Localism 2020-2050 (well predicted from Helsinki, 2012). It’s all “Empathetic Communities” + “Local Loops”—after the breakdown…
Twitter is a mixed-bag of a medium - but if you’ve curated your followers consciously enough, it can be an amazing mixture of town crier, morale booster and academic reading list. In this Coronavirus moment, we’re enjoying all three modes - but the last has turfed up a fascinating piece of futures thinking, which at least suggests a positive road out of a collapse/break-down in 2020, for the next thirty years…
We saw this tweet (embedded above, and his follow-ups below) from Roope Mokka, co-founder of Demos Helsinki. Roope was alerting the world to some scenario work they’d done in 2010-2012, on Sustainable Lifestyles (PDF). The link in the tweet takes you to scenes from a scenario called “Empathetic Communities” - where changes towards local and civic empowerment accelerate after a 2020 breakdown moment. (Roope’s follow-up tweets draw out the contemporary relevance of their earlier insights).
In a later tweet, Roope points us to another of his “localist” scenarios - Local Loops. This can easily run alongside Empathetic Communities, where a work-centric ethic focusses heavily on local value and productivity. Places are proud of their capacity to generate their own wealth.
Roope is right to blow his horn a little - this is extraordinary rich and predictive stuff from a decade ago. Maybe not surprising, from a country which has always prided itself on being able to think rigorously about the future, and adapt accordingly.
Digging into their main document further, there are two extra “sustainable lifestyles” proferred - Singular Super Champions and Governing the Commons. There are generated by a vertical axis that, somewhat creepily, stretches from “endemic” (local) tech to “pandemic” (global) tech. We’ll post the matrix and the table below, just for context:
Looked at from the actual date of 2020, you can see how each of these scenarios is being currently drawn on, across the political and activist spectrum.
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LOCAL LOOPS: 2020-2050
