Download or read book Futures Beyond Dystopia written by Richard Slaughter and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can dystopian futures help provide the motivation to change the ways we operate day to day? This book raises and tackles a number of important questions about the future and the lessons we can learn for the present.
Download or read book Futures Beyond Dystopia written by Richard A. Slaughter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-11-13 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can dystopian futures help provide the motivation to change the ways we operate day to day? Futures Beyond Dystopia takes the view that the dominant trends in the world suggest a long-term decline into unliveable Dystopian futures. The human prospect is therefore very challenging, yet the perception of dangers and dysfunctions is the first step towards dealing with them. The motivation to avoid future dangers is matched by the human need to create plans and move forward. These twin motivations can be very powerful and help to stimulate the fields of Futures Studies and Applied Foresight. This analysis of current Futures practice is split into six sections: * The Case Against Hegemony * Expanding and Deepening a Futures Frame * Futures Studies and the Integral Agenda * Social Learning through Applied Foresight * Strategies and Outlooks * The Dialectic of Foresight and Experience. This fascinating book will stimulate anyone involved in Futures work around the world and will challenge practitioners and others to re-examine many of their assumptions, methodologies and practices.
Download or read book Futures Beyond Dystopia written by Richard Slaughter and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can dystopian futures help provide the motivation to change the ways we operate day to day? This book raises and tackles a number of important questions about the future and the lessons we can learn for the present.
Download or read book Utopia Dystopia written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.
Download or read book Facing Our Futures written by Nikolas Badminton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating insight into how professionals and businesses can develop their foresight and strategy to ensure that they are prepared for an unpredictable future. Businesses, organizations and society-at-large are all subject to unforeseeable events and incidents that often have a dramatic impact upon prosperity and profit. Due to their unpredictable nature, business leaders and executive teams are unable to prepare for these specific events. But, through innovation, strategizing and an open-minded approach, they can restructure their organization and practices in order to mitigate (or even take advantage of) the impact of such events. In Facing Our Futures, Nikolas Badminton draws upon his decades of experience as a consultant and futurist to provide readers with the skillset and outlook they need to prepare their organization, team and themselves for whatever obstacles the future may hold. CEOs, executive teams, government leaders and policy makers need to gain a broader perspective and a firmer grasp on how their relevant industry, society or community is evolving and changing. Once they have acquired this foresight, they need to then discover how to fully harness it – by strengthening their foundations, forecasting and establishing a resilient and adaptable strategy. Facing Our Futures acts as a primer on the value of seeing how bad things can get and the power in imagining these futures. It also provides a proven strategic planning and foresight methodology - the Positive Dystopia Canvas (PDC) - that allows leaders to supercharge their teams to build evocative visions of futures that strengthen planning today.
Download or read book Four Futures written by Peter Frase and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the utopias and dystopias that could develop from present society Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism and extermininsm might actually entail. Could the current rise of the real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender's Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealth—but there's no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of "likes," wouldn't rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies are already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.
Download or read book Cosmonaut Keep written by Ken MacLeod and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Ken MacLeod's Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level.A visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe. Matt Cairns is a 21st-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey. Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova's first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader's daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier-to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel. Cosmonaut Keep is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book On Such a Full Sea written by Chang-rae Lee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more. . . . With On Such a Full Sea, [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart.”—Andrew Sean Greer, The New York Times Book Review “I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with On Such a Full Sea, I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?”—Porochista Khakpour, The Los Angeles Times From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker,The Surrendered, and My Year Abroad, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest in a shocking, future America. On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class—descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China—find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.
Download or read book Science Fiction Disruption and Tourism written by Ian Yeoman and published by Channel View Publications. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines science fiction’s theoretical and ontological backgrounds and how science fiction applies to the future of tourism. It recreates and invents the future of tourism in a creative and disruptive manner, reconceptualising tourism through alternative and quantum leap thinking that go beyond the normative or accepted view of tourism. The chapters, focusing on areas such as disruption, sustainability and technology, draw readers into the unknown future of tourism – a future that may be disruptive, dystopian or utopian. The book brings a new theoretical paradigm to the study of tourism in a post COVID-19 world and can be used to explore, frame and even form the future of tourism. It will capture the imagination and inspire readers to address tourism’s challenges of tomorrow.
Download or read book Beyond Market Dystopia New Ways of Living written by Greg Albo and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-23 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays which aim to create a world of agency and justice How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists such as Michelle Chin, Nancy Fraser, Arun Gupta, and Jeremy Brecher connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living.
Download or read book Children of the New World written by Alexander Weinstein and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes "After Yang," the basis for the acclaimed A24 film After Yang, starring Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Haley Lu Richardson, and directed by Kogonada. A New York Times Notable Book “A darkly mesmerizing, fearless, and exquisitely written work. Stunning, harrowing, and brilliantly imagined.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago. In “The Cartographers,” the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. In “After Yang,” the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how real a son he has become. Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary and singular voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.
Download or read book Bypassing Dystopia written by Joyce Nelson and published by . This book was released on 2018-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Curatopia written by Philipp Schorch and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.
Download or read book Infinite Detail written by Tim Maughan and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL! The Guardian's Pick for Best Science Fiction Book of the Year! A timely and uncanny portrait of a world in the wake of fake news, diminished privacy, and a total shutdown of the Internet BEFORE: In Bristol’s center lies the Croft, a digital no-man’s-land cut off from the surveillance, Big Data dependence, and corporate-sponsored, globally hegemonic aspirations that have overrun the rest of the world. Ten years in, it’s become a center of creative counterculture. But it’s fraying at the edges, radicalizing from inside. How will it fare when its chief architect, Rushdi Mannan, takes off to meet his boyfriend in New York City—now the apotheosis of the new techno-utopian global metropolis? AFTER: An act of anonymous cyberterrorism has permanently switched off the Internet. Global trade, travel, and communication have collapsed. The luxuries that characterized modern life are scarce. In the Croft, Mary—who has visions of people presumed dead—is sought out by grieving families seeking connections to lost ones. But does Mary have a gift or is she just hustling to stay alive? Like Grids, who runs the Croft’s black market like personal turf. Or like Tyrone, who hoards music (culled from cassettes, the only medium to survive the crash) and tattered sneakers like treasure. The world of Infinite Detail is a small step shy of our own: utterly dependent on technology, constantly brokering autonomy and privacy for comfort and convenience. With Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan makes the hitherto-unimaginable come true: the End of the Internet, the End of the World as We Know It.
Download or read book Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond written by Douglas A. Vakoch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caught as we are in a grave climate crisis that seems more irreversible with every passing year, our literary portrayals of the future often feature the dystopian collapse of the world as we know it. Science fiction explores how we got here, while pointing toward a more hopeful path forward. From an ecofeminist perspective, a core cause of our current ecological catastrophe is the patriarchal domination of nature, playing out in parallel with the oppression of women. As an alternative to dystopian futures that seem increasingly inevitable, ecofeminist science fiction helps us conjure utopias that promote environmental sustainability based on more egalitarian human relationships. Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction explores the fictional worlds of such canonical novelists as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Joan Slonczewski, as well as those of lesser-known science fiction writers, as they collectively probe humanity’s greatest existential threats. Contributors from five continents provide compelling analyses of far future dystopias on Earth that are all too easy to imagine becoming reality if humankind’s current trajectory continues, as well as provocative insights into science fiction utopias set on idyllic planets orbiting distant stars, which offer liberatory alternatives that might someday be actualized in the real world. By examining the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women, Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond provides the tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions, helping create a foundation for a truly habitable world.
Download or read book Redesigning AI written by Daron Acemoglu and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at how new technologies can be put to use in the creation of a more just society. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not likely to make humans redundant. Nor will it create superintelligence anytime soon. But it will make huge advances in the next two decades, revolutionize medicine, entertainment, and transport, transform jobs and markets, and vastly increase the amount of information that governments and companies have about individuals. AI for Good leads off with economist and best-selling author Daron Acemoglu, who argues that there are reasons to be concerned about these developments. AI research today pays too much attention to the technological hurtles ahead without enough attention to its disruptive effects on the fabric of society: displacing workers while failing to create new opportunities for them and threatening to undermine democratic governance itself. But the direction of AI development is not preordained. Acemoglu argues for its potential to create shared prosperity and bolster democratic freedoms. But directing it to that task will take great effort: It will require new funding and regulation, new norms and priorities for developers themselves, and regulations over new technologies and their applications. At the intersection of technology and economic justice, this book will bring together experts--economists, legal scholars, policy makers, and developers--to debate these challenges and consider what steps tech companies can do take to ensure the advancement of AI does not further diminish economic prospects of the most vulnerable groups of population.
Download or read book Futures written by Institute for the Future and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
