In this episode, we invite you to turn away from all the awful news, and instead imagine how we might craft a different world, together. By sitting together in small circles and having conversations with people with diverse skills and backgrounds. By engaging in what we like to call collective futurecrafting.
In the last Newmoonsletter, we also invited you to Play_ for End Times. By playing and focusing on futurecrafting, we’re not diminishing the seriousness of our current predicament. It is precisely because we take it seriously that we want to give it our all. All our love and care. And join the end times as players, not just mere observers shouting “How dare they?” into the void.
It is precisely because we take it seriously that we refuse to leave the tech we helped build and train in the hands of lunatics who just want to f*ck off to Mars and leave us all behind. And if enough of us play our cards right, this will not be the end of all times, but just the end of the times that were not fit for purpose.
In this episode, we dare you to dream, to imagine ways of coming together, both online and onland, and ways of taking the future into our caring, loving hands.
Throughout the discussion, we explore the Australian context from which the collective futurecrafting initiative emerged, and what collective futurecrafting looks like in practice. We explore our shared identity as Earthians, who can use digital technologies to exchange wisdom from our localities and help each other face diverse challenges. We reflect on how social media platforms like TikTok might fit into the practice of futurecrafting, while reminding ourselves of the addictive design that’s built into current social technologies.
We also explore ancient and somatic technologies we can use to co-regulate our emotions as social beings, and to re-cognise the practice of coming together in circles and crafting a future through embodied conversations. We reflect on a Slovenian saying about habits as iron shirts, and how we might help each other take the weight of our current habits and ways of thinking off our shoulders. And we explore how some existing AI and other digital tools might support governance and collective sense-making, and wrap up by imagining how we might make our collective futurecrafting circles intergenerational and more inclusive.
For a deeper dive, we invite you to explore additional resources mentioned in our meandering exploration:
Nurturing conditions for kindness & learning in public online spaces (Alja’s blog post about #WorldTok)
Cortico: a thoughtful balance of human listening and AI tools
Burnout from Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI
A curation of resources, projects, and communities related to permacomputing
Related episodes of the Pathfinders Podcast:
You can learn more about the Tethix pathfinding adventure at: https://tethix.co/pathfinders/ and support this podcast on Substack: https://tethix.substack.com/subscribe
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