There’s been a decided bump in my subscribership in the past several days (by well over a hundred). I wanted to acknowledge that and say hi to all the new people who may be stumbling through my posts looking for a coherent thread to tell them why the hell they’re here other than because I was recommended.
Who am I? I’m a Canadian speculative designer who both writes science fiction and is a foresight consultant. —No, I don’t predict stuff; prediction is a mug’s game, and if a futurist tells you they can predict the future, don’t hire them. My product isn’t prediction; it’s readiness. Readiness, in the form of earned optimism, is what this newsletter is about.
You’ll see me use this term, “earned optimism” a lot in my posts. It’s the key to unlocking the Unapocalyptic stance, and it’s very simple. Look, you can spend your evenings doomscrolling on your phone and surf an unending spew of bad news about where the world is headed. Everybody knows this, but we do it anyway.
You can also get fed up with the endless hand-wringing and finger-pointing, and hunt for good news instead. When you do, you can easily find it. Surprisingly, a lot of our recent climate news is positive: renewables are taking over the energy sector at a pace that proves my point about the uselessness of prediction (though despite what I said above, a few people actually are good at it; two that come to mind are Tony Seba and Ramez Naam). Many endangered species are proving more resilient than we’d feared; the gears of politics are slowly turning in the direction of sustainability.
So you might glom onto a set of analysts and YouTube personalities who aggregate the positive stuff—and there!, now you can feel optimistic. But at some level you know that this is a dodge; you’re just using selection bias to skew the news you consume in the direction you want to hear. QAnon and Maga victims do the same thing in the opposite direction, constantly pushing on that big alarm button that keeps them motivated. Optimism or pessimism that is based on selection bias isn’t honest. In neither case is it really earned.
You can only earn optimism by fully understanding the depth of the hole that humanity has dug itself into, and then by learning to use the tools that might dig us out.
So you shouldn’t typically look to me for good news on the climate or AI or politics, or for bad news. You can find plenty of either on your own. I am not here to write listicles for doomscrollers or polyannas. What I can do is give you some tools to assess all those messages, negative or positive—as I do, for example, in Apocalypse, or Just a Catastrophe? Once you’ve got some control over the overwhelming hurricane of data and opinions being thrown at you, you can start to analyze it, and play with it in a process some people call speculative design. (←-That Wikipedia link frames it a bit pretentiously if you ask me; my message is that we all do speculative design to some degree, and everybody can do it.)
Everybody should do it. I’ve spent the past few months showing off examples of how you can, such as The Single-Family Space Colony or Peacock’s Tail. These are intended to be lighthearted and point to what’s possible when you’re able to step back from the heat and noise of what is, and consider what else we could build in its place.
Taking the world as it is and doing the hard work to recast both survival and Utopia as design problems—and then proposing solutions—is how you earn optimism in the 21st century.
Bonuses for Paid Subscribers
Like many artists, I find that everybody loves what I do but nobody will pay me a living wage to do it. I’m far from alone in this; the upshot is that I’m not going to apologize for charging you for premium content. My deepest analyses and most extensive surveys are behind a paywall, and so are original stories and podcast readings of old ones. In fact, I’m serializing an entire crazy atompunk space opera novel there. You can read the first chapter for free. Please do read The Fallow Orbits Chapter 1, Parts I and II, and consider joining the paid tier.
For other free examples of my writing, don’t hesitate to check out these short stories:
“Hijack,” the cover story for the current issue of the IEEE Spectrum.
“The Suicide of Our Troubles,” a cheerful tale about suicidal AI published in Slate.
“Noon in the Antilibrary.” Written for MIT Technology Review, this one is intended to scare the bejesus out of you. Hope it works.
I’ll be adding much more material in the paid tier over the coming months. I want people to want to go there, obviously; but I also want to make sure I’m delivering content that you consider worthwhile. This first half-year of Unapocalyptic has been a test of that, and I’m pretty happy with results. It seems you guys are too. So we’ll push on.
—K