Primer

14
Paul Graham Raven
Cognitive bridges: infrastructure fiction vs. investor storytime, and other forms of narrative prototyping for adapting to the Anthropocene (2019)

The future hides that it hides nothing
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Graphical illustration of the blood of the city vignette and key process. Source: Ferhat Karaca, Fatih Camci, Paul Graham Raven - City blood: A visionary infrastructure solution for household energy provision through water distribution networks.
Graphical illustration of the blood of the city vignette and key process. Source: Ferhat Karaca, Fatih Camci, Paul Graham Raven - City blood: A visionary infrastructure solution for household energy provision through water distribution networks.

This is a story about stories. It’s a story about bridges and monorails that will never exist. It’s a story about how we ended up surrounded by roads and railways and pipelines and pylons, and about what those things do, and what they mean. It’s a story about humans and a trap they sprung on themselves long, long ago. It’s a story about complexity and autopoesis, about capitalism and unexpected consequences. It’s a story about change, and agency, and where those things are to be found.

It’s a story about infrastructure. But ultimately it’s a story about stories about the future, and about why we tell them, and about how we might learn to tell better ones.

Biography

Dr. Paul Graham Raven researches the narrative rhetorics of sociotechnical change for Lund University, Sweden, and sometimes works as a consulting critical futurist. He's also a writer and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, and a poet.