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I look at this rocket launch and see a triumph of technology and a poverty of imagination. @NBCNews/1414249314562580481On twitter.com
♻️ 4 Retweets ❤️ 19 Favorites Mood +3 🙂
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(and of course a society where rich white men have disproportionate power to live our their imagined narratives, but everyone sees that.)Permalink On twitter.com
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Richard Branson said he oriented his life and this company around a dream inspired by the Apollo landing. So the dream he's maintained for decades is: "I wish it was me up there."Permalink On twitter.com
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Reframed into a business proposition, this boy's dream became an offer for others with millions to spend to fulfill their own desire to go where a few, more celebrated men have gone before.Permalink On twitter.com
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Only the absurd hyperindividualism of capitalist wealth, and the willful blindness of many elites to a world in crisis can explain how a boy's fantasy in 1969 gets prioritized into a multi-billion dollar enterprise 50 years later.Permalink On twitter.com
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But beneath these power structures lurks the failure of imagination that troubles me more, and I think we can do far more to change.Permalink On twitter.com
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Midcentury science fiction, Hollywood, and state actors like NASA have all coalesced around a single imagined future. Inspiring countless boys-who-would-become-tycoons. @CarwilBJ/1126300200212021255?s=19Permalink On twitter.com
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These ideas created an imagined future, what I call The Future™ that is only one of many possible technological and social paths. In which technology appears as the savior, the Earth as a nest to be left behind.Permalink On twitter.com
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And in which boys and their toys take center stage. This makes sense for the comic book writers of the 1950s, or for movie producers of the 1980s (both of whom imagined greater gender homogeneity in their audiences than existed)Permalink On twitter.com
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But how can adults who have lived through the AIDS crisis, the overthrow of Apartheid, the crises of deforestation, language loss, climate change, and COVID and now COVID cling so tightly to a future timeline that is so linear and outward bound?Permalink On twitter.com
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How do they/we not see the heroic journey of the future involves a reckoning with our past, a rethinking of how we live together, a redistribution of resources, a renewal of relations with the non-human world, and a crash campaign to preserve the biosphere?Permalink On twitter.com
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How have these plotlines escaped them/us? @CarwilBJ/1126300212128038912?s=19Permalink On twitter.com
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How? Perhaps because our visual imagining of future hopes have either recapitulated the Atomic Age version of The Future™ or only dealt with these Earthbound challenges in the frame of dystopia.Permalink On twitter.com
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Perhaps when people, always the heroes of their own story, imagine themselves in the future, it's easier to put themselves in a cockpit leaving Earth than a collective effort fixing it.Permalink On twitter.com
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If so, we need to invest heavily in making the alternate, hopeful future tangible, visible, imaginable, so people will seed their dreams around it.Permalink On twitter.com
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And also, obviously and urgently, move the locus of decision making about huge future investments out of the heads of individual billionaires into public forums accessible to all and accountable to the not-rich majority.Permalink On twitter.com