24 Jun 24 Monday Briefing

Bad Bros, Futures, Oh My

This past Sunday, in the wake of a durian party (the king of fruit is back in season, friends!), my friend G asked if I had a reading resource list for someone hoping to explore futures studies. I realise that whatever list I might have is scattered across the remains of several attempts at personal databases, so I’ve pulled the threads together as a supplement at the end of this week’s Monday briefing. If this supplement proves useful/popular, I might curate themes in future editions – requests welcome!

News Roundup

Scaremongers and doomsayers should pause on their Taiwan rhetoric, because officially, at least, Xi is not taking the bait, and has smacked down his underlings jonesing for a fight. Does this make me breathe a little easier. Yes – a very little.

Sonia Sodha really doesn’t want to scaremonger, but I think she’s doing us all a favour because we should be concerned about the fact that no government in the world is really thinking, talking or doing something about what a rapidly declining birthrate globally means for end-of-life necessities. tl;dr politicians are obsessed with short power cycles and kick the can down the road, but so do we all, because we might collapse from the weight of reality otherwise.

MAGA wants to burn it all down, but what else is new?

Watch/Scroll

It’s fascinating to see one of my native languages through an outsider’s eyes, in this case, the secret behind how Chinese characters work.

Read

Who is the “Chinese Matisse”? Damned if I knew before I read this.

Brad Setser, an economist who knows his stuff unlike some others we shall not name here, tears apart the myth of deglobalisation that brings comfort to devotees of hegemonic nationalism. We’re all in this together, chickies.

Ponder

Bros Behaving Badly seems to be a constant theme throughout our known humanity, to the extent that in steppe nomadic cultures it became a thing for “wolf packs” of young men to be banished from their tribes for a period of time, free to roam and terrorise the known world on their mounts – outsourcing the problem on others, if you will, until they had sufficiently worked things out of their system and settled into acceptable members of society. Homosociality is almost universally a cultural norm until very recently, and there is nothing quite like the bond between brothers, “passing the love of women”, in the words of David to Jonathan.

In this week’s Ponder section, I’ve found a number of BBBs or just BBs (Bros Behaving), from youth gangs to fraternities to bromances between unlikely pairs.

Reading Resource List – Futures Studies

I’m prefacing this supplement with a warning because, as the Chinese say, 「走火入魔」– pursuit of esoteric knowledge can lead one down the path to hell. It is far better to remain agnostic about different schools of thought, different tools, and different methodologies so that one can focus on developing a personal frame of mind with which to think about the future and grapple with all the frightening and glorious possibilities within.

Predicting the future is a time-honoured human activity, and after close to fifteen years working in this space, the first thing I like to tell newcomers is that anyone who claims they can predict the future should be disregarded and laughed at. Not even master diviners (of the Chinese persuasion) would claim to know the exact shape of the future, but rather would present a range of possible futures based on an interpretation of the present which, surprise surprise, is what the modern and mostly western field of futures studies purports to do.

Foresight, as a sub-field of futures studies, is typically combined with strategy in the form of Strategic Foresight. I call it critical thinking. If you already apply critical thinking to all facets of your life, you are superbly placed to view the future through this lens. An understanding of complex adaptive systems is just as if not more important than critical thinking – the future is a result of all the entangled and entangling present realities. Understanding and accepting that is the first step towards being able to shape the future.

Over the past two decades, many governments around the world have latched on to futures studies as a tool du jour for participatory democracy; looking at the state of most of those countries, however, one should ponder whether hubris or wishful thinking played a bigger role in said latching. Drowning people will grasp at anything, as the saying goes.

Preponderance on this field has in recent times led to some perversions and even an implosion – what does long-termism, effective altruism and FTX have to do with each other? (I’ll let you descend into that rabbit hole yourself.)

This is all to say that everything should be taken with a Boxian pinch of salt. “All models are wrong, but some are useful” is my mantra when I approach this field, whether in a personal or professional capacity. As to its value, I’ll let esteemed futurist Stuart Candy guide you on it, and for a nostalgic 90s internet aesthetic, I point you to Dr Wendy Schultz’s (an erstwhile professional collaborator) resource page.

This should be more than enough to get started – happy reading!