Speculations

In the summer of 2013, Triple Canopy invited more than sixty writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists, and technologists to make bets on the future. Triple Canopy asked: Which future do you want to see realized? How would you describe it? What demands might this future make on the present? These speculations were to be optimistic, even if that optimism were skeptical or dark. They were presented as Speculations ("The future is ______"), a fifty-day series of lectures, discussions, and debates at MoMA PS1, Triple Canopy's contribution to the exhibition "EXPO 1." In subsequent months, Triple Canopy continued the speculations by way of public conversations about climate change and inequality, geoengineering, and the way in which we conceive of and represent nature.This book takes the form of a lexicon that traces the Speculations series' central themes and common terms of discussion, in order to convey the relationship between imagination and action, and the right we all have to shape the future (given the right tools). Triple Canopy considers strategic interventions into the economy ("guaranteed basic income"), political abstractions ("autonomy," "prometheanism"), figments of the imagination ("planetary colonization"), modes of expression ("science fiction"), and useful neologisms ("hedge-fund utilitarians"). Each entry consists of edited excerpts from speculations made by, among others, David Auerbach, Gopal Balakrishnan, Ray Brassier, José Léon Cerillo, Ted Chiang, Jace Clayton, John Crowley, Samuel Delany, Silvia Federici, Rivka Galchen, David Graeber, N. Katherine Hayles, Josh Kline, Benjamin Kunkel, Rachel Kushner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mary Mattingly, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeny Morozov, Hương Ngô, Trevor Paglen, Ashwin Parameswaran, Srikanth Reddy, David Rieff, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Rush, Astra Taylor, and Kathi Weeks.