A quick Friday post then to point to the Chicago Tribune’s images of past ‘high tech’ gadets.  The weekend homework that accompanies the images – think about stories from science fiction, predictions and forecasts you have heard and look for where parts of them have been realised.

A light-hearted review of some of those are answered in Where’s my jetpack?.

Recently, the doomsayers have been gaining the upper hand.  Curious to find out more about their worldview, I decided to set up an experiment in post-apocalyptic living, to learn what it might be like to live in the dark future they were foretelling. This article gives a brief outline of that experiment.

The utopia experiment, as I called it, started when I put an announcement on my website in January 2006 calling for volunteers to come and help me set up a temporary community in the Scottish Highlands. We would live as if modern civilisation had collapsed, growing our own food, generating our own power, and salvaging what technology we could from the wreckage.  Within a few months, I had received hundreds of applications to join the experimental community. And they weren’t all hippies in their twenties either, as one of my friends had predicted. With ages ranging from 18 to 67, and a roughly equal mix of men and women, they came from a wide range of backgrounds; an ex royal marine turned shoemaker, a computer programmer passionate about vegetables, a retired schoolteacher who had spent time with the Inuit.

It started in Mexico, while I was touring the Yucatan Peninsula.  I had long dreamed of visiting this part of the world, famous for the ruined cities of the Maya civilisation, which flourished in the first millennium, before collapsing rather suddenly around the tenth century.  And when I visited these lost cities, they did not disappoint.

I can still remember vividly the impact that the ruins of Uxmal had on me. As I surveyed the majestic temples and stone colonnades from the top of a steep pyramid, a feeling of melancholy overcame me. I pictured the bustling crowds who must have once thronged the streets and squares, over a thousand years before. In the distance, where once there would have been fields full of maize and beans, all that could be seen now was the green canopy of the jungle, which stretched in all directions, punctuated only here and there by the peeks of distant pyramids, marking the sites of other lost cities.

Nobody who visits these ruined cities can fail to wonder what happened to their original inhabitants, or why they were abandoned. Fortunately, archaeologists have pieced together the answer. The Maya collapse, it turns out, was not triggered by invasion, or any outside force; it was entirely self-caused. It seems the Maya depleted one of their principal resources – trees – and this led to a series of other problems, including soil erosion, decrease of usable farmland, and drought. The growing population that drove this overexploitation was then faced with a diminishing amount of food, which led to increasing migration and, eventually, bloody civil war.

As I sat atop that pyramid in Uxmal, a question began to form in my mind.  If a great civilisation like that of the Mayas can implode, I wondered, might not the same happen to us? There are, of course, some big differences between the civilisation we live in today and that of the Mayas. For one thing, our civilisation is global. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, it can appeal to the rest of the world for help. The Mayas did not have this luxury, because they were in effect isolated from the rest of the world. But on the negative side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, the trouble could quickly be exported and cascade throughout the tightly-integrated international system. If modern civilisation collapses, it will do so everywhere. Everyone now stands or falls together.

If the idea of our great global industrial civilisation crashing seems outlandish, no doubt the idea of their own civilisation collapsing would have seemed equally crazy to the Maya at their heyday. To the crowds who once thronged the now deserted streets of Tikal and Chichen-Itza, the idea that within a few years these streets would be deserted would have been hard to entertain. So perhaps those who refuse to contemplate the possibility of global collapse are simply suffering from a failure of imagination.

That’s when the idea for the utopia experiment came to me.  I would appeal for volunteers to live as if civilisation had recently collapsed.  It would be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  By acting it out in real life, I hoped our thoughts about such an existence would be more realistic than if we just sat around and made it up.

I returned to England from Mexico full of enthusiasm for my new project. The first task was to find a suitable location. My scenario called for somewhere rural, so the volunteers could grow their own food. Climate would be important too – and if climate change was one of the major contributors to the collapse of the old civilisation, the places favoured by the old climate might be too hot or too dry for new settlements. I began to peruse the scientific models forecasting the climate of different parts of the UK, and one area seemed to stand out as more favourable than most – the Highlands of Scotland. While the south of England would become increasingly dry with global warming, all the models predicted that rainfall would still be plentiful in the Highlands, while the rising temperatures would mean that average snowfalls there would reduce by up to ninety per cent.

Having secured a suitable location, the next step was to recruit volunteers for the experiment.  In January 2006, I put up a new page on my website, with the following announcement:

“Volunteers needed for a visionary experiment – from March 2007

From March 2007, I’ll be inviting volunteers to join me in an experiment in utopia in the Scottish highlands.  We will live together in a novel kind of community based on three main ideas:

1. It will be a LEARNING COMMUNITY – each member must have a distinctive skill or area of knowledge that they can teach to the others.

2. It will be a WORKING COMMUNITY – no money is required from the members, but all must contribute by working.

3. It will be strictly TIME-LIMITED.  This is not an attempt to found an ongoing community.  Members may stay for up to three months, but may also come for as little as two weeks.“

To make it clear that this was not just another commune, I made it clear that the aim of the experiment would be to simulate life after the collapse of modern civilisation:

“The main objective of this experiment,” I wrote, “is to simulate life in the aftermath of a collapse of global civilisation and to prepare for such an eventuality.”  The announcement finished by asking potential volunteers to email me a short (200 word) description of themselves and what they could offer the community.

At first I made no attempt to promote the project or tell anyone the announcement was there. I didn’t know if anyone would see the website, or respond. But, the wonders of the internet being what they are, somehow people found their way to this page, and within a few days I received the first application.   It was from a 51 year old man who called himself Agric. 

When I eventually met him in person, he turned out to be a softly spoken man with shocks of white hair and irrepressible energy (a “hobbit on speed”, as another volunteer once remarked), . He lived in Slough and worked in computers – but he was planning to sell his house and become a nomad. It didn’t take me long to realise that Agric was a committed “doomer” – a believer in the coming apocalypse. For him, the scenario we were playing out at the utopia experiment was not just a collaborative fiction. It was preparation for the real thing. He could always back up his gloomy prognostications with lengthy discourses on the stock exchange, the global economy and, of course, peak oil.

One of the main lessons from my experiment was how easy it was for people to make the same ideological transition that Agric had already made – from imagining what it might be like if civilisation really did collapse, to firmly believing that it would collapse.  The experiment was originally meant to be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn it into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  The problem, as it turned out, was that our thoughts became too realistic.  With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  A similar thing, after all, happened in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971 by Phillip Zimbardo, when the undergraduates who he selected to live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building started taking their roles far too seriously.  Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment early, and in the end I also decided to curtail the experiment after a year.

For me, one of the final straws came when some of the volunteers started talking about justice.  Without any police force, surely we would have to enact our own – inevitably rough – kind of justice?  That sort of thing is ok to write about in fiction, but it could get very dangerous if you begin to start acting it out in reality.

Besides the transition from taking the scenario as an interesting fiction and an accurate prediction, I also witnessed another strange mutation; the volunteers began to think of the future collapse as something good.  It’s the opposite to sour grapes – Jon Elster has called it “sweet lemons”. This strain of thought has many names.  Luddism.  Anti-technologism.  Anti-transhumanism.  Primitivism.  Bioconservatism.  But they all amount to the same thing.

Part of the appeal of this current of thought is that it provides an easy explanation for a sense of anomie.  Boredom, frustration, anxiety, depression?  According to the Luddites, we can blame them all on industrial civilisation.  If we were hunter-gatherers, living in small bands consisting mostly of family members, in contact with nature, directly satisfying our own biological needs each day, then we’d be happy, right?  Well, maybe.  But that was the past, and we can’t go back there now.  Or maybe we can – if society collapses…. That’s one reason why Luddism is so dangerous: it encourages people to imagine social collapse as something desirable.

Thinking about the future can be done in a sensible way, but only when one is aware of the many pitfalls that we tend to fall into when trying to do futurology.  The utopia experiment taught me about many of these pitfalls.  Besides the tendency to take fiction as truth, and the sweet-lemons phenomenon, I also witnessed what the security expert Bruce Schneier refers as the tendency to focus on “movie plot threats”.  People worry about dramatic threats of the sort that make good movies – and convince themselves that these are probable just because they are dramatic.  As Schneier says:

“We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared”

Psychologically, this all makes sense. Evolution has endowed us with good imaginations.  But these imaginations are often seduced by dramatic images and pay little attention to good probabilistic reasoning.

When I did eventually call an end to the experiment, most of the volunteers returned happily to their former lives, but some of them wanted to carry on.  Indeed, they were shocked that I did not want to carry on with them.  When I explained that the experiment had always been just that – an experiment, a kind of collaborative fiction – they didn’t believe me, even though I had clearly stated that at the outset.  A few of them are, I believe, still thinking about trying to buy some land of their own in a remote part of Scotland so they can live there permanently and prepare for the coming apocalypse for real.   And they are convinced that someday, I’ll see the light, and come and join them.”

The reason for this is because the Research into Action part of the Beyond Current Horizons project is trying to support all those in education involved in such thinking, be it around designing curricula, building schools for the future, becoming an extended school and perhaps even planning careers. So far my main conclusion is that this type of planning is not easy given, as Peter Schwartz puts it, the “impossibly complex array of factors that affect any decision”.

So what could be done to make it easier? How can all those involved in education be inspired enough not only to create a vision but to make it a viable one? One solution that I’ve been investigating is to use scenarios – as the Carnegie UK Trust report says they can:

• Help define future vision and strategic priorities
• Rehearse different policy or strategy options to and weaknesses, or unintended consequences
• Future-proof a decision that is on the table.

Moreover, scenarios should be engaging, memorable and thought provoking – which ought to be ideal given the various backgrounds of those involved either working alone or in groups when doing the required educational long term planning.

However, the tricky thing is creating them. To VERY briefly summarise the process you decide your area of concern, you list all the possible factors that may impact, by some black art you select the most important and divergent factors around which to develop your scenarios, you create these plausible, coherent and possible futures, and then you plan with them. And this leaves out the consulting of experts to ensure the factors are accurate, commissioning of research as necessary, agreeing and sharing definitions, the critiquing of the proposed scenarios, the refinement, workshops possibly at every stage of the process, and how to create an action plan once you’ve got the final scenarios…

Would this creation process be useful to the education leaders, Local Authorities, consultants, architects, IT suppliers out there that may be involved in long term planning in schools? It would after all require investigating possible changes in the role of childhood, employment, technology, assessment and all the other research challenges which will influence plans. In my opinion, though I’m willing to change my mind on the basis of reasoned argument, is no. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time in the world of planning in schools and surely what time is there should be spent doing the visioning and planning and not creating a set of plausible coherent possible futures in which these visions can be tested. The more interesting question is how can scenarios be used by education leaders? Which I may blog about in the future – but until then am looking forward to others thoughts on whether scenario creation would be useful in long term planning.

The RSA is currently looking at two important sorts of futures in particular: cognition, and the role of the government. There are some great videos on their website featuring lectures and provocations about how developments may play out in the future in these areas. Yet for a provocative glimpse at the pace of continuity, the RSA’s Journal (Summer ‘08) has a great timeline created – as stimulus rather than prediction – by Richard Watson. Many thanks to the RSA for allowing me to reproduce it here:

RSA Journal Timeline

Spelling and free roads both disappear around 2020, whilst work-free weekends and free public services have gone by 2030. The disappearance of childhood, the family room and free public spaces all have stark consequences for the way we think about the world operating (and of course interesting discussions about definitions of all of them), yet blindness and deafness, physical pain and household chores may all die to thankful applause. ‘Death’ disappears by 2050 but evidentally Cher and Cliff Richard just before.

The timeline is presented ‘with tongue firmly in cheek’ – but an interesting pair of questions are in the preamble – ‘do you disagree with something becoming extinct or merely with the date of the extinction? Do you have any serious evidence for why this might be incorrect or is it just a gut feeling?’

It’s not solely about the quality of the evidence and information that possible futures are based upon (which is a shame considering the incredible challenge leads developing the evidence within BCH!) but about making explicit the values (and artefacts and practices etc) that we want to hold on to. BCH is doing this in many ways – Million Futures is beautiful start to questions of hopes and aspirations. Often preferable futures are based upon the continuation of the values and emotional connections that we currently have, so it is important to consider those things that we wish to hold on to – artefacts, beliefs and relationships – and more than considering them, it is important to make them explicit and actively ensure that they can play a role in the preferable future we’re working towards. If you’d like to share the things you’re hoping will remain – get in touch.

Richard’s book ‘Future Files: The 5 trends that will shape the next 50 years‘ is being launched at an RSA event on Tuesday 23 September. (Views on the timeline are welcomed by the RSA and of course as comments here too). If you can’t wait for that, the first chapter is available for download.

]]> http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/25/28/feed/ 0 http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/18/25/ http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/18/25/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:50:39 +0000 Richard Sandford http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/?p=25 Friday afternoon! Time for a video: H. G. Wells and Alexander Korda’s 1936 film Things To Come, based on Wells’ The Shape Of Things To Come. It starts in 1940 as a world war starts to unfold, a prediction Wells got wrong by a year: other prescient elements include the strategic importance of air power and the use of submarines to launch weapons of mass destruction. Also notable for a fantastic score and the use of the word “eupeptic” in the first five minutes.

I stumbled across an article that recalls an approach used by Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno to “loosen up our expectations of what might happen in the near future” – in a similar way that Edward de Bono uses random words and techniques to encourage creative thinking, this approach is about stimulating other ways of viewing possible future.  Their approach presents a list of ‘unthinkable futures’ – possibilities that challenge the norm.

BCH is not about predicting the future, but exploring a range of socio-technological possible, probable and preferable futures to understand the implications for education – and it is important to consider how these wild cards can not only dramatically impact upon the way in which we live, but also how, over time, smaller incremental changes can lead to very different ways of living – which means that thinking about different futures needs to be imaginative yet considered; suprising yet expected.

The Long Now Foundation holds open seminars to share information, ways of thinking about the future and providing the sorts of stimulus that enables this wider exploration of futures.  For those not able to travel easily to San Fransisco, summaries and recordings of previous seminars can be found towards the bottom of this link

However, some methods do make bolder claims about predicting ‘the future’ – from the use of entrails and tea  leaves as indicators of the future to more ’scientific’ exploration of data and trends.  One challenge here is the ability to hold to account the strength of any prediction (the ‘predictor’ presumably long gone before long term futures are revealed!)  But if you’re feeling more confident about your interpretations of developments and trends (or want to see some others who are) – maybe Long Bets is where you can stake your claim.