One of our most distinctive powers is imagination, our capability to imagine or fantasize about possible futures. Systematic use of imagination can be a powerful method to analyze possible next steps in the present. In 2012, UNESCO coined the term Futures Literacy (plural: the future does not exist, …

Technology has always been a very distinctive feature of human existence. Technology is to humans what nature is to other organisms: our host. Man is nature, but through technology – humans came to stand against nature and its biodiversity; technology is now a global enterprise, advancing on a scale …

Despite continuous improvement, lifelong learning, and plan-do-check-act cycles, every new day the planet is a little worse off than the day before! In the first 10 months of this year alone, an area the size of the Netherlands has been deforested and twice that area has been added to desert! Technology …

Do we dare to explore the hypothesis that technology shouldn't necessarily play the main role in our human future? It's time to face this discrepancy. Technology became our faith, but it is certainly not a joyful faith. With every new "solution", comes the need for new "solutions" to mitigate the previously …

It is argued that full social accessibility has become too complicated. We don't really need to apply lifelong literacy to low-literate people. Instead, we must curb the proliferation of increasingly complex systems with double (or even triple) authorization and lots of jargon. I therefore think that …

Education plays a major role in this paradox: the cultural diversity that is increased by immigration is eliminated by successful education: education aims to maximise the opportunities for every child within the emerging global culture and thus reduce cultural diversity. The road from the Enlightenment …

It is argued that the power of large systems often literally gets in the way of job satisfaction for professionals such as doctors, nurses and teachers. And this system power is growing and growing, everywhere we are being tracked and watched by systems, data driven by cameras, GPS, control systems. …

Populists deny the problems we face ecologically and pass them on to the next generations. In this article I discuss 4 populist statements 1. The Netherlands for the Dutch, 2. The “ordinary” Dutch person is entitled to his/her prosperity, 3. The Netherlands is full, no more asylum seekers and 4. Our …

In de middeleeuwen was geweld op de zeeën rondom Europa endemisch. Piraterij was de norm. Scheepvaart en geweld gingen hand in hand. In de Lage Landen was het niet anders. Vanaf de vorming van de kustgraafschappen tot aan de Nederlandse Opstand waren handel, zeeroof en maritieme oorlogvoering onlosmakelijk …

How do (temporary) societies actually arise, bottom-up (co-creation), or top-down (organized by an elite)? In this article, both the book The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021) and the Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 are presented to answer this queston: both forms of emerging/organizing …