Futures-Header
This is the golden age of pessimism. And we’re tired of it.
      Why is it easier to imagine how the world ends rather than articulate a vision of the world we really want? Let’s say goodbye to oppressive technology and economic disenfranchisement! Let’s go beyond apathetic politic and dystopian science fiction and look to revive the struggling planet.
       With this edition of DING magazine we set aside the dystopian stories. We don’t want them to become self-fulfilling prophecies. We believe that by exploring positive scenarios, we can increase the probability of more desirable futures. We invited writers, technologists, researchers and designers from all around the world to help us unpick the stories of a time that is yet to come. They investigate the future from many different angles and take a look at structures rather than technologies. Communities, nature, other species and imagination play a vital role in the essays. This magazine, as the future of our planet, is about more than humans.
The historian Andrew Prescott and the artist and researcher Luiza Prado investigate past beliefs that still influence the future, from the invention of the computer as a tool to divide labor to the material traces on artwork that hint at their creators’ socio-economic struggles. adrienne maree brown takes us to communities in Detroit and to visionary fiction that helps to time travel for perspective. For Anab Jain, growing mushrooms encouraged her to move the center of her design practice away from only human users to encompass instead more species and complex systems, an approach that’s “more than human”. Audrey Tang shares her vision for democracy, and how intersectionality and radical transparency can lead to better societies.
The future is a big place. It can contain many many possibilities. It is a set of stories that we can write and imagine ourselves. We’re up for this and would love you to be too. There is no single future. There are many possible futures. They start here.
Stories for Revolution
Obtrusive Relationships
Gathering Multitudes: A bag of stars
Fugitive Memory: for Tu’i Malila
“The Quizumba is On”: Technological Appropriation by Black Women in the Amazônia
No
Big Green Lies
Letter from the Editors
A guide to the visceral science of time travel
The Unbounded Quest
An interview with Joana Varon
An interview with Jonathan Torres Rodríguez
An interview with futures leader Anab Jain
Where would you like to place your pet giraffe?
Afropresentism – On Incantation and the Machine
Letter from the Editors
A Few Notes on the Cult of Sylphis
Speculative Tourism
Letter from the Editors
Tending to wildness: field notes on movement infrastructure
Aveia, espaçonaves, uma folha de babosa, uma pélvis: fui coletar trechos Oats, spaceships, an aloe leaf, a pelvis: I went to collect parts of the future and decided to turn around.
Προφορικό ποίημα για την προέλευση των Δικτύων Εμπιστοσύνης Narrative Poem about the Origins of Networks of Trust
The Battle to Control the Carbon Media Cycle
Archive of Disappearances
Prototyper la Banlieue du TURFU et transcender la réalité
To Become Undone
Digital artivism: pictures worth thousands of words
Ratios / Proporciónes
Shadow Visions
Letter from the Editor
Future Perfect Continuous
Be Water –  Insights into the Hong Kong protest movement
Care in a techno-capitalist world
HammamRadio, your feminist-love radio station
One Vision, One World. Whose World Then?
Play, imagine, build – the collective verbs
Venezuela – the dual crisis
Letter of the Editor
Terraforms – Or, How to Talk About The Weather
On Persistence: The Past Art/Works of An/Other Future
What the Enlightenment Got Wrong about Computers
Community Learning at Dynamicland
Imagining a Universal Declaration of Digital Rights
An interview with Audrey Tang
Dream Beyond the Wounds
The Blurring
More than HumanCentered Design
The Unpredictable Things
When the Path We Walked Blocks Our Ways Forward
Letter of the Editor
A viewpoint on Craft and the Internet
Who Controls the Internet?
Ethical Tech around the World
Interview with Gillian Crampton Smith
Life & Death
Typographic Craft
The Internet as a Lota
A Medieval Crash
A Gandhian Dream
Evolutionary Craft