When tomorrow is just like today, boredom can result. We seek novelty. However, in this phase in human history, tomorrow will certainly not be like today. Indeed, we are in the midst of dramatic social and technological change. This includes:

1. A demographic shift in Africa such that 40% of all children worldwide by 2050 live in Africa[i] and by 2100, 39% of all adults globally will live in Africa.[ii][iii]
2. Under-population [iv]in many Western and East Asian nations,[v] creating labour shortages, and the possibility of steady-state economics.
3. The rise of new technologies such as 3d printing, drones, artificial intelligence, driverless cars dramatically increasing productivity, reducing costs, and among other impacts, recongifuring city design (why parking spaces? or why not cars as mobile homes?).
4. The likely major disruption in the global food industry through cellular agriculture – the new pure meat and pure milk and the end of the animal based food supply chain, the possibility of the narrative shift from slaughter houses to greenhouses and food labs. [vi]
5. The shift from coal based energy to solar and wind (and other alternatives) renewable systems.
6. The beginning of the rise of the peer to peer economy and possibly platform cooperativism, certainly the possibility of the uber-ifcation of energy, that is: AI, plus solar, plus energy sharing. This challenges energy hierarchy, changing consumers into prosumers and foundationally challenging energy producers – are fossil fuels the new stranded assets?[vii]
7. A likely hegemonic shift from an American centric world to a China and Asian-centric century, changing what we value, the global hierarchy of truth, knowledge, and beauty.[viii]
8. On top of that, perhaps the most profound shift is the rise of gender equity – the beginning of true diversity and inclusion

For many these changes are heralded as the beginning of a new era, the end of empire, the end of the patriarchy, the end of the coal-oil era, the end of poverty, the end of man over nature – a transition to a new era, what Sarkar has called, neohumanism. [ix] For others, these are frightening as the assets they have held – physical as in coal mines, psychic as in male domination, cultural as in Empire-first are all under threat. “They vow to make their tribe great again”[x]

For sure, in these times of transition, finding a centre to hold on to can become difficult. We feel powerless, vulnerable, lost. Our normal day way of thinking and being may not be enough. We may need super-powers to stay calm, afloat, strong, focused  during these tsunamis of change, as the futurist James Dator has written.[xi]

In my work in Futures Studies and as a student of the mystic, P.R. Sarkar, I offer the following ideas or super-powers, if you will.[xii] I have used these with dozens of nations, hundreds of international organizations, and hundreds of citizens groups throughout the world. May futurists use some or all of these powers.

We hope they help in avoiding the pitfalls and perils coming, and to create the futures you wish for.[xiii]

First, as everything changes, find a quiet time – meditation is best for this. Breathe in, breathe out. Make this a practice, such that the feeling of quietness carries throughout the day. Meditation, mindfulness, zikr, zen, or other methods that help focus on one thought – the mantra, the sound that transports one to shanti, stillness – even when hundreds of thoughts race.

Second, see the future as an asset, part of a learning and creation journey. Instead of being worried about what will happen, use the future to start to create realities you would like to see happen (within your zone of control). Insights about the changing world, what you can do, what your organization can do, to help one chart their way forward. Instead of being lost in the day to day, the litany of events, we find that by challenging one’s assumptions about reality  or double loop learning, the future is easier to create since one is watching for weak signals, watching for what works and what does not. Indeed, misleading assumptions are considered one of the leading causes of strategy failure. Often, we double down, argue even more belligerently for our view even as the data suggests otherwise, as in climate change.

Or we rush to create a list of things to do. But double loop learning is questioning our assumptions. Is the future created or given to us? Do I believe the future is bright or bleak? One large organization paid its managers to conduct a review on the changing external world – the environmental scan – and paid experts to comment on this review. However, it had no intent, as evidenced in board meetings, to change their strategy. They merely wished to inform regulators that they had done due diligence on the emerging future. They did not wish their assumptions challenged.

Third, find the used future. The used future is a practice we engage in that no longer works. For example, many institutions wish to be part of the knowledge revolution but they still engage in clock in and clock out behavior. They remain focused on the assembly line, instead of creating metrics where it is out come not time spent that truly matters. As institutions remain mired in the 19th century, workers experience fatigue, tired of surveillance, and feeling what makes them special is not being counted.

Fourth, understand which disruptions or technologies, cultural mind-set shifts, demographic changes will impact them. And, this is crucial, discern the first and second order implications of these changes. Many argue which will be the correct impact. They seek certainty in a world where the future keeps on changing. Wiser is to ascertain the alternatives. For example, with the rise of cellular agriculture, is it wiser to (1) move towards regenerative agriculture, where farmers are stewards of the land, (2) shift toward pure meat and make the land that was used for animal farming for other purposes, or (3) become a niche organic meat seller, or (4) all the above, or (5) to do nothing in the hope the new technology does not disrupt you and your industry? Instead of being focused on the right answer, the future is full of possibilities. However, without going through the implications, we often resort to defensive postures. One farming federation when presented with the possible future of lab meat becoming prevalent suggested that they needed to eliminate vegetarians and scientists. While this was done in humor, the challenge to move from “there is nothing we can do” to alternative strategies became apparent to all participants.

Fifth, we focus on scenarios, a number of possible stories about the future, instead of the right answer. These scenarios become alternative worlds that you, the organization, and the nation can inhabit. From these scenarios, options can emerge, choices can be created, and conflicts resolved since alternative  futures are now clarified. They can help develop national strategy, for example, as with the recent scenarios below of the Malaysian Ministry of Education.

(Source: https://www.nst.com.my/education/2018/04/361452/way-forward-higher-education-4ir-era.)

Sixth, the future strategy needs an enabling metaphor. Every person or organization has a narrative that underlies how they interact with the changing world. More often than not, when the external world changes, the story is left behind, and individuals live a metaphor that no longer creates the desired vision. Instead, suffering results. One global organization was looking to the future but their metaphor was an old crippled elephant. They needed to find a better story and then en-act from that story, the new future they wished for. In this case, they imagined themselves to be an octopus – intelligent, flexible, and swift to react. Individuals as well carry stories that do not work.

One CEO found that his core skills he had learned over 40 plus years were no longer useful. He described this as coming to play a game of tennis at a grass court only to find out that he was now playing on a clay court. His new narrative became someone who could play on multiple courts. For that, he needed to expand his life skills to include spiritual and emotional intelligence. However, in the long run, he realized, it was not winning (or losing) that mattered but the rally, the love of the game. Thus, a better narrative for him was that of the coach, teaching children how to play.

Seventh, and finally, and perhaps the most important superpower of all is to link the story to the system, to strategy, otherwise, the story is empty, mere words that lead to nothing.[xiv] If, for example, the octopus is the new story, then power needs to be decentralized to the tentacles, to the field. If the octopus is the new story, then there needs to be funding for emerging threats and possibilities. In the elephant story, the organization is unable to  see the future  as the organization has no systematic ways to scan for trends and weak signals. If the octopus is the new metaphor, then the organization needs to focus on outcomes, to actually become flexible. Systemic change also means that the new measurements of success are needed so that the story is not just valued but is the anchor to the desired future. Often organizations wish to move from crisis management (ambulance at the bottom of the hill) to prevention (fence at the top of the hill), however, when they do so, their budgets decline and accolades are not passed  out since they have solved problems before they occurred.  New measures of prevention are required, as for example, with the work of former deputy commissioner of Toronto Police, Peter Sloly. Elected representatives as well are hesitant since they need to be seen cutting the ribbon on new projects. Thus, new measures are required that ensure the vision – prevention, for example – is measured and rewarded.

With this final superpower, the subjective worlds of narrative and vision align with the objective worlds of systems and measurements. The future becomes real: the real becomes the future.

                      Scenarios on Adelaide Park Lands linking strategy with metaphor. David Chick.

To conclude, in times of dramatic change, we don’t simply need better maps of the changing world, we need special powers or super powers to avoid the futures we don’t want and create the futures we do. We need the super power of:

(1) Being able to stay calm and focused through meditation;

(2) We need the power to learn and reflect instead of acting from unchallenged assumptions and past behavior.

(3) We need the superpower to challenge the used future – what we have been doing but no longer works.

(4) We need the ability to understand how the world is changing, and the impacts of these disruptions on our day to day life and strategy.

(5) We need the superpower to understand and create alternative futures instead of being fixated on one view: one future. This means letting go of the train-track worldview.

(6) We need the super-power of narrative, of telling a different story about our lives. And, finally,

(7) We need to link story to systemic change, creating a virtuous cycle of change, ensuring that what we value, we count.

References

[i] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28757054. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[ii] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28757054. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[iii] See Sohail Inayatullah, “The Youth Bulge,” Journal of Futures Studies (Vol. 21, No. 2, December, 2016), 21-24.

[iv] See Sohail Inayatullah, “Ageing Futures: From Overpopulation to World Underpopulation,” The Australian Business Network Report (Vol. 7, No. 8, 1999), 6–10.

[v] https://theconversation.com/japan-is-not-the-only-country-worrying-about-population-decline-get-used-to-a-two-speed-world-56106. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[vi] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-israel-trade-deal-lab-grown-meat-veganism-vegetarianism-a7950901.html. Accessed 16 2 2019

[vii] I am indebted to the World Bank executive Richard MacGeorge for alerting me to this approach. He moves the discourse away from political interests to sunken psychic costs.

[viii] See, for example, Sohail Inayatullah, Asia 2038: ten disruptions that change everything. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2018.

[ix] See, for example, Sid Jordan, “Era of Neohumanism,” https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-38/era-of-neohumanism/.Accessed 17 2 2019. Also see, Sohail Inayatullah, Marcus Bussey, and Ivana Milojevic, eds., Neohumanisteducational futures. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2006.

[x] See special issue on Donald Trump and the future, , the Journal of Futures Studies. (Vol. 21, No.3,  March, 2017),

[xi] James Dator, “Surfing the tsunamis of change, ” http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/publications/futures-visions/SurfingTsunamisMexico1994.pdf. Accessed 16 2 2019. Also see: Christopher Jones, “Surfing the tsunamis of change,” Journal of Futures Studies .Vol. 8, No. 2, 2013, 115-122. http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/18-2/S04.pdf. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[xii] See Sohail Inayatullah, Understanding Sarkar: the Indian episteme, macrohistory and transformative knowledge. Leiden, Brill,2002.

[xiii] These are drawn from, Sohail Inayatullah, What works – case studies in the practice of foresight. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2015.

[xiv] This approach is developed in a series of books, the latest being Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic, eds.  CLA 2.0: Transformative research in theory and practice. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2015.

About Sohail Inayatullah

Professor Sohail Inayatullah /sə’heɪl ɪnaɪʌ’tʊla/, a political scientist, is Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies); Associate, Mt. Eliza Executive Education, Melbourne Business School, and Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Faculty of Social Sciences and the Arts).

In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies. In 2010, he was awarded the Laurel award for all-time best futurist by the Shaping Tomorrow Foresight Network. In March 2011, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. He received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii in 1990. Inayatullah has lived in Islamabad, Pakistan; Bloomington, Indiana; Flushing, New York; Geneva, Switzerland; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Brisbane and Mooloolaba, Australia.

Inayatullah is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Futures Studies and on the editorial boards of Futures, Prout Journal, East West Affairs, World Future Review, and Foresight. He has written more than 350 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and magazine editorials. His articles have been translated into a variety of languages, including Catalan, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Indonesian, Farsi, Arabic, and Mandarin. Inayatullah has also written and co-edited twenty-two books/cdroms, including: What Works: Case Studies in the Practice of Foresight; CLA 2.0: Transformative Research in Theory and Practice (2015); Questioning the Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation (2007); and, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change (1997). His latest (2018) book is Asia 2038: Ten Disruptions That Change Everything.

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But all is not lost: in highlighting the growing role of General Intellect’s autonomous and cooperative production through the development of the commons and alternative and antagonistic uses of new technologies, Giorgio Griziotti proposes new ideas for the organization of the multitudes of the new millennium.

Excerpt from “Neurocapitalism: Technological Mediation and Vanishing Lines”, by Giorgio Griziotti (with permission)

The archaic god and the technological Leviathan – sacred techne

What has been discussed regarding neo-nomadism and transient modes of being has a counterweight (or contradiction) in new forms of absolute belonging that are manifested through archaic religious fundamentalisms. These extremisms are, in their various facets, more and more present – even hegemonic – in vast areas of the South. A conspicuous part of the global population is walking the road back to a sense of belonging that is even more archaic and binding than those previously discussed.

From a superficial point of view, fundamentalist movements seem to have in some way substituted those of Soviet-inspired national liberation from the Cold War era, a vision that doesn’t however take into account the influence of the profound transformation that came with technological mediation. On the other hand, how can we explain the inconsistency of a North poised between the fascination and the threat of technological temptation and the archaic fundamentalism that, from the South, manifests itself even in western metropolitan suburbs? Simondon provides an interesting key for interpreting these profound contradictions.

In one of his main works dedicated to the modality of existence of technical objects, Simondon maintains, similar to what was written in the introduction, that the genesis of technical reality is part of human beings’ relation to the world.¹ In addition, he adds that technicality is, along with religion, one of the two simultaneous phases² that emerge in order to solve the problems presented in the magical, primitive original stage of our relation to the world. “Primitive unity,” writes Simondon, “appears as a reticulation of the universe in privileged key points where exchanges between the living and the environment take place.” These are places or magical moments³ that are distinguished as figures distinct from the background of the universe. At a certain moment in evolution, we pass from the magic unity of these reticulations to the development of technical and religious thought that is “the organization of two symmetrical and opposite mediations.”In this doubling, or rather phase shift, key points in the world separate from the background to become a technicality that is crystallized in efficient and instrumental objects that function everywhere and at any given moment, while the background becomes abstract and is subjectified, personified in divine, sacred forms of religion. What prevents us from grafting the contemporary condition of a technology-religion dualism onto Simondon’s vision? Simondon states that in the becoming of technical objects, key points of the magical, prehistoric world lose “their capacity for creating network and their power to influence reality that surrounds them from a distance.” In this way, he refers to the technological mediation as we knew it until very recently.

Today, however, the situation has changed so drastically that we have put forth the hypothesis of this volume based on the paradigmatic leap in said mediation. A leap characterized, to use Simondon’s terms, by the emergence of a context where today’s technical objects (for example ITC devices and networks) are integrated with the “background” (the space-time of the universe), restoring, in some way, original unity. Such reconstitution obviously doesn’t take us back to a world populated by magical places and doesn’t entail transcendence but, contrary to what Simondon asserts, it can no longer be claimed that the technical object is “distinguished” from natural being in the sense that it is not part of the world. Quite the opposite, our hypothesis is that in human’s “becoming machine,” the technical object becomes a part of the living and this calls into question the vision of two mediations: the technical and the religious, counterposed as an indissoluble couple.

The basic framework from which technicality and religion were born at the dawn of human history is made brittle by a multiplicity of technologies that invade not only the political dimension of life, bios, but also the biological one: the vital breath of zoé. Evoking an extreme biopolitical case that acts upon the separation between bios and zoé and reduces life to “nude life,” we can refer to Nazi thanatopolitics. Agamben reminds us of the Euthanasia-Program enacted by Hitler to eliminate incurable mental patients:

[T]he program, in the guise of a solution to a humanitarian problem, was an exercise of the sovereign power to decide on bare life in the horizon of the new biopolitical vocation of the National Socialist state. The concept of “life unworthy of being lived” is clearly not an ethical one, which would involve the expectations and legitimate desires of the individual. It is, rather, a political concept […] on which sovereign power is founded⁴.

70,000 people were eliminated, of which 5,000 were children, in the span of fifteen months. The program was later abandoned due to the growing protest of the Bishops. The two doctors responsible for the program, condemned to die at Nuremburg, “declared they didn’t feel guilty because the question of euthanasia would come up again.” With the Aktion T4 program, the Nazis also widened their deadly action to all “lives unworthy of being lived.”⁵

Today, for the first time, technology allows us to operate within the complexity that binds and separates bios and zoé and that, until recently, was indecipherable. In fact, like all mysteries, what unites life and death was the exclusive prerogative of religion and, in rendering it profane, we overstep the boundaries of the confines of religious thought and technical thought moves into the domain of the sacred. Paraphrasing Agamben, we could say we are facing a sacred techne that “is set outside of human jurisdiction without trespassing the divine.” Therefore, from an archaic point of view, the civilization of profaning technology can be killed with impunity, as homo sacer, but not sacrificed.

On the other hand, this capacity to act upon bios and zoé opens many prospects including, in a positive sense, that of an era of hybridization that is not exclusively anthropocentric⁶ that could give life to a non-capitalist, non-archaic ethics. Positive outcomes are not, however, obvious or to be taken for granted because, in this framework, technology is also the tool of the contemporary necropolitics practiced by biopower that, concentrated almost exclusively on the daily exploitation of life itself, creates inhumane forms of destruction. Inhumane are the new forms of a remote-controlled algorithmic death because it is delegated to automatons and robots like, for example, the CIA’s drones that, in under eight years, killed thousands of people in Pakistan alone, including hundreds of women and children,⁷ or the automatic sensorial strafing systems able to automatically activate themselves and shoot “intruders.”⁸

These new forms of asymmetrical warfare, of which remotely guided drones are only the tip of the iceberg, are subverting the praxis, theory and ethics – if not the very concept of war itself, as explained in the well-argued piece A theory of the drone.⁹ More generally, the ecological devastation of the Earth is literally inhumane in the sense that it takes out a dangerous mortgage on the possibility of human participation in the future. However, now we’d like to focus our attention on the macropolitical consequences of questioning a reality founded on a technological-religious bipolarity. If technical objects, born from the objectification of magical places that emerge from the background of the primitive world tend to reorganize themselves in networks, pushed by cognitive capitalism and reconstitute a new unity, what are the consequences for religious thought?

The impulse of reticular technologies that reconstitute unity with the universe in the perspective of control and the commercialization of life and death calls into question the religious phase, breaking the previous balance. This condition influences all religions and, in particular, the three main monotheistic belief systems. Our hypothesis is thus that, subjectivizing and rendering “profane” the role traditionally allocated to the divine, technical capitalist thought unconsciously pushes the latter to regress towards archaic values by any means necessary. It is as if religious subjectivation tries to recover its primitive vocation of total need that it feels slipping through its fingers. In this regard, it is enough to recall the anathema of Pope Ratzinger – a theologian little inclined to the populism in vogue – against the “dictatorship of relativism.” In looking for universal and absolute values, fundamentalist theologians are convinced they will find the original strength to contrast the invasion of technical, profane thought by going back to archaic values and ethics. This obviously doesn’t mean that, for example, in Islamic theocracies the use of contemporary technology is denied but that, maybe unconsciously, they react against the supposed danger of a society that no longer has divinities to refer back to for ethics. This is common both in fundamentalist instincts as well as the three monotheistic religions.

Thereafter, the force and effects of this phenomenon are different: in the areas of Christianity and Judaism, cradle of the new technological paradigm and where the decline of belonging strikes ideologies and religion, fundamentalism sometimes manifests with virulence,¹⁰ though without assuming a driving or central function. In the great swath of the postcolonial south, from Morocco to Indonesia and where one of the great monotheistic religions, Islam, prevails, the situation is quite different. It doesn’t seem surprising that facing western techno-biopolitical expression, archaic religious calls gain strength and increasingly radicalize. If post-capitalist social movements had managed to rapidly trigger new political processes during the Arab Spring, today we probably wouldn’t be witnessing the wars that tear apart, disperse and take entire populations hostage, “collateral damage” of two asymmetric necropolitical blocs that fight in a downward spiral: biotechnological capitalism on the one hand and absolutist obscurantism on the other.

One of the expressions of the explosion of this antagonist equilibrium between the technical thought of cognitive capitalism and fundamentalist religion found its origins in the Middle Eastern wars to then spread globally. The two significant and rival arms are, on one side, suicide bombers and, on the other, Hellfire missiles launched from a remotely controlled drone that annihilate any form of life within a twenty-meter range.¹¹ The kamikaze and the technological angel of death are the incarnation of two deviations that attempt to destroy one another and us without any hope for victory.

If fundamentalist thought wasn’t the archaic equivalent of Western neo-colonialist biopower which it opposes and if it had a minimal awareness of the impulses that animate it, it would have promoted Nineveh and Palmira as symbols of resistance rather than destroying them with several tons of TNT. In conclusion, nothing good will come of this war that opposes a simulacrum of god to the technological Leviathan origins of supreme algorithms attempting to subject the entire planet. Only a third path of constructing a common based on post-capitalist ethics can effectively counter this trend. The rest is a question of time.

Bio: Giorgio Griziotti was one of the first digital engineers to graduate from Milan’s Politecnico University. His participation in the autonomous movements in Italy in the 1970s forced him to gain most of his professional experience in exile. He has an experience of more than thirty years in large international IT projects. Today he is an independent researcher and member of the collective Effimera.

Released by Minor Compositions 2019
Colchester / New York / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

www.minorcompositions.info |  www.autonomedia.org

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