What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse?

A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existential risk” studies any real or hypothetical human extinction event in the near or distant future. This movement examines catastrophes ranging from runaway global warming to nuclear warfare to malevolent artificial intelligence, deploying a curious mix of utilitarian ethics, statistical risk analysis, and, controversially, a transhuman advocacy that would aim to supersede almost all extinction scenarios. The proponents of existential risk thinking, led by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, have seen their work gain immense popularity, attracting endorsement from Bill Gates and Elon Musk, millions of dollars, and millions of views. 

Calamity Theory is the first book to examine the rise of this thinking and its failures to acknowledge the ways some communities and lifeways are more at risk than others and what it implies about human extinction.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

“Sustainability is not a buzz-word anymore; it’s a matter of survival. Meaningful achievement in sustainability will require significant paradigm shifts in attitudes about how we live, how we consume resources, how we govern ourselves and how we transport people and goods.  Asti’s excellent exploration of the issues is a must-read.”
-- Subrata Basu, AIA, AICP                                                                                                                                       Miami-Dade County Department of Planning and Zoning
 
 
“Industries, health care, education and others are trying to tread more lightly on our environment.  To achieve sustainability goals our times demand, we must work together to maximize the benefit to our communities.  Asti has always seen the larger picture and encouraged orchestration of diverse initiatives.  The Chicken Came First is full of knowledge, sensitivity, and insights certain to advance the achievement of sustainable communities.”
                --Richard Renfro, AIA
                Renfro Design Group, AIA, New York City

The first English-language collection to establish curiosity studies as a unique field

 

From science and technology to business and education, curiosity is often taken for granted as an unquestioned good. And yet, few people can define curiosity. Curiosity Studies marshals scholars from more than a dozen fields not only to define curiosity but also to grapple with its ethics as well as its role in technological advancement and global citizenship. While intriguing research on curiosity has occurred in numerous disciplines for decades, no rigorously cross-disciplinary study has existed—until now. 

Curiosity Studies stages an interdisciplinary conversation about what curiosity is and what resources it holds for human and ecological flourishing. These engaging essays are integrated into four clusters: scientific inquiry, educational practice, social relations, and transformative power. By exploring curiosity through the practice of scientific inquiry, the contours of human learning, the stakes of social difference, and the potential of radical imagination, these clusters focus and reinvigorate the study of this universal but slippery phenomenon: the desire to know. 

Against the assumption that curiosity is neutral, this volume insists that curiosity has a history and a political import and requires precision to define and operationalize. As various fields deepen its analysis, a new ecosystem for knowledge production can flourish, driven by real-world problems and a commitment to solve them in collaboration. By paying particular attention to pedagogy throughout, Curiosity Studies equips us to live critically and creatively in what might be called our new Age of Curiosity.

Contributors: Danielle S. Bassett, U of Pennsylvania; Barbara M. Benedict, Trinity College; Susan Engel, Williams College; Ellen K. Feder, American U; Kristina T. Johnson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Narendra Keval; Christina León, Princeton U; Tyson Lewis, U of North Texas; Amy Marvin, U of Oregon; Hilary M. Schor, U of Southern California; Seeta Sistla, Hampshire College; Heather Anne Swanson, Aarhus U.

We live in a world saturated by futures. Our lives are constructed around ideas and images about the future that are as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This book is a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the forms and functions that the future takes. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, prophecy and trauma, it brings together critical meditations on the social, cultural, and intellectual forces that create narratives and practices of the future. The prognosticators, speculators, prophets, and visionaries have their say here, but the emphasis is on small narratives and forgotten conjunctures, on the connections between expectation and experience in everyday life.

In tightly linked studies, the contributors excavate forgotten and emergent futures of art, religion, technology, economics, and politics. They trace hidden histories of science fiction, futurism, and millennialism and break down barriers between far-flung cultural spheres. From the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the forests of Java and from the literary salons of Tokyo to the roadside cafés of the Nevada desert, the authors stitch together the disparate images and stories of futures past and present. Histories of the Future is further punctuated by three interludes: a thought-provoking game that invites players to fashion future narratives of their own, a metafiction by renowned novelist Jonathan Lethem, and a remarkable graphic research tool: a timeline of timelines.

Contributors. Sasha Archibald, Susan Harding, Jamer Hunt, Pamela Jackson, Susan Lepselter, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Masco, Christopher Newfield, Elizabeth Pollman, Vicente Rafael, Daniel Rosenberg, Miryam Sas, Kathleen Stewart, Anna Tsing

Explores ecological impasses and opportunities of our fossil-fueled civilization
 

It is more and more obvious that our fossilized civilization has no sustainable future. It is an ecological Ponzi scheme stealing away the lives of countless species and the wellbeing of future generations in exchange for contemporary conveniences and the luxuries of a small subset of the human population. Yet a civilization wholly beyond fossils still seems difficult to grasp. 

 

In No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of the rise of fossil civilization through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oily automobility and plasticity), showing what tethers us to the ecocidal trajectory of petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. He also looks ahead toward the world that the rapid electrification of vehicles, buildings, and power is creating. What can we do to make electroculture more just and sustainable than the petroculture we are leaving behind?

Trends have become a commodity—an element of culture in their own right and the very currency of our cultural life. Consumer culture relies on a new class of professionals who explain trends, predict trends, and in profound ways even manufacture trends. On Trend delves into one of the most powerful forces in global consumer culture. From forecasting to cool hunting to design thinking, the work done by trend professionals influences how we live, work, play, shop, and learn. Devon Powers' provocative insights open up how the business of the future kindles exciting opportunity even as its practices raise questions about an economy increasingly built on nonstop disruption and innovation. Merging industry history with vivid portraits of today's trend visionaries, Powers reveals how trends took over, what it means for cultural change, and the price all of us pay to see—and live—the future.

In the field of history, the Web and other technologies have become important tools in research and teaching of the past. Yet the use of these tools is limited—many historians and history educators have resisted adopting them because they fail to see how digital tools supplement and even improve upon conventional tools (such as books). In Pastplay, a collection of essays by leading history and humanities researchers and teachers, editor Kevin Kee works to address these concerns head-on. How should we use technology? Playfully, Kee contends. Why? Because doing so helps us think about the past in new ways; through the act of creating technologies, our understanding of the past is re-imagined and developed. From the insights of numerous scholars and teachers, Pastplay argues that we should play with technology in history because doing so enables us to see the past in new ways by helping us understand how history is created; honoring the roots of research, teaching, and technology development; requiring us to model our thoughts; and then allowing us to build our own understanding.

While Ralph Ellison is perhaps best known for his novel Invisible Man, he was also a significant twentieth-century intellectual, having authored numerous essays and papers that shaped thought on subjects from jazz to liberalism. Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years gathers outstanding scholars in the fields of American and African American studies to engage Ellison’s theoretical and critical writings.

Several essays in this collection focus on an area of Ellison’s thinking that has yet to be adequately scrutinized—his study of, and writing about, music, specifically jazz and the blues. Although not a systematic philosopher of music, Ellison exhibited the seriousness and rigor associated with the critical musical writings of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said. Other essays in this special issue examine salient questions raised by Ellison’s work, including the nature of the connection between the novel and the democratic mind, Vietnam and the crisis of liberal society, and the problematic of modernism and freedom. Ralph Ellison addresses the ways in which Ellison’s writings about art were also efforts to think about and discuss political agency.

Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Kevin Bell, Adam Gussow, Ronald A. T. Judy, Robert O’Meally, Donald E. Pease, Barry Shank, Hortense Spillers, Kenneth Warren, Alexander G. Weheliye, John Wright

W. Warren Wagar's A Short History of the Future is a memoir of postmodern times, cast as a history. This powerful and visionary book is narrated by a far-future historian, Peter Jensen, who leaves this account of the world from the 1990s to the opening of the twenty-third century as a gift to his granddaughter. A combination of fiction and scholarship, this third edition of Wagar's speculative history of the future alternates between descriptions of world events and intimate glimpses of his fictive historian's family into the first centuries of the new millennium.

"Thanks to Wagar's magisterial command of futurist information and theory, his extrapolated near-term future is an incisive, dynamic vision of where we may indeed be heading."—H. Bruce Franklin, Washington Post

"A comprehensive, massively detailed script of a possible near future. . . . Intriguing."—San Francisco Chronicle

"A Short History of the Future reads with ease, raises provocative possibilities and presents challenging occasions for thought and argument."—Chicago Tribune

"A breathtaking future history in the manner of Wells and Stapledon, unnerving in its mixture of fact, fiction, and personal perspectives."—George Zebrowski, New York Review of Science Fiction

A dazzling and imaginative combination of fiction and scholarship, this speculative history of the future is a memoir of postmodern times. This second edition shows how the events of 1989 and their aftermath reinforce Wagar's predictions of the future. "A breathtaking future history in the manner of Wells and Stapledon, unnerving in its mixture of facts, fiction, and personal perspectives."—George Zebrowski, New York Review of Science Fiction

In the tradition of H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come, W. Warren Wagar's A Short History of the Future is a memoir of postmodern times. Cast in the form of a history book, the narrative voice of the book's powerful vision is that of a far-future historian, Peter Jensen, who leaves this account of the world from the 1990s to the opening of the twenty-third century as a gift to his granddaughter. A dazzling and imaginative combination of fiction and scholarship, Wagar's speculative history of the future alternates between descriptions of world events and intimate glimpses of his fictive historian's family through the ages.

Jensen's tale traces the flow of the future from the early twenty-first-century reign of a megacorporate global economy, to its sudden collapse in 2044, when nuclear catastrophe envelops the world. In the traumatic aftermath, a socialist world commonwealth comes into being in the year 2062, followed by a lengthy transition to a decentralized order of technologically mature autonomous societies, many located in outer space. The riveting literary interludes that follow each chapter take the form of letters and documents from the history of Jensen's family, evoking the everyday lives of people in the midst of these global-historical events. Here we meet a woman in Brazil whose son is dying from a new immuno-deficiency disease, two brothers comparing life on earth with life in a space colony, and many more.

Neither fiction nor nonfiction, Wagar's brilliantly creative work is not meant to forecast the future, but rather to draw attention to possibilities and alternatives for humankind and planet Earth. In doing so, it also serves as an unforgettable reminder that the future is being made now.

Concerns itself with the future of sociology, and of all social science. The thirteen authors—among them Wendell Bell, Kai T. Erikson, Scott Greer, Robert Boguslaw, James Mau, and Ivar Oxaal—are oriented toward a redefinition of the role of the social scientist as advisor to policymakers and administrators in all major areas of social concern, for the purpose of studying and shaping the future. This book contains research strategies for such "futurologistic" study, theories on its merits and dangers, as well as an annotated bibliography of social science studies of the future.

A collective engages and mirrors the critical need for energy justice and transformation
 

Solarities considers the possibilities of organizing societies and economies around solar energy, and the challenges of a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Far from presenting solarity as a utopian solution to the climate crisis, it critically examines the ambiguous potentials of solarities: plural, situated, and often contradictory. 

Here, a diverse collective of activists, scholars, and practitioners critically engage a wide range of relationships and orientations to the sun. They consider the material and infrastructural dimensions of solar power, the decolonial and feminist promises of decentralized energy, solarian relations with more-than-human kin, and the problem of oppressive and weaponized solarities. Solarities imagines—and demands— possibilities for energy justice in this transition.

Drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond capitalism

To live in this world is to be conditioned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfettered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—creating a planet of surplus populations. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social relations, new modes of economic existence, and new collective worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future. 

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter

 

“Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail.” —Vilém Flusser 

Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the philosopher Vilém Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two “scenarios for the future” to be produced as computer-generated media, or technical images, that would break the imaginative logjam in conceiving the social, political, and economic future of the universe. What If? is not just an “impossible journey” to which Flusser invites us in the first scenario; it functions also as a distorting mirror held up to humanity. 

Flusser’s disarming scenarios of an Anthropocene fraught with nightmares offer new visions that range from the scientific to the fantastic to the playful and whimsical. Each essay reflects our present sense of understanding the world, considering the exploitation of nature and the dangers of global warming, overpopulation, and blind reliance on the promises of scientific knowledge and invention. What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, with Flusser’s concept of design as “crafty” or slippery, and with art and the immense creative potential of failure versus reasonable, “good” computing or calculability. As such, the book is both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.