Remote Futures

Introducing the online home for Remote Futures Research Society, an organization interested in comprehending the qualities of signals of future change and emergent phenomena from typically understudied or overlooked geographies.

We are interested in spaces distanced from the usual metropolitan hotbeds. We are unaffiliated with academia nor in service to enterprise.

Drawing partly on futures and foresight research techniques, our focus is on the margins rather than the core to better interpret a broad canvas of change. We consider emergent indicators that might anticipate highly uncertain futures, and intentionally sidestep short hype-cycle time-horizon framing. Our attention is on remote futures.

The motivation of this endeavor is to prioritize in-place physical exploration and generously trust community-led experience in the world, while sustaining the spirit and objectives of a foresight studio. Connecting virtually is a starting point but not an end goal.

Purpose

The Remote Futures Research Society assembles conditions for inquiry and exploration of plausible future societal and technological change in typically understudied or overlooked geographies to better decipher a broad canvas of transformation.  

It addresses this purpose by developing questions about processes and phenomena shaping society and developing conjectures on long-time or “remote horizons.

Trusting the observations and experiences of members, it seeks discovery through on-the-ground exploration, recreation, transdisciplinary research, dialogue, and fun.

Remote Futures Research Society's areas of interest address profound change brought about by unproven or new technologies and the revival or endurance of old technologies toward new applications.

We intentionally consider the margins as places of knowledge creation and generators of weak but plausibly significant signals of future change.

In the sense of timescales and location, we foreground the far-out.

Version 1 - July 2023

Directions

01 Communication

How we convey ideas about the remarkable transformational possibility of new technologies on daily life, pleasure, work, education, and culture.

02 Security

The shaping of society by the organization and dynamics of future security measures and threats.

03 Threats

The variety and forms of interpretations of societies' interaction with new threats and geography's role in these interpretations.

04 Governance

The real-world effects of new governance models, special economic zones, and virtual states that deserve attention.

05a Boundaries

What will accelerate or delay the invention of new concepts of territorial boundaries, location, and nation.

05b Logistics

What will accelerate or delay the physical movement of beings and goods throughout.

06 Land

Novel ways to evaluate the circumstances and future reproducability of large-scale infrastructure projects, such as megaprojects, terraforming, NIMBYs, geoengineering, and extraction.

07 Happiness

The future as a psychological landscape: happiness, fearlessness, emotional health, and decision-making through future disruption.

08 Values

Theories of values systems and their consequences for understanding radical ecological, demographic, and technological change.

09 Categories

New concepts of the universal and categorical in an environmental context: futures that transcend rural-urban binaries; either-or zones of ecological preservation or exploitation; spaces of inclusion-exclusion (walled gardens, gated communities)

10 Patterns

Patterns in how geography and culture generates signals of the future. Proposals for recalibrating how we assess remote in both the physical and temporal sense.


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