Posit

The future is now, and it isn't going very well. Today we are surrounded by astonishing new technologies, scientific discoveries, and accumulated knowledge that could be used to the benefit of people and planet alike. Yet when it comes to building a better tomorrow, humanity seems to be failing on almost every front that counts.

Posit takes the position that this failure is in large part due to common expectations about the future itself; the learned assumption that a better world must be innovated into being. All the signifiers of progress promised by science fiction are arriving, after all, yet everything is seemingly getting worse. Maybe that's because those promises were mostly made by extractive industries with a bottom line, now cashing in as civilization crashes out.

This newsletter is an effort at demonstrating a counterintuitive kind of futurity, aimed at counteracting the visions of tomorrow that amount to ever deepening abstraction from Earth and alienation from one another. Posit will explore alternative narratives for the future, in schools of thought and practice such as degrowth, bioregionalism, cooperativism, maintenance, and appropriate technology. It will also present perspectives from practitioners and thinkers working outside the narrow frames of progress that have bamboozled us for so long.

Every month, this page will present a collection of original and curated articles, interviews, histories, book reviews, reflections, and various other artifacts and ephemera collected in the process of researching the better tomorrows that are available to us today.

100% of the content here is human-generated.