The Importance Of Utopia: Visions Of Violence, Peace, Hope & Despair — ilosofy. A utopia of blood. That’s what it was to be. Thankfully it never came to be. The Third Reich was to evolve to become the Greater Germanic Reich, a state that would have plenty for all its people, be advanced in science, people would be proud of who they are and what they have achieved. Above all this vision would only cater to the good people of this world, if others were even considered to be people.
While I’m sure that most people (though not all people, I do read the news) are quit glad this utopia never came to be, I’m willing to bet that if you are reading this you’re already living in a utopia of sorts. “During the first half of the last century, the growth of the world population caused the absolute number of poor people in the world to increase, even though the share of people in poverty was going down. In 1820, it was estimated that 94% of the world lived in poverty and 84% lived in extreme poverty.
Perhaps the principal example of utopia is Plato’s Republic. Cadelllast.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/distributed-digital-democracy.pdf. From Design Fiction to Experiential Futures. This is the second chapter I wrote for the book, “The Future of Futures“. It explores the role design fiction, experiential futures and visual media in foresight work. It also includes several examples of good design fiction, which are formatted nicely in the original publication. Download this chapter as a formatted PDF, here. I have another chapter in the book, which is about the effect of crowdsourcing, big data and the web on scenario planning and foresight.
You can read it here. From Design Fiction to Experiential Futures by Noah Raford, PhD Experiential futures, design fiction, artifacts from the future or speculative fiction. Of course, “experiential” and immersive activities have always played an important role in certain kinds of futures work, particularly in the early days of scenario practice at GBN.
These approaches come with certain risks, however. Experiential futures is a powerful addition to the foresight toolbox. Examples Superflux, Song of the Machine Fly Me to the Moon. Technology Review: Science Fiction. Utopia. Etymology[edit] Varieties[edit] Ecology[edit] Ecological utopian society describes new ways in which society should relate to nature. They react to a perceived widening gap between the modern Western way of living that, allegedly, destroys nature[3] and a more traditional way of living before industrialization, that is regarded by the ecologists to be more in harmony with nature. According to the Dutch philosopher Marius de Geus, ecological utopias could be sources of inspiration for green political movements.[4] In the novelette Rumfuddle (1973), Jack Vance presents a novel twist on the ecological utopia.
Economics[edit] Politics and history[edit] A global utopia of world peace is often seen as one of the possible end results of world history. The communes of the 1960s in the United States were often an attempt to greatly improve the way humans live together in communities. Religious utopia[edit] Religious utopias can be intra-religious or inter-religious. Science and technology[edit] POLYTOPIA the emergence of. #Polytopia-(the emergence of) - is a work/proposal in progress# We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
R. Buckminster Fuller Establishing a common ground It is commonly agreed/argued that ‘The common good’ is a utilitarian ideal, thus representing "the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of individuals". The goal of a Polytopia is simply NOT to define the common good and by that escaping the trap of statistical interest. A co-emergent interest let us define as:” the interest emerging out of a collaborative mind mutuality, emphasizing the unique perspective of each and every individual member, voluntarily desiring to cooperate/share/connect/interact with other minds, for the purpose of allowing : “A ‘positive – unified’ vision of transcultural diversity, as applied to sentient beings”, a Polytopia, to emerge. Po-ly-to-pi-anoun A ‘positive – unified’ vision of transcultural diversity, as applied to sentient beings; Polytopia What is a Polytopia?
Transhumanist religion 2.0. Cosmic infinity (credit: ESO/Wikimedia Commons) Cosmism, an emerging “religion 2.0” that is part of a radical futurist conception of the future development of humanity, can give us the positive optimism and “strenuous mood” to overcome our current problems and embark on our cosmic journey. So say contemporary cosmists, who believe that the “manifest destiny” of our species is colonizing the universe and developing spacetime engineering and scientific “future magic” much beyond our current understanding and imagination. These ideas were first developed in the late 19th century by Russian Cosmism, the scientific philosophy of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Nikolai Fedorov, who considered science as a tool given to us by God to enable us to resurrect the dead and, as promised, enjoy immortal life.
Some cosmists — including me — expect that God-like beings will exist in the future, and they may be able to affect their past — our present — by means of spacetime engineering. Rene: The Search for Polytopia. When we launched SpaceCollective towards the end of 2007 we had no idea whether the “forward thinking terrestrials’’ we were hoping to attract were actually out there.
All we had to go by was our sense of the zeitgeist and the hypothesis that we are currently living through a period of exponential change that has the potential to transform human nature, using as our reigning metaphors the networked intelligence of the web, technology-induced evolution and the new space age. While students at UCLA in Los Angeles and Vienna’s School for the Applied Arts were in the early process of beta testing the site, scores of aspiring members somehow found our unpublicized URL and were applying for membership to our yet to be launched invite only community. Without any publicity or public beta, an instant network of forward thinkers from all over the world had spontaneously sprung into existence. “The infoverse is where we will live. And we need a home. A mutually supportive habitat of sorts. Polytopia Our Mind Habitat in the Infoverse. A project Proposal: Polytopia , Our Mind Habitat in the Infoverse A dream you dream alone is only a dream.
A dream you dream together is reality. John Lennon Space collective has done an amazing thing; it has allowed the initial manifest of a collective intelligence to come forth and shine. The cadence of the flow of information and innovation in the infoverse demands a response; the surge is rising, bit by byte and torrent by data swell, and it asks for a reply. Polytopia is such a liberty upholding worldview, an umbrella meta-concept, which will permit us all to join in the adventure of our scientific and technological oncoming future, without rating systems based on outmoded Neolithic brains. Project proposal Polytopia , Our Mind Habitat in the Infoverse — “Here’s to the crazy ones. . — And on a more personal note, while writing these words I am listening to good old Pink Floyd, Shine on you Crazy Diamond: Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 6-9)
Naveen Jain: "Inliers": Why Non-Experts are Better at Disruptive Innovation. Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something, whether it's playing the guitar, charting the stars or writing software code. In his landmark book Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell looks at why certain people are successful and postulates that, among other things, a combination of circumstances and the ability to become expert at something produces truly exceptional people and ideas. That's an interesting thesis on the part of Gladwell, and perhaps true in yesteryear, but in today's world of growing exponential technologies, I beg to differ.
I believe that people who will come up with creative solutions to solve the world's biggest problems -- ecological devastation, global warming, the global debt crisis and distribution of dwindling natural resources, to name a few -- will not be experts in their fields. Myopic Thinking Innovation and Information in Abundance The digital revolution has also meant a revolution in access to information. Satellites in the shed? TEDGlobal announces the new DIY revolution | Technology | The Observer. Once upon a time, if you said you were doing a spot of DIY, everyone would know you'd be doing something involving wobbly ladders, pots of paint and, depending on the decade, either stripping your floors or recarpeting them.
No more. Or at least ladders and pots of paint might still be involved, but the end result could be a aerial drone you've built yourself. Or a biotech lab. Last week's TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh – the festival known as "Davos for optimists" – shone a light on the DIY revolution – a movement that encompasses items ranging from manufacturing to synthetic biology to medicine. After a decade in which digital technologies have disrupted industries from music to the media, it's capitalism itself that is now under attack. A decade ago, open-source software revolutionised the internet. Catarina Mota, a 38-year-old Portuguese PhD student, is typical of the new breed of DIYers, or, as they tend to call themselves, "makers". Like most makers, she's self-taught. What is the Role of the 'Open Source' Movement in Society Today? We are in the process of transitioning from the Industrial Age of the past century into the Information Age of the 21st century.
Many acknowledge this but don't really grasp what it means. We are moving from the 'closed' protective systems that worked well in the Industrial Age to the new, more effective 'open' systems approach that is the hallmark of the Information Age. We are moving to a new way of doing things – the 'Open Way'. The Open Source Way is more than a development model; it defines the characteristics of a culture.
The open source way thrives on broad collaboration and shared effort. From www.opensource.com/open-source-way The Open Source Way is about possibility. Think about it. The characteristics of the new 'Information Age' are quite different. We're still in the midst of the transition, so many organizations are still operating under the old rules that worked well in the fading Industrial Age. Peer-to-peer and Marxism: The Berlin Debate. On May 3, Jonathan Clyne, Lena Hanno, Alex Dirmeier and Jean Lievens had a discussion with Michel Bauwens on peer-to-peer and Marxism. The discussion took place in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in Berlin. Here’s a slightly edited transcript of the discussion.
The recording was reasonably good, but our voices were sometimes unintelligible because there were other guests talking in the lobby and there was also a piano playing (from the theme song from Titanic to What a Wonderful World, all very appropriate). So my apologies if I misinterpreted some of the interventions, because sometimes I had to guess what has actually been said (words between parentheses are added). If that was the case, please react so I can change it. I hope this debate will continue. Michel started the discussion with a summary of his thoughts on peer-to-peer. So why does that mean that the Marxist theory of revolution is not convincing for me? Alex: Can you define what you mean by a new mode of production? The Internet map. The map of the Internet Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface.
Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other. Charges and springs To draw an analogy from classical physics, one may say that websites are electrically charged bodies, while links between them are springs. Springs pull similar websites together, and the charge does not let the bodies adjoin and pushes websites apart if there is no link between them. Semantic web The Internet Phenomenon.