I recently finished listening to Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything as an audiobook. It aligns nicely with the Exploration for this week on Game Changers.
I originally picked up the book after hearing a podcast interview with McGonigal. I’ve wanted to write a science fiction novel and I thought this book might help me with world building. She includes prompts to think about the future and imagine yourself already there. Imaginable may have inspired more ways to think about my future book, but it also inspired me to think about the actual future.
One of the biggest takeaways for me was deliberately considering how a specific technology might affect the future. She asks you use positive imagination and shadow imagination. That is, to consider what might be the benefits to a given technology and what might be its unintended consequences. I remember optimistically signing up for a Facebook account in 2010, ready to connect with friends and family and to build my social network. The Arab Spring was in full bloom and Twitter and Facebook were full of potential. I was pie-eyed in my positive imagination of what was to come. But the same forces that helped launch the Arab Spring began to show their shadow side in the following years.
In 2017, after struggling through depression and anxiety exacerbated by these platforms, I finally deleted my accounts. I was suffering the daily ups and downs of a never-ending news cycle. I was feeling angry all the time, plummeting down one internet rabbit-hole after another, losing hours of my life to the ephemeral whims of the media. Others were falling victim to conspiracy theories and lies spread by trolls, foreign agents, and malicious bots. The country was dividing into factions. I’m still asking myself why we were not prepared for the fallout of the new attention economy and the spread of disinformation and misinformation.
Jane McGonigal is primarily a game designer, and it is through this lens that she looks at the future. She works with The Institute for the Future to design future simulations that last days or weeks. Each simulation considers a scenario at least 10 years in the future and asks participants to write posts imagining that specific future. In 2010, she ran a simulation called EVOKE which imagined a respiratory pandemic, a person called “Citizen X” spreading wild conspiracy theories online, and a season of terrible wildfires in the American West. The parallels to the imagined 2020 seem prescient to the actual 2020. She is careful to state that she and her team really don’t know what the future will bring. But they do look for clues in the present to create the simulations. They call these clues “signals of change” and since listening to her book, I am seeing them all over.
One scenario she has the reader imagine, is that a tick-born disease called alpha-gal is causing millions of people to develop a severe allergy to mammalian meat products. The scenario is based on an actual disease that is quietly spreading in certain areas of the world, including the US. In the past week, I have seen two articles in major news outlets suggesting that the disease is beginning to spread rapidly. Before listening to her book, alpha-gal was not even on my radar.
I appreciated that the simulations don’t just dump dystopian scenarios on the reader. Some of the scenarios are more hopeful, and even in the scarier scenarios, she invites the reader to consider how they might be able to prepare for or help others in the future. For instance, maybe it’s time I learn how to use an Epipen in case I need to help someone suffering anaphylaxis from a severe meat allergy.
I originally started this Computer Science program because I wanted to understand more about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Since I beginning the program, I have also developed an interest in quantum computing. I might not end up a data scientist or quantum computer programmer, but with a foundation in CS, I have a fighting chance to continue studying these subjects.
And now that school is wrapping up, maybe I’ll also have time to write that novel!
For a more immersive experience with McGonigal, she offers courses through Coursera.
