoses always represent a projection of the past into the future, and the more you extend the past into the future, the more likely it is that reality will turn out to have a different idea. However, projections of the past into the future can at times have a pedagogical function by pointing out areas where something must happen. Even where the futurist is on safest ground, when working with demographic

to reproduce the past ‘wie es eigentlich war’, as it truly was. A parallel to futures studies is difficult because it is hard to find any futurist today willing to stick his neck out and postulate that it is possible to determine ‘wie es eigentlich sein wird’, how it truly is going to be. But per­haps there aren’t all that many historians of ‘truth’ left, either. There once were historians of ‘truth’ and, in this sense, there are futurists of ‘truth’ today. They are called fortune tellers and astrologers, and let them believe what they want. My first teacher in the art of futures studies,2 Torben Bo Jansen, liked to use a broom as a metaphor for time, with the stick as the past, the binding of the broom as the present, and all the broom hairs representing the infinitude of possible developments we face at any given moment. This model may falter because it posits

As the writer william gibson said, ‘the future is already here, but it is une­venly distributed’. my present is the past to some and the future to others. The future doesn’t exist; nor does the past; and the present is so transient or narrow that you could throw doubts on its existen-ce, too

The historian and the futurist can be said to study different sides of the same subject: the present. Because of this, a futurist may see a historian as colleague of a sort. i once suggested to an historian that there was a basis for a common trade union or at least professio-nal association that could be called ‘time studiers’

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lation, which includes 3rd and 4th generation immigrants, ignores the social adaptation and integration that takes place. My grandmother was Norwegian. Does this make me an immigrant? When prognoses are not good, or at least not good for much, and strategies must be made in the present to function in the future, what then? Then we have megatrends – the crutches of the futurist.

From uncertain prognoses to megatrends

Megatrends are, at least as viewed at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies,3 broad trends with a high level of durability, which due to their breadth can in prin­ciple affect everything and due to their durability can be expected to apply in the long term – 10 to 15 years. They are crutches because the future IS unpredictable, but you are horsewhipped to try anyway, and some things do move forward with greater durability than other things. In a Germanic academic tradition, this definition is rather vague. Here, I choose the Anglo­Saxon tradition, perhaps best illustrated by an American judge, who said about another hard­to­define subject, pornography, that ‘it is hard to define but you know it when you see it’. At the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, we currently operate with 15 megatrends: knowledge, acce­leration, new technology, hypercomplexity, globalization, commercialization, economic growth, democratization, individualization, immaterialization, network economy, health, the environment, resources, and ageing. I won’t go into these megatrends in detail here. After all, most are probably self­evident. The typical megatrend is in principle quite banal, but it must be in order to live up to the definition, however vague it may be. Therefore, the art is to consider the concrete possibilities for the company that must consider the future in which its stra­tegy will function. This is where it is important to com­

development, uncertainty increases the longer you try to look ahead. A projection of, for instance, the number of 25­64 years old in Denmark can be most certain for the next 25 years, based on particular assumptions about mortality and immigration patterns. It is also useful to point out the challenges that arise from this: Either productivity must increase dramatically or the inflow of labour must be significantly increased in order to negate the prognosis. Another example can be found with the ongoing debate about tax reform and the truth that is now estab­lished – at least among economists – that people who get to keep a larger proportion of their pay through a reduction of top­bracket taxes almost automatically will work more hours. This is a claim about a reliable con­nection between effort and reward. Not only does this overlook those who already work as much as they can; it also ignores the possibility that the connection between effort and reward may be influenced by how rich you are and that the exchange between money and time may be more complex. This is not an argument against (or for) reducing top­bracket taxes, but an argument against beli­eving that the optimal conclusion is guaranteed. A point to be made about the top­bracket tax discussion is that it takes place in a society that by now is so complex that it at times becomes necessary to conduct experiments and be ready to abandon prior conclusions if it becomes clear that they fail to live up to the expectations. This requires bold political management; i.e., a willingness to resist the findings of polls and focus groups. A third example could be the prognosis of the immi­grant population in Denmark towards 2050. One can get the impression that such a prognosis also has an ideolo­gical effect, namely to warn against present­day immigra­tion. Such a simplistic projection of the immigrant popu­

it may be tempting to conclude that ideas about the past are ‘nice to have’, while expectations of the future are a ‘must have’. This conclusion is true to the extent that, without expectations or notions of the future, we are unable to act and unfit to make decisions

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trend really should be called ‘a need for new business models’, but ‘free’ probably sounds sexier. This trend is promoted by other existing megatrends, including in particular new technology (digitalization and automa­tion) and a rubbing­off effect from other areas that have always been ‘free’, such as radio. The other prospect is a phenomenon, which could be called ‘more chiefs and fewer Indians’ or ‘the over­administrated society’. This trend is brought about by a combination of automation, which makes many ‘Indians’ superfluous, information technology, which makes cen­tralized control more possible, and the increasing power of lawyers in society. I lack a fitting, preferably deroga­tory, term for this trend.

this article is an edited version of an article by the same name, which appeared in the book Strategi & driftsøkonomi (gyldendal business 2009), a commemorative book for professor ole øhlenschlæger madsen, institute for economy, aarhus university. the second part of the article will be published in Fo/Futureorientation #2, 2010.

Johan peter paluDan is the director of the copenhagen institute for Futures studies. he mainly works to communicate the institute’s results through lectures and courses in Denmark, the nordic countries, greater europe, and the united states.

bine the futurist’s general approach with the company’s specific expertise. Futurists will always be generalists in relation to companies, which focus on a single activity or a group of related activities. However, this isn’t solely a handicap, but also an advantage, since companies may have developed blinkers towards certain elements of rea­lity, and then the futurist may at times be the little boy in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. The established list of megatrends is guided by the sub­jects and companies with which we work. If the Institute, for example, had been involved with UN organizations, the megatrend of urbanization would have been crucial. In light of the regional development of Denmark, with a polarization between the capital region and ‘the Eastern Jutland metropolis’ on the one hand, and Western Jutland, Southern Jutland and the islands (often together called ‘the rotten banana’) on the other hand, it can be argued that urbanization actually is a Danish megatrend. Even though megatrends are stable, long­term trends, they aren’t eternal. We can imagine both that they will cease to be and that they will become so banal that they lack the power to inspire. Finally, one could argue that the vagueness that cha­racterizes the megatrend definition makes it difficult to establish when a new phenomenon represents a new megatrend. At any rate, there are two ‘prospects’ on the horizon, to use an expression from another world where you also have to demonstrate your ability before you can become accepted. One is ‘free’, as promoted by, for instance, Chris Anderson from Wired magazine. This idea is in part false advertisement, since very little in the world is free. The megatrend is rather that there are an increasing number of products that customers are unwilling to pay for. Then you must find alternative ways of financing these products. Therefore, the mega­

Future strategy in the present – part 1 - by Johan peter paludan

The megatrend is rather that there are an increasing num-ber of products that customers are unwil-ling to pay for

notes1 times literary supplement, sept. 26, 20082 it may be pretentious to call this an art, but an early work in futures studies is by bertrand de Jouvenel and is called ‘L’art de la conjecture’3 Futures studies is still too new a discipline to make it possible to speak about fully established and accepted concept apparatuses

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Visionary thinking – A philosophical trip with Clumsy Hans

The funny coincidences

u Thoughts aren’t just isolated in the human skull, but contain impulses with ideas that fly around among other people. The thoughts vibrate out in the world and attempt to guide people forward to each other, so that encounters and events can become inspiring transacti­ons. There is something that connects people beyond language and the familiar connections. When we think thoughts, we can experience that our thoughts connect us to other people. Our mindsets become living, imaginary beings that run around in the field, pollinating flowers. We know it all too well. We can have worked with a basic idea for some time, and suddenly there is an encounter, an event or a sudden change that makes our basic idea match a corresponding need in another person, a company or an organization. It happens when we are ready. The positive coincidence arises spontaneously and immediately when the perfect match presents the oppor­tunity for a mutual experience of the effects of thought. Something has led people together, even if perhaps they never had anything to do with each other before. This type of occurrence is the encounter with the effects of thought. It is an image of an opening. With these types of experience, the effects of thought have predestined an encounter between people. The encounter is, so to speak, already planned before any of the parties know of it. We can speak of a process of reflection, where the reflection shapes the predestined encounter. Every time we give of ourselves, we actua­lize our power. The power is brought forth as a thought process wherein these thoughts can create conditions for the growth of new ideas and initiatives that reflect the fairy­tale aspects of life. We can use Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about Clumsy Hans to describe the journey you go on when you let yourself be led by positi­ve coincidences. It is a journey that prepares us for what will come.

Clumsy Hans and the predestined encounter

In best ’Clumsy Hans’ style we can move around with an open mind for what will come. A current of power trans­mitted by another person may hit us without either party being aware of it. We may be in movement towards the castle where the princess waits and smiles gracefully. She is involved in selecting her chosen prince, and as we may remember, this is the prince that has managed to catch her current of power. In a reflective position in

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his way to the castle, Clumsy Hans catches her current and reflects it as an expression of her love. The attention leads him forward to all sorts of thoughts, emotions and ideas, which collectively prepare him with sufficient insight into what is to come. Clumsy Hans can do it all, and he has brought it all with him in time. He moves intuitively and knows what the graceful princess needs. He knows that he can learn to match it. As if his journey was a dance with her cur­rent, he collects all the good answers. He prepares him­self for the big encounter. He may be clumsy, and lacking in social graces, but there is nothing wrong with his intu­ition. Reality shows him the way. Without any thought of how anything fits into any specific shape, he uses his intuition – it is his best tool, and he chooses to follow it as stubbornly as a mule. Clumsy Hans experiences being welcomed by the princess. He immediately catches the princess’ attention by showing her what he can give her. He has transfor­med her needs into tools that can be used for a life in a whirl of pleasures. She falls for him like a ton of bricks. She wants him, and him alone. The other candidates may be nice and noble with their dark, pinstriped suits, a gleam of pomade in the hair, and their principles poli shed for the occasion. However, they have nothing special to offer – they are all trained by the cultural elite that values euphemisms of politeness over the meat of the encounter. She knows that with Clumsy Hans life won’t be boring. His artfulness gives her the attention she needs because he manages to go by intuition. He can

see her in what he encounters on his way. This is the pre­destination that follows him to the door. Through a curi­ous alertness, he knows what to expect. The future lies in his attention, which is his compass on his journey to the castle. His practice is basically very simple. He doesn’t attempt to hide anything or leave things unsaid. He basically seeks the truth in himself and others. His imme­diate character bears witness to a gesture towards what will happen. He knows that he will be prepared for what will come if he follows his immediate impulses. He has experienced this process many times before. Hence, he also follows the impulses he encounters on his way to the castle. He experiences strong emotions before meeting people. He can have thoughts that seem unrecognizable – overall, he sees life as a riddle filled with omens, signals, encounters, and patterns that show him the way. This is his preparedness. He continually practices to become bet­ter at using this preparedness, but it takes a lot of energy to follow his intuition. Nonetheless, he gradually learns to perceive what the future offers him, precisely because his starting point is the immediate, everyday experiences.

An impeccable practice

Clumsy Hans doesn’t think strategically in a classical sense. His experience is that too many people make decisions on the basis of how other people would react or on what their opinions might be about this and that. Clumsy Hans does not desire to become part of a peer group in which the rope of equality makes people fall in

we can have worked with a basic idea for some time, and suddenly there is an encounter, an event or a sudden change that makes our basic idea match a corresponding need in another person, a company or an organization. it happens when we are ready

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donkey. His ability to connect bits and pieces shows that he uses his creativity. He has learned that an eclectic approach equals a visionary approach. This has rubbed many people the wrong way, but his experience has told him that, on his way to the castle, he will meet people who can indirectly guide him along the right path. Clumsy Hans is helped by his immediate impulses. He continually remains one step behind in order to fore­see events and meet the next step. This means that his eclectic approach has honed his ability to listen to other people. Through this, he has learned to think visionary thoughts. He indirectly foresees what he will encounter. He knows that what he encounters today he will need tomorrow. This equips him with security and a feeling of positive forward motion. Clumsy Hans moves through a wondrous world. It can be a real fairy tale. He is constantly in motion, and his body is always filled with ideas and thoughts. The daytime is sometimes too short, so he also uses the night and wakes in the morning with dreams in his memory. Sometimes, it can also become too much for him. Hence, he also finds a release in writing poems, drawing figures, painting random things, taking strolls with his notebook, meditating in silence, and playing sports. All are activi­ties that create an effect through their impulsiveness. It is very important for Clumsy Hans to find ways to create or be with others, and the above can be examples of this. When Clumsy Hans isn’t riding, he’s walking on his ideas.

The blind collection

He chooses his future by his own lights. Through follo­wing the eclectic approach he makes visionary thinking available. When he collects thoughts and ideas, he does it so that they can reflect the need for what is to come. This

line. Clumsy Hans thinks with his heart. This liberates his thoughts, and he needs that. The signals he catches and builds on come from the heart. He builds bridges between people’s hearts. When you meet Clumsy Hans, you will thus be able to recognize him by his ability to say what you think. Skilled is the person that manages to read your thoughts. He is masterful in the language of thought and seeks liberty through this. His ability to think with his heart originates from many years of isolation from the surrounding world. Here, he practiced thinking himself free through a con­tinuous flowering of new ideas and emotions. Here, he discovered the possibility to feel what others feel from a physical distance, think what others think, and in general to connect to other people in their absence. All these years were a training camp where he learned that there were parallels between the experiences of different people. Clumsy Hans took note of the impulses and pre­monitions that could engender clarity and insight into future events. He used his immediate forward motion to develop a method that could be used to lift others through creative thinking. He could simply move people at a distance by moving himself in a new direction, all because of the connection on a mental level. Clumsy Hans encountered more and more of his own kind as the years went by. They all live empowered by their power supply. A true Clumsy Hans manages to become a part of the process and always uses himself to evaluate the meaning of something. Like a true eclectic, Clumsy Hans collects things around himself. This doesn’t necessarily make him a hoarder; it is more an expression of his passion for the sensual and the literal. He likes to pull out tools depending on what is needed. His empathy shows itself in his ability to be led by moods and emo­tions. In this sense, he is a soldier of fortune riding a

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The goal is what comes out of it – neither more nor less. The goal is a process. nevertheless, there is a ten-dency for people to choose the familiar and well tested over making experimentation an integrated part of their life

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The character behind the thoughts

Clumsy Hans is a whimsical fellow. He is very much his own man. He acts, if at all possible, from the mood and emotion he feels. Some might say he is altogether unpredictable and an abuser of others’ confidence. Others might understand that he tries to find connections in the thoughts and emotions he encounters on his way to what is to come. His nature is to counteract the pitfalls of reality and instead pare problems down to the essentials. This brings him closer to his actual power. The balance is recreated from emotion and clarity of thought. Clumsy Hans can at first seem flighty and distant, but he is actu­ally always lucid and very aware of the signals his body sends him. He is equipped with all sorts of safety valves that auto­matically kick in when needed. This is a part of his pre­paredness when he moves in the world. His body never­theless tells him on an emotional level what the thoughts and words of others mean, and he follows this rather than the written word. Clumsy Hans feels very concretely on his body what others tell him. There is a direct input­output relation that indicates the emotional significance of what others say. This gives Clumsy Hans the opportunity to decide whether something is important or not. It provides an insight into the context for what is said, and it makes him open to new ideas and thoughts about the other person. The tracks Clumsy Hans leaves behind hence also bear witness to his attention and his immediacy. He is no lazy bastard, but rather a diligent, independent audiograph who finds the essence in the thoughts people think. He is trained to do that.

What, then, is visionary thinking?

The spoken or the written word is always encrypted by emotion, and it is this emotion that makes the thoughts mobile and a manifestation of the effect of thought. Clumsy Hans and the description of his method express a form that presupposes predestination. This is the central

means that he can retrospectively follow a development of visionary thought through becoming aware of his own awareness. This doubling happens automatically. It shows the way. Thus, the eclectic approach might also be said to be wise in the sense that it forms a reflection of the other’s need. Clumsy Hans knows that all the time he will be met by things that can prepare him for what will happen. It is simply a matter of devotion and hence a blind acceptance of what shows itself to him. This blind collection means that he chooses with his emotions. We don’t know what the future holds; but Clumsy Hans thinks that, once we have used eclecticism sufficiently many times, the likely future will become clearer and clearer. When we choose on the basis of what inspires us, a pattern will arise. This pattern, seen in retrospect, will form an insight into how we can shape similar tools for the needs and desires we might face. By finding inspiration to solve his own problems or chal­lenges, Clumsy Hans will always be able to find solutions to others’ problems of a similar character. When Clumsy Hans grows older, this will make him a wise king. His visionary thinking is implicit in his immediate interaction with others and in his immediate devotion to what happens around him. Clumsy Hans is of the opinion that the future is decided for us depending on the path we choose to walk – and the path we will learn along the way. Clumsy Hans has experienced countless coincidences between the thought currents he encounters and events to come. He thus perceives that the future lies implicitly in the collection of ideas and thoughts that show themselves to him. When he grows stubborn, he forces an argument, which exposes the remaining uncertainty that people might have regarding their own intuition. His argument is that this isn’t anything parti­cular to him. This is basically a way we can experience the world, no matter who we are. However, there is little room for doctrinaires in this regard. They worship distance over love. They don’t want to be felt – only branded.

The visionary mode of thought is in dire straits right now because of the lean fetishism. it is in sharp contrast to uniformity. it is by definition without precedent, and for this reason it will always make a difference compared to ‘business as usual’. This alone makes it necessary in a time in which everybody does the same things

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self­preservation, which among other things are imple­mented under the heading ‘Lean’. Lean is an example of the organizational decay that renders decision processes demands for order. The result of this decay is ‘business as usual’, and the importance of creative processes and the unique understanding of such processes possessed by the Clumsy Hanses become hidden away in the drawer like unused windfall apples. The visionary mode of thought is in dire straits right now because of the Lean fetishism. It is in sharp contrast to uniformity. It is by definition with­out precedent, and for this reason it will always make a difference compared to ‘business as usual’. This alone makes it necessary in a time in which everybody does the same things. To sum it up, we can say that visionary thinking meets the demand to recreate the fairy tale in our lives. On the one hand, visionary thinking enables us to describe the future based on the impulses we encounter. On the other hand, it is a method that enables us to realize a particular vision. Clumsy Hans has shown us the synthesis. He pre­pares himself for what is to come by allowing himself to be influenced by sudden impulses. His special ability to consider himself in relation to reality makes him impor­tant. He shows us a mode of being that can be used in the world of art to test new interpretation spaces for a thinking practice.

morten paustian has an msc in business philosophy. he is the owner of the company pantheon Filosofi and studies the effect of thought, among other ideas. he has a particular focus on applied philosophy and has extensive experience with original thinking and business develop-ment.

premise for being able to explain pre­knowledge of what is to come. Everything else is loose claims and contracti­ons of random categories of consciousness. Visionary thinking requires a creation process whe­reby we use our intuition to produce insight into what will happen. We get inspiration, impulses and emotions that must form the basis for developing new products, programs or concepts that can match the needs that will emerge in the future. The world needs more people like Clumsy Hans. The world needs a true movement. We need to be able to move freely according to our immediacy; i.e., daring to choose spontaneously with a corresponding emotion of enjoyment. In this sense, we can master our own future and, rather than being impressed by the noble human being, can learn to choose the strength in being. This can meet the need for future ability. In this way, it is possible to become a futurist, for whom forward motion creates new ideas and insight that is made available to the public. The goal is what comes out of it – neither more nor less. The goal is a process. Nevertheless, there is a tenden­cy for people to choose the familiar and well tested over making experimentation an integrated part of their life. Instead of walking a tightrope in relation to a commu­nity of thought, whereby we join a circle of people who don’t want to be subjected to being alone, we must value the need for the unique higher than the need for the mediocre. More and more people select to choose their own future rather than making a multilateral agreement. Clumsy Hans did not give in to the nice and noble. He wanted the princess, and he got her because he was faith­ful to the effect of thoughts and the connections they could disclose. Visionary thinking will likely become a future way of thought that takes over when strength is chosen. It is a way of seeing the world in a manner according to which the important thing is to acquire the ability to challenge others with new ideas, projects and organizations. This can counteract the predictability and artificial instinct for

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