In 2018, Beserat became the publisher of the first Ethiopian superheroes — Jember and Hawi, each with an eponymous comic book — retelling episodes in his country’s 3,000-year history with a twist. With seven books in English and Amharic achieving $128,000 in sales, Etan Comics hails itself as the “home of African superheroes”.
https://www.ft.com/content/2fcbe1f9-f282-4527-b4e2-86cf102b1f27
Category Archives: science fiction
Forget Utopia. Ignore Dystopia. Embrace Protopia!
“Either we’re headed for a dystopia or we’re headed for a utopia,” Mr. Kelly, 70, recalled in a recent interview, describing the prevailing attitudes about the future at the time. “Neither of those seemed to be feasible, or even desirable.”
So Mr. Kelly coined a term to describe a third option, meant to represent the reality in which he believed we already lived: protopia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/special-series/protopia-movement.html
KEANU REEVES EXPLAINS THE MATRIX TO TEENAGERS
Reeves and his The Matrix Resurrections costar Carrie-Anne Moss sat down for an interview with Alex Heath of The Verge. They discussed Epic Games’ The Matrix Awakens, the Metaverse, cryptocurrency, cyberpunk, VR porn, and their returning film franchise. (This is the interview where that amazing clip of Reeves laughing at NFTs came from.)
https://nerdist.com/article/keanu-reeves-explains-the-matrix-to-teens/
Digital Twins Are Set For Rapid Adoption In 2023
The idea of digital twins — digital representations of physical systems, products or processes that serve as indistinguishable counterparts for purposes such as simulations, testing, monitoring and maintenance — has been around for some time. But indications are the concept’s time has come for wider adoption to support business applications.
https://frankdiana.net/2023/01/24/digital-twins-are-set-for-rapid-adoption-in-2023/
Related Report: Pre-emptive Culture Mapping: Exploring a System of Language to Better Understand the Abstract Traits of Human Interaction | presentation slides
Black Pilled – Seeking new relationships with technology
Today, most people use computers more like television. Mostly consuming software and content other people have made.
https://www.thebestsubstack.com/p/black-pilled
VISUAL DECOLONIZATION OF FUTURES
The Visual Decolonization of Futures is a proposal to liberate the legacies of coloniality that have been sustained through the use of images in the field of Futures Studies. It is a project that confronts and disassociates images about futures from the hegemonic perspective of the Global North. It seeks inclusion, respect, and autonomy not only for individuals, but also for groups and social movements, such as feminism, the black movement, the ecological movement, the LGBTqia+ movement, etc.
https://www.profuturists.org/post/visual-decolonization-of-futures
The subculture history of the internet – Cyberpunk [1990] Documentary
Why do we crave the awful futures of apocalyptic fiction?
In the first two decades of the new millennium, stories of the post-apocalypse have permeated pop culture, from books such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) to films and TV programmes such as The Walking Dead (2010-), the Hunger Games series (2012-15) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). While post-apocalyptic fictions of previous eras largely served as cautionary tales – against nuclear brinksmanship in On the Beach (1959) or weaponised biology in The Stand (1978) – today’s versions of these tales depict less alterable, more oblique and diffuse visions of our doom. So why can’t we seem to get enough of humanity’s unavoidable collapse and its bleak aftermath?
https://aeon.co/videos/why-do-we-crave-the-awful-futures-of-apocalyptic-fiction
Navigating the Mysteries
The correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking. It always was. Not punditry, allegory, or mandate, but mythmaking. The creation of stories. We are tuned to do so, right down to our bones. The bewilderment, vivacity, and downright slog of life requires it. And such emerging art forms are not to cure or even resolve uncertainty but to deepen into it. There’s no solving uncertainty. Mythmaking is an imaginative labor not a frantic attempt to shift the mood to steadier ground. There isn’t any.
https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/navigating-the-mysteries/
Using Fiction to Find Your Strategy
Unlike many strategic foresight tools, design fiction does not attempt to identify what is more likely to happen. Nor does it limit strategy conversations to the C-suite; in fact a core component is the participation of a wide range of stakeholders. Consequently, the teams that we’ve seen deploy design fiction are able to formulate and shape desirable futures that other tools do not enable people to see.
https://hbr.org/2022/06/using-fiction-to-find-your-strategy?registration=success
Analyzing Trends with Tim Stock 