Some imagine BANI—Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, Incomprehensible—is what’s coming. RadarDAO shows instead a “Future In Sync”
From Radar Dao site
We receive much literature from those who are trying to sell a vision of the future, to brands and business (and we give them a look, because community-oriented futures is definitely one of our interests). But we’ve rarely had one as diverse, and radically presented as this one from Radar DAO, titled FutureInSync.
The style is that of a 90’s-style hypertext story, where you weave a click-through path amid ideas and images (so, not another PDF!). But the context of FutureInSync seems like, to us, as much a psychological panorama of the anxieties and aspirations of creatives in Gen Z and Gen Alpha, as it is a pitch for business.
We’d encourage you to click through at your own pace - but in their “signal tracking”, they’ve turfed up some amazing examples of cosmo-local creativity and initiative that we’d love to share with you below.
First, their big picture:
From “VUCA” to “BANI”
…A VUCA world is the predominant archetype describing our current paradigm, an acronym standing for:
Volatility (unstable, fragile, and often without threshold clarity);
Uncertainty (unpredictable, random, and often without a decipherable pattern or adequate information)
Complexity (unstructured, interdependent, and often without a clear start and end point);
Ambiguity (unclear, paradoxical, and often without a solution even despite adequate information).
Dating back to 1987 and attributed to the US Army College, VUCA was originally articulated as a navigational framework for the post-Cold War era. Since then, it has trickled down into political and military strategies, business studies, and management and leadership ecosystems. Today, all signs point to VUCA’s acceleration and intensification as its impacts become more pronounced in everyday societal dynamics — particularly since the pandemic.
While 9/11 is considered an important catalyst, Niall Ferguson’s book The War of the World asserts that the roots of our VUCA paradigm can be traced further into 20th century violence, rippling outward into the disconcerting challenges we face today.While VUCA remains our most frequently referenced descriptor for the current paradigm, our rising unease — and emerging research — implore us to reconsider whether it reflects the above anecdote.
….But according to Jamais Cascio, we are now in an age of BANI — Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, and Incomprehensible. It may look and feel a lot like VUCA, but there are differences both subtle and stark.
While both brittle and volatile suggest a world that’s difficult to rely on, the latter indicates systems prone to episodic instability and disorder (think: the Russia-Ukraine War driving a global food & energy crisis). To be brittle, on the other hand, is to be in a state of constant hyper-fragility, waiting to shatter; so much volatility and so little time to return to equilibrium that we’re simply past it.
Brittleness fertilizes our ecosystem for anxiety, incentivizing shock-proofing and short-termism — making it that much harder to grasp incoherence.
Incomprehensibility is what you get when you try to make sense of a world in prolonged ambiguity: inundated by information overload, sensory overstimulation, and paradoxes of choice. BANI’s A and I mutually reinforce one another, as unabating anxiety reduces cognitive clarity, making messy complexities seem even murkier than they are.
At the root of this new paradigm is nonlinear ‘chaos’ — and not just the feeling of it, but the reality of it: non-deterministic, nonlinear systems thwarting any attempts to reconcile cause with effect, input to output. Consider climate change its magnum opus.
Radar’s response is that we need:
NEW STRUCTURES
New Frameworks for Thought - New Systems of Belief - New Structures of Belonging
NEW STORIES
Re-thought Values and Priorities - Better Sources of Common Language - New Pacemakers and Points of Shared Meaning
NEW BEHAVIOURS
New Modes of Healing - More Moments of Collective Effervescence - More Playfulness, Whimsy, and Mischief
Here are some of the cultural and social forms they’ve identified under these headings:
PORTALS INTO OTHER WORLDS
WHAT IT IS:
Projects like this create spaces for people to consider alternate perspectives and generate a sense of social cohesion, highlighting our commonalities over our differences. We expect to see more of these types of projects leveraging technology to overcome divides of space and time, and would love to see art used to foster reconciliation and understanding between regions experiencing tension.
WHY WE LIKE IT:
As an art installation, it creates a sense of possibility — particularly among those unable to travel, missing out on the moments of serendipity and cultural expansion that come with spending time elsewhere. According to its creators, the portal and iterations to come are meant to serve as a kind of digital bridge, meant to encourage people to “rethink the meaning of unity.” While it might sound cheesy, that’s exactly the kind of message we can get behind right now.
HOW IT MIGHT CONTINUE TO MANIFEST:
The Portal Unity Network is a project erecting live, two-way video feeds connecting cities around the world, which allow participants to interact with others in a paired location 24 hours a day. The initial pilot — which looks like something straight out of Stargate — took place in 2021 between Vilnius, in Lithuania, and Lublin, Poland. Expect to see more of this: A team of product design students in Bristol, U.K. have won a competition to design the next iteration.
Upcoming at the HogFarm
COMMUNITY AGRICULTURE, LITERALLY
WHAT IT IS:
Hamlet Organic Farm (or HOG Farm) is one of many community-supported agriculture farms vying to bring people both closer to the food they eat (through access to seasonal produce) and to each other (through seasonal events). They shift the conversation around localism from merely cultivating vegetables to cultivating social connection.
HOG Farm and its likeminded brethren are doing a bit of everything: hosting earth-to-table dinners, cooking classes, biodynamic wine tastings, performances, sound baths, and yoga sessions. And as regeneratively-minded web3 organizations like Farmers Marketverse, Thirsty Thirsty, and Happy Goat get in the mix, this feels like it’s the start of something bigger.
WHY WE LIKE IT:
Strategies like this help shift the narrative when it comes to what can often feel like a dull topic, dimensionalizing something earnest and good as trendy and fun, as well — faster than you can say ‘sound bath’. By fostering both sustainability and social cohesion, these players are closing the gap between ourselves and our neighbors, creating deeper connections to — and care for — the places where we work, eat, and live.
HOW IT MIGHT CONTINUE TO MANIFEST:
As we consider the overwhelming challenges we’re all facing, organizations are likely to find greater success enacting strategies that combine good vibes with the ability to do actual good across multiple facets in a person’s life.
MULTIPLAYER MEDITATION
WHAT IT IS:
Collective effervescence can be quiet, too. And The Big Quiet, making its post-COVID return in 2022, may be the most potent example of this. Coining itself “a mass meditation movement for modern people,” the organization gathers thousands of individuals for moments of quiet, connection, and music at the most iconic places on earth.
But they’re not the only ones taking meditation multiplayer: Interbeing Inc. is a new venture with a goal to improve the mental health and well-being of all through interpersonal meditation practices. With practices done live and out-loud with fellow participants, those who engage can gain a greater sense of embodied presence and human connection to those around them.
WHY WE LIKE IT:
At this point, we’ve talked at length about the wellness benefits of multiplayer mode — but we love that this trend takes it a little more literally. Alongside the social clubs for rest and rejuvenation (read: Spaces Social Club, SF Commons) that we mentioned earlier, there’s a clear shift away from the ‘self-care as selfish’ narrative and toward a recognition that recuperating and recharging in concert may just be better for all of us.
HOW IT MIGHT CONTINUE TO MANIFEST:
As new modes of healing become mainstream, expect to see more forays into multiplayer mode: From collective psychedelic experiences and community breathwork to DAOs like Zaya (aimed at deepening our collective affinity to nature as a pathway toward greater health), we’re already seeing it emerge.
***
Even though this is ultimately a pitch for futures work, we are struck by the way FutureInSync assumes regenerative, post-ego, networked and spiritual realities for Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers - although “participants” might be a more accurate term.
Their interest in synchrony - the patterning and framings that can bring disparate elements together - echoes that of our co-initiator and founder Indra Adnan, in her writings on a fractal age.