Unapocalyptic Year 1 Table of Contents

My first year on Substack, organized by theme and topic

I’ll be away on vacation for the next week, but I’ll leave you with a resource—an index of my posts from 2023-4 organized by topic. Unapocalyptic is not a topical blog—meaning, I’m not just commenting on this week’s tech news or election—so my older posts may be just as interesting to you as my newest ones.

You can use the links below to decide which thread of ideas you’d like to follow through Unapocalyptic. These will be useful if you’re a new subscriber, but even if you’re not, there’s a year’s worth of articles here. You may want to reread something!

I’ve organized the posts into five rough categories: tools for design thinking; thoughts towards a 21st-century science fiction; stories and novels; foresight tools; and designs and thought experiments.

1. The Unapocalyptic Designer

I’ve spent a lot of words this past year on how to break out of our default ways of thinking. These posts lay the foundation for the actual work of moving to an earned optimism about the future.

• Who Paints the Dew on the Daisy?
  The ideas in this post underly pretty much everything else I’ve written on the Unapocalyptic theme. Here’s a skeleton key for understanding how to think about the future—a post about our theories of change, and how we consciously and unconsciously use them to imagine the future.

• Apocalypse as Design Constraint
  Is there a “best” theory of change? No—but I do have my favourite, and I describe this incredibly powerful and flexible approach here.

• The Sides of the Argument
  A meditation on arguments: how we justify the positions we take towards the future, and in particular, our own agency in changing it.

• Doomscroller vs. Windtunneler
  I’m going to be returning to the ideas in this post in 2025. It’s about the fallacy of the “it’ll never happen” argument—that just because we’ve never done something (like come together to conquer global warming) that means we never will. This is a dangerous stance to take, and it has an opposite, which I’ll be talking about soon.

• Apocalypse, or Just a Catastrophe?
  We’ve inherited most of our vocabulary for describing massive social change from religious sources. This post explores the apocalyptic language of the Christian tradition and looks at how it continues to influence our discourse—and even our thoughts—about the changes we face today.

• Design Your Imagination
  Can you fine-tune your mind to become more creative and perceptive? In my late teens and early twenties I went on a campaign to do that and was largely successful. I share some of the techniques I learned from others as well as some I developed myself.

• Recognizing Stagnation
  When we imagine the future we typically do so using some specific set of archetypes or cliches that we’ve learned from science fiction or popular narratives about what’s possible. Identifying when you’re employing such a ‘paratactic list’ in your thinking is an essential skill to master if you want your futures to be striking and original.

• Crisis, or Event?
  From the inside, a major historical turning can look like a catastrophe, even an apocalypse. I use Alain Badiou’s concept of the the “Event” to show that this is rarely the case, and that new possibilities are opened up when we reframe the current moment as one where we literally lack the words to describe it.

• Deploying Apocalyptic Language: Deep Dive
  For my paid subscribers, this post takes the ideas from the previous post and unfolds them using examples from my own work. It’s about the deliberate use of apocalyptic imagery to influence people.

2. 21st-Century Science Fiction

• The Science Fiction of the 1900s
  If you’re interested in my take on science fiction, then start here. This isn’t a manifesto—my message to any author out there is write whatever you want. Rather, this is a design challenge I’ve set myself: to imagine a science fiction whose key ideas and themes are all from this century.

• So, What’s Next?
  Are we trying to solve the problems of the 21st century using approaches developed in the 1900s? Are the programs and ideologies of that era still relevant? If they aren’t, what is replacing them?

• Deep Dive: Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud
  This subscriber’s post goes a step too far (for some people) by describing the implications of Quantum Mechanics—or more exactly, how our thinking has to change because of the worldview that it forces upon us. Physicists will do almost anything to avoid talking about this stuff—but somebody has to.

• Post-Colonial Science Fiction 1: Space Opera
  For argument’s sake, let’s agree that the science fiction of the 1900s imposed colonial narratives on space exploration. If we were to not do that, what would the resulting stories look like? For instance, a post-colonial space opera?

• Re-imagining Rights
  This post could fit in several categories. It’s about how the idea of rights may evolve in this century and beyond. As such, it’s a piece of speculative design, but also a meditation on how we might describe future, post-humanist societies. Its examples, though, are all current, because the changes I talk about here are happening right now.

• The Music of the Anthropocene
  Purely subjective, this one. I review five recordings that have been on constant rotation for me. They’ve been my pandemic writing music, and they may not be to your tastes, but in one way or another they’re all about our current moment. This is not music to reassure, but to challenge.

3. Stories and Novels

• The Fallow Orbits
  Last summer, just for fun, I wrote a novel and serialized it here. Can you read it for free? Lord no! The first chapter is free, but the rest is for my paying subscribers. Luckily, Unapocalpytic is cheap; and how many other Substacks give you access to entire original novels by award-winning authors?
  The Fallow Orbits is a dieselpunk/atompunk YA space opera. It’s my homage to an author whose books I devoured as a kid: Andre Norton.

• “Forbidden Life”
  I’ve always enjoyed writing hard science fiction that reads like fantasy. “Forbidden Life” is a kind of Foucault’s Pendulum ancient conspiracy tale, with a modern twist.

• “Hijack” - A Free Short Story for You
  Last spring I published a short story in the IEEE Spectrum, and you can read it online for free. This is a little piece about dismantling Mercury and what you might do with the spare parts.

4. Foresight is Not Science Fiction

• Roll Your Own Foresight Project
  What is it that “futurists” actually do? How is foresight different from futurism? Could a foresight project help you in your present situation? Here I do a quick and highly superficial survey of foresight as a practice, and outline where you can start if you want to become a foresighter, or just run a foresight exercise for your colleagues or friends.

• Planning Backwards
  What are foresight techniques? A popular one is backcasting, where you start with some future situation and work backwards to now to find. Backcasting makes tracing a set of necessary steps to get to (or avoid) there from here. I explain the method, then describe a useful variation.

• Express Elevator
  William Gibson’s famous dictum that “the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order” can be supplemented with another—namely that Utopia and catastrophe ride in the same boat. To me, any realistic portrayal of the future will contain both disaster and triumph. It’s this mix of apocalyptic modes that makes resilience in the face of surprise more important than prediction.

• Adaptation Termination Shock: The Nightmare Scenario
  I worry that capitalism requires growth, and today the only growth area is natural catastrophes. What if countries’ economies, and companies’ business models, become predicated on the climate getting worse? Will they stop trying to stop it, and switch to hurrying it along?

• The Daily Grind (of a Working Writer)
  How I pushed through the headwinds of ADHD, small-town culture, dropping out of high school, and isolation to become a successful writer. Techniques, tricks, and algorithms that I use to trick my distracted brain into writing every day.

5. Designs and Thought Experiments

• A Whole New Way to End Our Civilization
  What can we do if we know how to select appropriate theories of change, reframe issues creatively, and deploy language correctly? Here I give an example, of reframing the whole concept of the end of the world.

• Peacock’s Tail
  How do you fight the despair that comes from knowing just how bad our global climate/biodiversity crisis is? Using the approaches outlined above, I take a first stab at a new ethics for the future—one that can return us to an energized and even cheerful engagement with the future despite its most nightmarish possibilities.

• After the Internet
  Was the Net that we use today inevitable? Or could it have evolved in different ways—perhaps, very different? Using the case study of Stafford Beer’s Cybersyn and the short-lived Chilean experiment, I show that yes, a different global network was possible—and perhaps still is.

• Dragged into the AI Hype Cycle
  I don’t like talking about Artificial Intelligence because I’ve spent the past 25 years writing about an alternative vision paradigm of it. If you haven’t read my books, here is a summary of where I differ from… pretty much everyone, on what AI is and could be.

• Better than Brains
  A followup to Dragged into the AI Hype Cycle. Artificial superintelligence is an idea that richly deserves to be roasted. —Not necessarily debunked, but seriously, are there a lot of problems with this idea! I present a few of them.

• Earning an Optimistic Scenario
  I pry the lid off of historical pessimism and show some of the operating biases and fallacies that can underlie it. Then, I write a scenario for the year 2040 that acknowledges (I hope) the difficulties facing us, but nonetheless ends up being hopeful.

• Technology is Legislation
  How much in our lives is decided for us not by sinister conspiracies, History, or genetics, but by the technologies with which we surround ourselves? And what would a “Preferences tab” for choosing our own mix of technologies look like?

• The Single Family Space Colony, Parts I and II
  At the intersection of reframed thinking and a 21st-century science fiction, we find the reimagination of space settlement. These two posts recast the notion of the space colony as imagined in the 20th century, into something new and perhaps more exciting. For my paid subscribers, I do an even deeper dive into what’s possible in a separate post.

• When the Means of Production Own Themselves
  How will the rise of Artificial General Intelligence change economics? I argue that it could go two ways: to a tyranny I described in my 2002 novel Permanence as “the rights economy,” or to something new and liberating.

• How to Save the Metaverse (and Why)
  Let’s change the foundational metaphor we use to think about our engagement with computing systems, away from them being places (as in ‘cyberspace’ or the ‘metaverse’) to being metaphoric translations of our real world.

• Retiring Geopolitics
  If the idea of ‘massive system change’ is more than just rhetoric, then what do we have to do to achieve it? Here I look at the idea of the sovereign nation-state and ask what might replace it. (Not the Right’s favourite whipping-boy, World Government, because that’s just another kind of state. No, the options are far more interesting than that.)

• Saving the Desktop
  As a Canadian, can I trust closed operating systems and programs developed in autocratic countries? What if America became such a state? Could Microsoft and Apple be trusted any more? Now, I know a lot of liberty-loving Linux freaks, but Linux is not the desktop alternative most of us need. As an alternative, I test-drive Haiku, a friendly OS based on the famous but doomed Be Operating System.

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The posts above represent my output from the first year of Unapocalyptic. Stick around, subscribe, and if you can become paying subscriber to help ensure there’ll be much more in the future.

—K