GERALDINE WHARRY

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The Long Tether, Acedia and Our 'Bizarro' epoch

Geraldine Wharry

What is the Long Tether symptomatic of? And how do we get ourselves out of it?

Today I’ll share some thought starters. I don’t consider them finished ideas but they are a POV continuously being formulated and investigated and have been for years. So thanks for joining me on this journey and it’s an honour to share with you the process.

Also, thank you for sharing your interest in my Hindsight database template. I wrote about it here when discussing systematizing hindsight and reviewing past work in case you missed this. In a similar vein, Conscious Chatter hosts Kestrel Jenkins and Natalie Shehata recently discussed the benefits of hindsighting and Slow Media, which resonated with the motivations.

A ‘Bizarro’ in-between epoch and what to do about it.

In seeking to describe this societal vibe we are in, I recently heard the term ‘Long tether’. And it just clicked.

It was referenced in this episode of Articles of Interest titled ‘Fashion without Capitalism’ on Tamás Király, a fashion artist from 1980s Hungary. In the podcast, there is mention of the long tether as the 1980s phase between Communism winding down and Capitalism speeding up in Hungary.

This reality that emerged summarised the tensions between the old system that is about to end and the new that is about to come.

It got me thinking about the similarities with the times we live in. There is so much willpower for positive change and so much 💩 co-existing at once. The vibe in the world sometimes feels like the In-Between in Stranger Things. Dark, stark, listless, never-ending perhaps.

Adrian Hon’s RSA interview ‘A History of the Future’ lends perhaps another take on the Long Tether. Hon speaks about a state termed Acedia. For some context, he’s the Co-founder and CEO of the gaming company Six to Start and prior to this was a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at Oxford, Cambridge and the University of California San Diego.

What is Acedia?

Acedia (/əˈsiːdiə/; also accidie or accedie/ˈæksɪdi/, from Latin acēdia, and this from Greek ἀκηδία, "negligence", ἀ- "lack of" -κηδία "care") has been variously defined as a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world. In ancient Greece akidía literally meant an inert state without pain or care. Early Christian monks used the term to define a spiritual state of listlessness and from there the term developed a markedly Christian moral tone. In modern times it has been taken up by literary figures and connected to depression.’

Are we collectively listless without realising it? The Mental Health crisis is reaching alarming levels, yes but there is something else. We are in limbo, between an old and new world. With tensions and rubber band elasticities that will inevitably reach a snapping point.

We are both scared and experimenting. For many in the creative industries and future foresight fields, we are doing our best to renew. Let’s face it, a lot of 💩 (had to re-use this lovely emoji) just ain’t working anymore.

If you’re seeking to profile and go visit a better future world, you won’t be able to formulate it with data.

This is what Noah Raford, a futurist who has spent the last 15 years working as the UAE’s chief futurist and whose small claim to fame is predicting the pandemic recently shared with Wired. Raford is also a founding executive of the Dubai Future Foundation and the Museum of the Future.

He explains something he coined the Future Logical Materialism Fallacy . To create radically new living systems and solutions, he explains no amount of data will help. Our imaginations and inventions need to do the hard work.

His other advice? Get comfortable with discomfort. Discomfort meaning uncertainty. Sadly, we often associate the lack of data with uncertainty.

Enlightenment is not the alleviation of suffering, nor is analysis the alleviation of uncertainty about the future.

There’s no amount of data or trends you can research or discover to help you visit the story of the future. In this period of the Long Tether, to assuage your discomfort, you will not ‘future-proof’ your organisation (not a great fan of the term future-proofing) with the right data.

Raford shares and I could not agree more, that if you stress out about having all the data points and research, you will most likely be missing the real changes. Raford used the term ‘terror of the future’.

What is the right response to the ‘terror of the future’ when you’re living in the Long Tether?

My advice:

  • Be more radical in your thinking and approaches.

Famous biographer Walter Isaacson who has profiled the likes of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Jennifer Doudna and more recently the controversial Elon Musk shared that in following some of his subjects or researching the ones that had already passed, one common trait remained:

  • A reality distortion field. Steve Jobs was renowned for this and the term was used by the Apple team to describe being around him.

People with RSF are/ were people whose mission is/ was to change society. Impossible was not in their vocabulary. And they are/ were relentless in convincing others of things seemingly impossible to accomplish.

Raford shares another reason for being radical (in regards to AI):

One way or another, we're going to have a forcing moment in the next decade or so between climate, economic failure, state collapse, large-scale populist movements and even potentially revolution, and the absolute destruction of much of the labor force by AI is gonna force us to fundamentally reevaluate what we mean for us as a society. What does economy mean? What does society mean? What is the world that we actually wanna build in here? And that conversation is gonna probably be violent. It's probably gonna be uncomfortable. It's gonna have different forms in different countries. But it's going to become the genesis of what the next couple of versions or iterations of human society look like through a decade or two of experimentation and discord and strife. And that's freaking exciting because the world is falling apart and we need to start building a new world.

One way to change the prism, get out of this Long Tether is with the help of:

  • Speculative design

  • Design fiction

  • Backcasting

  • Scenario planning

  • Applied futurism

  • Transition Design

These foresight and systems design approaches can be carried out in different ways. A key component is collaboration and co-creative processes. However, I would argue we need to go further than speculative design approaches and make sure we don't subvert the practice which is very ethics-driven, and turn it into over-fictionalising futures.

Applied futurism, the kind used by governments to map out possible future scenarios and plan accordingly is something the Creative and Style Industries could use more of. This may appear challenging because we work on a much shorter timescale. But we need to move into that world to face radical societal changes more pragmatically rather than only focus on the cool shiny tech, services and designs.

As a Futurist and founder of Trend Atelier this is what some of it looks like applied to my work and I am in the very early stages FYI, so I am sharing this evolution with you:

  • What would Trend Atelier become in the event our members become climate refugees? How will we support them?

  • What would happen if my foresight practice was displaced due to climate change, democratic instability or rendered obsolete due to an AI takeover?

  • And what would the opposite of that look like?

  • What would our world look like if we embraced the care economy? Explore 2032 scenarios here by myself and creative researcher Coline Rialan created for Trend Atelier’s Care Futures.

  • What would Fashion look like and be useful for if we faced a climate collapse event? Explore a speculative 2041 scenario here co-created with Limbo & Hatch and Digital Artist Harriet Davey.

If you’re starting out and are in a team or a community, I would start with the conversations:

  • Swap 30 minutes of research time a week with a conversation with your team about scenarios that are unfolding right now that will deeply affect you. Converse with your community and friends.

  • Once you've outlined key future scenarios and concerns from your conversations, dedicate a segment of your work and time towards profiling your organisation or yourself in these possible futures that are more likely than we realise.

There are different ways organisations dive into future scenarios but for the purpose of this piece, we won't explore these. My last advice:

  • Tap into Worldbuilding not as an exercise to create fictional worlds in the traditional sense of the word. As a literal way to build the world right now because the future is here.

I am simultaneously obsessed, excited and terrified about the future. How about you?

  • Obsessed about how the world feels like it is slowly falling apart and we need to build a new world.

  • Excited about all the innovations for the greater good I am seeing in the Tech, Diversity and Inclusion as well as material innovation spaces, the amazing humans I speak with every week who are pushing the needle. Something incredible is happening. And the next generation is thinking on a whole other level as well.

  • Terrified of our lack of preparedness to climate change, the erosion of democracies, threats to marginalised communities, our inability to stop overconsumption and the lack of oversight when it comes to AI.

I am not a pessimist. I am not suffering from Acedia. I am in love with this world. But where I would like to be inconvenient is in asking myself and every one the following.

Are we stuck in the Long Tether? Shelving away lessons from the pandemic and ignoring the possible futures ahead?

In 2020 Devon Powers wrote in her piece Pandemic Futures about the internal biases of trend forecasting agencies and the commercial motivations that hinder our objectivity. In this post-pandemic world, have we learnt that facing difficult possible futures is how we create better, healthier societies, let alone contingency plans?

Knowing that we just came out of a pandemic that was predicted by scientists, ignored and then gave the world majour whiplash, how can we be more systematic about mapping out the very real threats of today ahead of tomorrow?

In March this year, 93 leading scientists shared in the final instalment of the UN's IPCC report their final warning. UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated:

We must move into warp-speed climate action now.

I don't need to go into an exhaustive list of what happened this year with climate change rolling much faster than even expected. We are all aware.

So questions like what would design and fashion look like in a world where we experience drastic resource scarcity? Or climate displacement? are not far-fetched.

I think we need a wartime mindset.

What will awaken in us a wartime mindset? The same one we had during the pandemic. Sounds impossible? What we did from 2020 to 2022 when the world stopped would have been deemed impossible in 2019.

So I beg you to be more radical in the steps you take and dedicate time to possible future scenarios ahead as uncomfortable as they may be. With your teams, your community. Face and think about a future world that is very different to today.

The challenges to overcome could mean coming out better, not necessarily worse. Or maybe worse. The point is, go visit these possible shared futures, don't wait.

This is the time to be energised and build a different kind of society.

Don’t hang out in the Long Tether for much longer. This bizarro epoch we are in will force us to re-evaluate no matter what, and possibly much faster than we think.

A few inspirations to end with and consult on your own time:

By Geraldine Wharry