Memory Work is a research-based future scenario. It is not a prediction. It is neither visionary, as in preferred, nor is it admonitory, as in dystopian.
It is intended as material for meditation, stimuli for imagining collective future memory. Memory Work engages with ethical and moral imperatives across (past, present, and future) time.
History is written by the privileged, framed by their prejudices, and coloured by their biases. History records. Memory recalls — through mutual recounting and reconstruction of lived experience.
Through memory work, collective futures can be imagined.
We encourage you to use this as a resource, to question it and to iterate on it, generating your own future experiences, visions, vignettes, and artifacts.
The following are cultural artifacts from the future scenario, Memory Work. Although they might only exist in this possible future world, they are informed by signals of change observed today. Click each artifact to explore the social, political, technological, and theoretical signals that informed it.
A call for people to be with and of nature, to take care of the Earth and each other through mutual aid and collectivized reproduction — the
concept of a Living Internet took root as a new way of thinking and feeling about how we form kin.
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Like mushrooms springing from disseminated spores, an ad-hoc network of communes began to emerge outside of cities. Populated by
urbanite folx who looked to move from precarious conditions to collective survival — the communes embodied ways of life oriented around slowness,
intentionality, distributed abundance, and decentralized care.
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The Living Internet became a kind of superorganism mediating the flow of nutrients
among all living beings.
She is the bridge between infrastructure and ecology, immediacy and longevity, information and life. We are the spiritual caretakers of the Living Internet, charged with the responsibility of growing and nurturing her.”
Referring to a loosely knit movement of
political, business, and spiritual leaders; entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators; and their
supporters — the words Mothers of Invention (or the initialism MOI) are found
emblazoned amidst the taped seams, utility straps, and zipped pockets of tech aprons and lab coats (worn
functionally and fashionably as a political statement).
In response to the clumsy and ineffectual
Climate Imperative of the first decades of the 21st century, the anti-patriarchal Mothers of Invention
seized control of the world’s institutions — transitioning big businesses into cooperative models,
formalizing new means of equitable exchange, and choosing nurture over growth.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
The Cosmetic Healer offers personal care services that are not merely aesthetic, but also affective,
producing positive psychological and mental health outcomes. Cosmetic healing practices include a broad array
of services from ancestral dietary guidance to postpartum care. In the application of topical cures and facial serums,
in the intimate acts of stretching, massaging, and sculpting the body, in the pull of lifting surgeries, and in the tensile
pressure of braiding — subtle energies, ripples of love and compassion, transfer through the therapist to the client. Among Cosmetic Healers,
treatments involving the manipulation, stimulation, and removal of hair are most sacred. Hair is seen as our subtlest sensing technology, an
antenna to our external and inner worlds. It is also a storage device, a kind of soft drive, a recording of selfhood and generations of trauma.
The rubbing, kneading, and then pulling of the hair into braids is a labour of care, stimulating growth and ascension to a higher self.
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Given the nature of vulnerability involved with their practices and the level of faith entrusted to Cosmetic Healers, they often operate
only within smaller, local communities, offering their services to lifelong friends and fictive kin in exchange for invaluable gifts such as childcare,
home-cooked meals, and expert advice.
The field of Ancestral Intelligence (a mended iteration of AI) integrates more-than-human ways of thinking — reviving ecological frameworks from indigenous knowledge and employing the sensing and processing powers of plants to better understand our situation in the natural world. Ancestral Intelligence is governed by a covenant of reciprocity, to honourably transact with the natural systems whose intelligence we’ve relied on to produce our medicine, food, energy, and building materials. The principles of Ancestral Intelligence are applied throughout the living sciences and in the biotechnologies. New life is cultivated to heal environments: microorganisms that filter air pollutants, purify waters, and regenerate soils.
In the age of creative biology, the biggest challenge facing the technosphere is the closing of its materials loops and waste
streams. Taking inspiration from the deep time-tested processes of evolutionary adaptation and Gaia-scale recycling, engineers,
designers, and citizens are turning to biomaterials for inspiration — combining long-known traditional techniques with new molecular-scale
capacities for intervention. One of the most influential organizations in the world, Almanac, provides the tools, materials, and training to a new
generation of problem solvers working to make products (from organic buildings to bio-fashion) that are more resilient, more adaptive, and cycled
more efficiently back into the metabolic processes of the Earth.Â
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Almanac’s organizational code reads as follows:
About Almanac | We Make Living Tools™Â
Almanac is a design ecosystem for the era of creative biology.Â
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We are a cooperative of citizens, makers, scientists, engineers, and organizations coordinating productive workflows for programmable biology.
Together, we’re creating a flourishing desktop biotech economy, governed by a philosophy of stewardship, sustainability, slowness, and safety.
We’re giving everyone — from curious citizens to seasoned designers — the tools, materials, and knowledge to create with biology and make the most out of life.