Unemployed and Unemployable

Today, in the Design Science Studio, Ilana Lipsett from the Institute for the Future was leading us in a world building exercise, called The Thing from the Future.

The exercise begins with this prompt:

Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.

So, we are invited to imagine this ridiculous world with a madlib:

• In a ______ future
• there is a ______
• related to ______.
• What is it?

For example,

In a probiotic future, there is a community related to metaphysical gravity.

If I may, I will suggest the preposterous in this imagined future:

Imagine you live in Canada.

Justin Trudeau announced the dissolution of Parliament and resigned with the following announcements:

• Canada, since it has been founded upon a legal fiction, has been abolished
• Crown sovereignty has been invalidated
• Land sovereignty has been returned to Indigenous, Inuit, and Métis
• All currencies have been rendered invalid
• Thus, corporations are obsolete
• The age of employment and wage slavery are over
• People have been granted full agency in redesigning their own experience as human beings on Earth

Where would we start, given the designs and principles that nature has made available to all living beings?

• In a probiotic world, life has ultimate value, living soil—earth—being its very foundation.
• The climate emergency is real and must be the first priority in a probiotic world.

Three clues have been granted to us, based on the following models of social, economic, and political organization:

• Delancey Street, A Place for Second Chances
• Occidental Ecology Center featured in Kirsten Dirksen’s video, 7 friends built restoration ecovillage. Outcome 50 years on
• Taiwan’s model of participatory democracy as communities of subjects and plurality has been suggested as an approach to governance based on a process of consensus-building

Plus, if you didn’t know, Love is Metaphysical Gravity.

How might we weave a world together?