Across our lives old narratives about progress—what it looks like and what it takes—are breaking down. At the same time, new narratives are yet to emerge in any clear way. And so we find ourselves in a narrative vacuum. Dystopian stories love vacuums; they play to our fears. So people sell us more and more dystopia, filling our feeds and phones, creating a vicious cycle in our content consumption. What’s more, as we consume more dystopian stories we shrink our natural capacity to positively create the future.
My podcast guest this week is Ari Wallach, a futurist who has spent the past decade thinking about this narrative vacuum problem. These days much of his time is spent finding, planting, cultivating, and amplifying “protopian” stories to counterbalance the dystopian ones. It was an uplifting 45-minute conversation that helped me reframe our current moment and gave me a shot of hope.
Links referenced in the podcast
A Brief History of The Future (PBS Series)
