Reclaiming The Future

Ecosystem architecture encourages us to invest in futures that we would like to inhabit rather than settling for the one we expect to become reality. From its inception, the true promise of the decentralized internet has been the multiplication of public and private spaces. More importantly, we acquired an unrivaled degree of ownership over them. We did not lose the internet due to fragmentation, but because we started outsourcing our responsibility to take care of it to governments and corporations. It is high time to reclaim it.

While the internet is irrecoverably shattered, I sincerely believe that it is still possible to prevent the tectonic plates from further drifting apart. However, the odds are rapidly stacking against us. Without swift and clear interventions, we will be destined for a future that is already being written for us.

The name of that story is Surveillance Capitalism. In her book of the same title, Shoshana Zuboff succinctly captures its essence:

Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.

Just as the proponents of a unified internet, corporations and governments strive to connect the unconnected, since persistent online access helps them gather larger amounts of more granular data. In the age of surveillance capitalism, these former adversaries have found a shared interest in gaining control over people’s behavior. Data is their weapon of choice. By analyzing vast behavioral patterns, they can more easily predict and preempt people’s actions. Naively giving people more and better access to the internet only feeds into this vicious cycle of exploitation.

To prevent this future, we must first align the misaligned before connecting the unconnected. Alignment, however, does not start with asking people what they want. Alignment is the process of figuring out what people need, shaping tangible futures from these needs, and then finally give them the option to choose between them. Without a proper palette of possible alternatives, people will only repeat the most probable outcome — and the most probable narrative is always the one that fortifies the current status quo.

Whether it is cryptocurrencies, virtual and augmented reality, or artificial intelligence, loud alarm bells should ring whenever we are presented with a supposedly inevitable future. In these instances, we must first ask: Who is presenting this future? How is this person, network, or organization situated? And what interest do they have in the realization of this future?

These questions are not only important for present futures but equally applicable to past ones. In “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”, Kodwo Eshun makes a strong case for the importance of reading these counter-futures:

By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory. Chronopolitically speaking, these revisionist histories may be understood as a series of powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates.

Past futurists are our future allies. They can teach us to reject the logic of a future that has already been written for us. The only way to avoid bleak dystopian scenarios is to keep imagining, shaping, and performing better alternatives. What distinguishes our current reality is that we no longer need to settle for a one-size-fits-all model of the future. Multiple inhabitable ecosystems based on shared values can peacefully coexist. These spaces, however, will not appear out of nowhere. They need to be designed, developed, and nurtured. Ecosystem architecture is the practice that does exactly that.