The Future We Deserve has been on hold. I’ve been in four countries this spring, and doing fascinating things in each.

• Belgium, doing a hexayurt village in Brussels and learning how to think like a European
• Berlin, learning about mesh networking, transferring the hexayurt to c-base and researching squat culture.
• The UK, building hexayurts with Engineers Without Borders (see the videos at the end) and working with Spacemakers on the West Norwood Feast.
• Ireland, getting on the ground at Cloughjordan Ecovillage and continuing to learn the economic options available.

It’s now come time to prioritize The Future We Deserve. My Ireland schedule gives me three or four days a week to complete work on the book, which is the gap that I’ve needed to take to actually Get The Thing Done. The previous round got rather entangled in a fascinating project involving some rather senior former British military brass and a quarter of a million dollars of research funding for a new generation of humanitarian technologies, and (while I can’t talk much about that project) it was yet another case of bigger, later.

No such error shall be repeated this time! I’m downcycling to just do the book for now. After all, I’m sitting on top of $2000 of the community’s money, and I haven’t delivered what was supposed to be done by Christmas!

The Future We Deserve has matured and mutated considerably in my mind since the project’s inception. I thought it was going to be a quick crowdfunded, coproduced book about the future, largely of interest to the community around the book – a sort of community show-and-tell of our ideas. Sitting down with the collection, however, has given me an insight: I think both the book and the methodology to produce it are of global interest. “What is The Future We Deserve?” is an empowering question.

We are not getting The Future We Deserve from our politicians. In a lot of areas, we don’t have any entity or organization to even ask the question. While the question goes unasked, we cannot frame the enterprise of creating the future in the moral and just terms required to edit out the bad futures, and create the good ones. “This is not the future we deserve” is a powerful, simple, final way to reject a proposed reality. The future we want is an infinitely diverse and fluid question, filled with aesthetic choices. The future we deserve is a simpler, more pragmatic approach to co-creating the world.

The book is intended to enable people to use a local process of appreciative inquiry to create a shared vision of the future they deserve, and then to implement plans that will lead to the selection of that reality from the palette of potential, available futures. The moral axis, the notion of an unjust future, not just an unwanted one, is the key to unleashing the moral outrage at the future we are actually being delivered by the power structures we have created to govern earth. That is the purpose of The Future We Deserve.

Enjoy the plywood hexayurt videos!