These are the ideas in the Protopia Futures Framework separated out into two sections: "For" and "Against".
Despite seeing the absurdity of this artificial dichotomy, I personally find this helpful to digestion. There's a lot here!
- Learn to foster radically hopeful and inclusive future ways of seeing and being in this world
- Engage the plurality of future possibilities: the scope of the probable, possible, plausible, and desirable
- Open imagination doors so others can walk through them
- Craft speculative fiction world design and foresight practices that challenge the status quo
- Shared YES VISIONS of the future
- Making the hardest choices of the decades to come
- Proactive prototyping of radically inclusive futures that focus on future cultural values and ethics
- Humanity as the driver for said evolution
- Boldly address past and present injustice and exploitative frameworks
- Replace said frameworks with regenerative and equitable alternatives
- Continuous dialogue, an iterative process, to be questioned, adjusted, and expanded
- Center previously marginalized perspectives, especially of indigeneity, queerness, and disability
- Explore visions of embodied hope
- Futures wherein we have come together, imperfect
- Creating and recovering blueprints for action
- Create spaces of active imagining
- Resourcing in the present
- Moving towards collaborative visions of liberation
- Speculative futures with time horizons no more than 30 years into the future and that take place primarily on Earth
- Narratives of life on our home planet
- Gender and sexuality as an open, fluid exploration space
- Futures are trans
- Future-queering
- Continuous becoming of our very own expanded selves
- Extraordinary cultural plurality
- The stories less heard in their narrative complexity
- Hybrid identities of "third-culture people"
- Anti-fascism
- Culture as a continuum of history's blending and humans on the move
- Disability
- Neurodiversity
- Networks of mutuality
- Learning by adaptiveness, nurturing, and flexibility
- Continuous process of learning from diverse lived experiences
- Integration and melting of disciplinary boundaries
- Contextual ecosystems education
- Come together to radically expand each others' horizons
- Uplift the previously silenced voices
- Complement each other with diverse knowledge and experience
- Evolve as plural planetary culture
- Relationships between diverse individuals and between diverse communities
- Learn from identity-rooted philosophies of interwoven, symbiotic coexistence
- Look to Ubuntu, "I am because we all are. We are human because we participate, blend, and share."
- Technologies that expand human potential
- Technology at human scale
- Technology that is buildable by communities
- Technology that is maintainable by communities
- Tools that bring us together
- Innovation that ensures safety while enabling diverse experiences of togetherness, collaboration, and co-presence
- Accessible physical experiences and expressions with sensorial augmentation
- Sensorial expansion led by the needs of the previously excluded
- Sensual rituals as places of ancestral reckoning
- Reveling in tenderness
- Expansive and creative sexuality
- The joy of human connection
- Equitable relationship with the planet
- Honor how language about more-than-human beings matters
- Position humans among and in relationship with all life
- Life-centric design
- Life is technology
- Biology-based technologies
- Circular ecosystems design
- Learning from the living world
- Organic, living compounds
- World growing
- Design for species both charismatic and microscopic
- Leaning in to and honoring algae, mycelium, bacteria, and viruses
- Seeing ourselves as ecosystems in communication with the world and each other
- Honor the mind-body connection
- Honor and nourish our living inner landscapes
- A plurality of innovative and ancestral agricultural strategies to support all life
- Find balance between industry, Earth, and community
- The living world seeping into cities
- Cities that nourish their living landscapes
- Built environments and living landscapes in symbiotic relationships
- Think of visible landscapes along with oceans, sub-terrains, and the atmosphere, all interconnected
- Be a regenerative intelligence
- Engage in regenerative action in every critical choice
- Learn indigenous, symbiotic world-views
- Honor diverse intelligence of and our co-dependence with the living world
- Spirituality and rituals
- Cultural importance of ancestral and emerging spiritual practice
- Design technologies that support spiritual practice
- Space in cities for accessible gathering
- Time in calendars for celebratory rituals of the living world's cycles
- First nation sites and restitution of sacred land
- Recognize the non-universality of linear time
- Remembering cyclical life-visions of indigenous ancestors
- Creativity: aesthetic, cultural, scientific, social, and political
- Critical thinking
- Analytical thinking
- Subcultures
- Plurality of creative expression
- Creativity of youth
- Creativity that explores deep listening and seeing
- Engage the emergent values inherent in circular ways of being
- Emergent values and recalibrated cultural constructs of material degrowth
- Infinite growth in knowledge
- Regenerative politics: equity and contribution, accountability and responsibility
- Honoring aging, death, and grief
- Embracing temporal experience
- Ecosystem regeneration through mortality
- A cultural environment inhospitable for fascism and other genocidal ideologies
- Embrace the lessons of history from the perspectives of the oppressed
- Uncomfortable yet vital conversations about the harm we have experienced and in which we have participated
- Vitalize the process of learning and unlearning
- Don't give up when we fail, misunderstand, and misalign
- Be honest and vulnerable
- Deepen our engagement
- See ourselves as historical actors
- Dream expansive, hopeful futures
- Act in accordance with protopian values
- Support forward-looking and regenerative-action-focused grassroots activism
- Participating in policymaking
- Engage with hypercorps
- Constraints and suppositions of dominant perceptions of reality
- Science fiction and corporate foresight visions with dystopian/Utopian stereotypes
- Entrenching the status quo
- Industrial markers of progress
- Cultural, social, and political will informed by a multiplicity of biases and injustices from the 20th century
- Colonialism
- Cartesian dualism
- The false binary of dystopia/Utopia
- Neo-religious content outlets for dualistic ideas of heaven, hell, and the fetish for the apocalyptic rapture
- Futures that are desolate, beyond repair, with engagement futility
- Using dystopias as product road-maps
- Inequality
- Alienation
- Xenophobia
- Racism
- Fascism
- Biosphere collapse
- Perpetuating the gaze and experience of privilege
- Greenwashing
- Eco-fascism
- Leapfrogging all of the most urgent inequities of the present
- Closure of critical inquiry
- Eugenics
- Genocidal nightmares
- Aryan Utopia
- Apartheid
- Extreme surveillance capitalism
- Endless economic growth based on exponential technology
- Exponentialism
- Colonial extraction consequences
- Limitless extractive economic growth
- Cultural and biosphere extinctions
- Infinite material expansion on a finite planet
- Underlying Christian mythos of technology as savior
- Marginalizing other narratives and faiths
- Ivory-tower delusions of colonizing grandeur
- Technological innovation without humanitarian evolutions
- Technology/science of Kelly's "What Technology Wants"
- Patching things up with temporary, disposable, and technological solutions
- Protopia indebtedness to or situation between dystopia and Utopia
- Monologues moored in the gaze of privilege, tied to boundaries of thought established via patriarchal settler colonialism
- Being bound to the realm of theoretical imagination
- The inevitability of imposed futures
- Sci-fi which features distance time periods and fantastic locations
- Neocolonial approaches to space expansion
- Rigid gender/sexual binary, a recent colonial invention
- Oppressive cis-heteronormative boundaries
- Colonial fictions of race
- Stereotyping
- Fascism
- Callous and violent chauvinist bigotry
- Nationalist bigotry
- Xenophobic bigotry
- Ableist world-views
- Ableist infrastructure
- Ableist language
- Learning by forceful normalization, punishment, and austerity
- Ageism
- Drawing generational lines
- Conventional hierarchies
- Low-context seclusionist thinking
- Biosphere and societal collapse
- Isolationist approaches
- Research and development within isolated fields, ideas, and discourses
- Obsolescence
- Solely relationships between diverse individuals
- Reviving Western communitarian socialist frameworks of imposed homogeneity
- Thought based on Cartesian fabrications such as "I think therefore I am."
- Technologies that bind human potential
- Tools that constrain, isolate, overwhelm, disembody, or split us apart
- Historical erasure of the embodied knowledge of indigenous cultures
- Sensorial expansion led by the wants of the privileged
- The living world as environment or natural resources
- Human-centric design
- Positioning humans in the center
- Obsession with mechanical technologies in mainstream and commercial futurist discourse
- Fossil fuel based energy
- Finite, mineral based materials
- World building
- Eremocene, the age of loneliness
- Extinguishing all other life forms on Earth
- Space design just for ourselves
- Fear and disregard of algae, mycelium, bacteria, and viruses
- Seeing ourselves as isolated entities or distant floating islands
- Damage by mechanized, reductionist versions of agriculture
- The duality of rural and urban
- Cities that consume their living landscapes
- Thinking only of visible landscapes while ignoring oceans, sub-terrain, and atmosphere
- Being a destructive force
- Settler-colonial relationships with the land
- Science that is not entangled with and dependent on the living world
- Positioning ourselves as a superior consciousness
- New age (con)spirituality commodification practices bound to colonial legacy as well as ableist prejudices and exclusions
- Divisive religious dogmas which require dehumanization of the other
- Time in calendars solely for human achievements
- Subculture-ignorant future narratives, technologies, environmental efforts, and urban design
- Perpetuating cultural ageism about creativity
- Most rewards going to those who speak the loudest, often with tools, as self-expression
- Capitalist model of infinite growth on a finite planet; unsustainable and deadly
- Linear economies
- Infinite growth in anything except knowledge
- Obsolete binaries of conservative and liberal
- Extractive politics: exploitation and expropriation
- Novelty/innovation/youth-obsessed culture
- Techno-utopian obsession with immortality
- Prejudice
- Bigotry
- Discrimination
- Fascism and other genocidal ideologies
- Violence
- Lessons of history from the perspectives of the oppressors
- Militarization of history; impotence of human actions
- Exponential global warming
- Climate pattern disruption
- Biosphere collapse
- Pandemics
- Disinformation warfare
- Fascist consolidation
- Increasing inequality