Sustainable Mobility

The video of the talk Jamais Cascio gave at the Art Center Summit on Sustainable Mobility a couple of months ago is now available. It runs about 40 minutes, and plays only through their site (which is why there isn’t an embedded version here). They don’t make a point of showing every slide in his presentation, so if you’re interested, you can follow along at home with the slideshare version.

The talk weaves together several themes that run through much of my work—resilience, intelligence as adaptation, scenaric thinking, and, above all, agency:

I want you to think through these three scenarios as lenses, to understand the choices you’ll be making in your own designs, in your own businesses, in your own communities over the course of the next decade or so. Understand how the choices and the actions that you take fit with the choices and actions of others.

  Because one of the critical things I want you to walk away with is the recognition that the future is not a destination, it’s not some place we go to, it’s a process, and we enter the future minute by minute. The worst thing you can do is to give up your power to create that future, to leave it to somebody else and say, “well, it’s out of my hands.” When you give up that kind of agency, when you give up your capacity to shape and recreate and transform your own future, you’ve really given up your role in civilization.

  This is ultimately the most important thing you can do: to think through what you want to do, what you can do, to create the future you want.

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