Media Susan Effect

I'd like to explore a discussion about scenarios using this book I read recently called The Susan Effect by Danish author Peter Haug. The book is not designed as speculative fiction. It's, it's a crime fiction novel. There's a touch of mystery around how the main character Susan has this innate ability about her that when she's in the presence of people, they open up and share and reveal things to her. that they otherwise would not. Whether it's magical science fiction or some kind of quantum field, it's never really explored, it's just assumed. And Susan and her husband and her 2 children have a similar effect. In this particular story, the family is appointed by the government of Denmark to explore and to find some data for them. And in the process of exploring this, they eventually discover that there is this Futures Commission that had been put together by a number of bright young people a couple of decades before, before the story. And this particular group of young people were very good at making very accurate predictions about the future. Now, in futures thinking, we don't like to talk about predictions. It's not crystal ball gazing. It is looking at the data that is available, the trends that are available, extrapolating into the future, within certain parameters in order to create a number of potential scenarios. And at that point, we get to decide what to do with these scenarios. And in this case, this group in Denmark had predicted a social and economic collapse in Europe. The Danish government's response was to put together another team to extract what needed to be protected from Denmark to make sure that it survived the collapse. So we're talking about culture, music, art, writing, language, agriculture, and people and wealth, all protected and categorized, and they were going to move to this island in the southern hemisphere where they would be protected while the social collapse happened and then they could go back later and pick up any pieces, but their culture would be intact. Scenarios are never values neutral. There's always going to be a set of parameters that we're looking at. So for whom are these scenarios being designed? What are the assumptions? What are we looking at prioritizing? Are we trying to prioritize culture? Are we trying to prioritize physical resources? Are we trying to prioritize an elite group's wealth? Are we trying to prioritize people? And it turns out in a lot of scenarios and in a lot of situations today, so we're not looking at the future, but today people are not prioritized. Wealth is prioritized, culture is prioritized, access to opportunities for certain people are prioritized over the basic livelihood of other people. That's a reality we see today, so we shouldn't imagine that it's going to be absent from certain people, certain organizations' scenarios for the future. Another question we can ask is, when we're putting these scenarios together, are we doing it, are we designing it so that we can look at a potential future, decide that we don't like it, and work out what we can do to transform society to transform the circumstances so that we go in a different direction? Or are we using the scenario so that we can work out how to protect certain interests to weather the storm, to weather the collapse that is inevitable? Scenarios can also be secret, private. They can be designed for a particular in-group, for their interests, or they could be co-created, democratic, accessible. It is entirely possible with the resources we have on this planet, with the intelligence and creativity and technology and science that we have on this planet, it is entirely possible to create inclusive futures that honor people rather than the exclusive future scenarios that only protect the interests of an in-group. We're able to do better. We're able to think about the future in a better way. But that only happens if we're able to have the courage to explore our own values, our own assumptions, and to explore together the potential of what a good inclusive future could look like for everyone.