vcc492 final

Question 1

“No Future”: A Lexicon
- Wolf Meyer

Answer 1

• the concept of there being no future
• the way things are right now in society makes a future look far from promising
• some people adopting futures that accept—and even actively build upon—the terrible future we will likely soon inhabit
• people are choosing to not have kids and move away becasue they have no hope for a future
• Due to unfortunate realities society is facing (climate, race, epidemics, etc.) people are choosing futures for themselves aligning with the realities they anticipate
• Society adapts and conforms building a new reality in the face of uncertainty or a future with “no future”

Question 2

“No Future”: A Lexicon (my opinion)
- Wolf Meyer

Answer 2

• “no future” sentiments now look like people not wanting to have kids, basically they are changing their desired future to fit the concept of no future becuase they think there is none
• even if the concept of a future is inclusive (not only accounting for rich white men) we cannot protect ourselves from things like the inevitable climate chnage
• Even if it feels like we have no future, we can still learn how to imagine new ones. But a real shared future only works if it includes everyone and is actually sustainable.

Question 3

Key concepts

Answer 3

• No-future (Wolf-Meyer)
• Defuturing (Blauvelt)
• Urban frictions (Sauter)
• Alien AI/ with and against AI (Murphy)
• Kinship (multiple authors)
• Other as Alien (Womack / Last Angel of History)
• Spaceship (Last Angel of History / Morgan)
• Afrofuturism (Womack)
• Indigenous Futurism (Morgan)
• Techno-optimism (Andressen)
• Indigenous approaches to AI (various authors of “Making
• Kin with the Machines”)
• Poetism (Teige)
• Post-post-apocalypse (Yuen)

Question 4

“No Future”: A Lexicon (main concept)
- Wolf Meyer

Answer 4

• The “No Future Lexicon” argues that the traditional post-apocalyptic narrative is no longer sufficient; we’re in a post-post-apocalyptic condition.
• With apocalypse normalised, we must move beyond survival toward new systems, healing, and future‐making.
• The “future” on offer often repeats the same logic of disaster rather than offering real alternatives—thus the lexicon provides keywords to resist, reject, and reimagine futures.
• Post-post-apocalyptic: A phase where collapse has already happened (or is ongoing) and the focus shifts to what comes after—not just surviving but thriving.
• Lexicon of futures: Words mutate—meanings shift—and the article collects keywords to help articulate alternative futures instead of accepting predetermined ones.
• Limit of dystopia: Apocalyptic futures lose their radical edge when they become the mainstream “safe” scenario; they reduce imagination rather than expand it.

Question 5

“No Future”: A Lexicon (Example & Implication)
- Wolf Meyer

Answer 5

• Example: Film Perfect Days (2023) is cited as a post-post-apocalyptic scenario: quiet, everyday life after trauma, not high drama.
• Implication: We must craft new stories of the future that don’t simply replicate disaster narratives but offer sustainable, inclusive possibilities.
• The article challenges us: If the future “on offer” always looks like the end of the world, then who gets a future? Who doesn’t? What does a world look like that isn’t premised on catastrophe?

Question 6

“No Future”: A Lexicon (why it matters for the exam)
- Wolf Meyer

Answer 6

• Great for Question 6: “What are the limits of the post-apocalyptic dystopia to our understanding of the future?”
• Strong for “who gets a future” themes (Q7) and questions about utopia vs dystopia (Q10)
• Gives language and conceptual tools (lexicon) to discuss how imaginaries of the future can be restrictive or enabling.

Question 7

Defuturing the Image of the Future (thesis)
- Andrew Blauvelt

Answer 7

• Design doesn’t just create futures—it also destroys or limits them (“defuturing”).
• Modernity broke away from historical continuity and produced many fragmented, partial futures rather than one inclusive possibility.
• The lack of a unified vision of the future is itself a crisis: “our time is the first … to produce no images of the future or only negative ones.”

Question 8

Defuturing the Image of the Future (key concepts)
- Andrew Blauvelt

Answer 8

• Future-making: Designers draft plans, models, prototypes that shape what doesn’t yet exist.
• Defuturing: The process by which design, modernity, and ideology foreclose alternative futures.
• Multiple futures ≠ one future: Because so many designs emerge, and because they are fragmented, there’s no consensus future.
• World’s fairs / industrial expositions: Historic examples of “futuropolises”—designed future cities which also excluded non-Western others and erased other futures.

Question 9

Defuturing the Image of the Future (examples & implications)
- Andrew Blauvelt

Answer 9

• World’s fairs (e.g., 1939 New York World’s Fair) built imaginary future cities (e.g., “Futurama”) while presenting colonised peoples as timeless or primitive—thus enacting defuturing.
• Implication: We need to recognise who is allowed into future-visions and whose futures are excluded. Design must confront this inequality.

Question 10

Defuturing the Image of the Future (my understanding from reading)
- Andrew Blauvelt

Answer 10

• design essentially attempts to write the future based on what we need - so when we design we create thigns we currently need, so this writes a future where this need is met
• “design is always future making”
• After 1900, to design is to design for the future, it is to bring the future into being as a contemporary possibility.
• world fairs became became synonymous with future-making
• not only other lands and lives that were colonized but the future itself
• designing the future does not just design it but can destory it, the invention of cars designed a future with cars but it also designed a future with pollution that helped the climate crisis and traffic accidents
• designing futures make materiallity possobe and likely, but also can defuture limiting the number of futures we have now (bc of cars and invention of raods the space roadss take up coulve been something else)
• For Polak, “images of the future” are a barometer of the health of a civilization, and their quality and power depend on their capacity to conjure a compelling vision, if there are any visionaries left in society at all.
• The future we fear isn’t a distant event—it’s already in motion. So our future visions shouldn’t be warnings, but plans for how to prevent the future we don’t want.

Question 11

Techno-optimism manifesto
- Marc Andreessen

Answer 11

• When society wants something, we come together and create it, whether it’s increased comfort, happiness, ease, etc.
• One invention stimulates the production of another, leading to the idea to develop another creation or adapt it to better fit society today.
• Production, development, and adaptation are limitless; it is our job to come together and create the world we all so desperately hope for.
• This quote merges with one of the final messages within the reading, which is: “Because the future is open, not predetermined and therefore cannot just be accepted: we are all responsible for what it holds.”
• remeber andreessen is a major tech mogel, this does not refelct everyone, only his pov bc it super helps him

Question 12

Techno-optimism manifesto
- Marc Andreessen

Answer 12

• The manifesto argues: Technology + free markets = human progress, abundance, growth.
• Rejects technological pessimism: “We are being lied to … that technology takes our jobs, threatens our future.”
• Instead: “Technology is the glory of human ambition … the spearhead of progress.”

Question 13

Techno-optimism manifesto (key concepts)
- Marc Andreessen

Answer 13

• Growth is moral: Societies grow or die. Technology is the primary engine of growth.
• Markets + Technology = Techno-Capital Machine: an upward spiral of innovation, productivity, jobs.
• Intelligence & Energy: The foundational resources for progress—leveraging AI, fusion, etc.
• Abundance: Through technology, goods become cheap, productivity rises, living standards increase.
• Not Utopia, but close enough: A constrained-vision optimism rather than naive utopianism.

Question 14

Techno-optimism manifesto (exampels)
- Marc Andreessen

Answer 14

• Example: He argues there is “no material problem … that cannot be solved with more technology.”
• Implication: If you oppose tech or slow it, you oppose human progress.
• Use for exam: Contrast this with critical/relational readings that emphasize dependency, inequality, futures of exclusion.

Question 15

Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms (main thesis)
- Morgan

Answer 15

• Indigenous artists use speculative visual cultures (aliens, UFOs, futurity) to imagining futures rooted in kinship, land, and community rather than colonial techno-progress.
• Indigenous peoples live in the “dystopian now” — they’re already living the consequences of colonialism, resource extraction, displacement.
• Visual culture becomes a tool for resurgence, not disappearance: moving from “death imaginary” (which sees Indigenous peoples as doomed) to futures.

Question 16

Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms (key concepts)
- Morgan

Answer 16

• Kinship as Technology: Indigenous knowledges (relations, land, care) used as technologies for futurity.
• Alien/UFO Metaphor: Used by Indigenous artists to represent displacement, colonial contact, forced migration — e.g., alien figures abducting land or people.
• Dystopian Now vs Future Imaginary: Indigenous futurists claim the apocalypse isn’t coming—it’s here; yet they craft future imaginaries of life, joy, permanence.

Question 17

Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms (exampels)
- Morgan

Answer 17

• Ovilu Tunnillie’s This Has Touched My Life depicts removal to infirmary with space-helmet nurses → mixing colonization + sci-fi.
• Pudlo Pudlat’s Imposed Migration (1986) shows a UFO lifting northern animals off their land — metaphor for forced relocation.
• Sonny Assu’s digital alien-figures inserted in pre-colonial Indigenous scenes to critique colonial contact

Question 18

Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms (my thoughts from reading)
- Morgan

Question 19

The Shape of Space (main thesis)
- Fred Scharmen

Answer 19

• Scharmen argues that the design of orbital space habitats (e.g., the 1975 NASA Summer Study) reveals how living in new geometries challenges our terrestrial assumptions of space, orientation, and subjectivity.
• The future of habitation isn’t just another city—it demands new forms of perception, motion, and who is invited into those spaces.

Question 20

The Shape of Space (key concepts)
- Fred Scharmen

Answer 20

• New geometries: Living in rotating habitats (Bernal sphere, Stanford torus) changes “down,” “up,” “in,” “out” and warps spatial perception.
• Designing humans: These habitats don’t just house humans—they help define who humans are, what bodies can do, and who gets to be there.
• Speculative architecture as future-making: These space city designs are not fantasy—they reflect cultural, political, and power assumptions about the future.
• Who is invited into the future? Scharmen emphasizes that futurity isn’t neutral—design brings exclusions

Question 21

The Shape of Space (examples & implications)
- Fred Scharmen

Answer 21

• Example: The 1975 NASA Summer Study “space settlement” paintings depicted large rotating cylinders and domes, showing humans floating, walking in curved environments—radically different from Earth’s ground plane.
• Implication: Our Earth-bound city designs carry assumptions (flat ground, horizon, gravity) that limit possible futures. If we can imagine radically different spaces, then we can imagine radically different futures on Earth too.

Question 22

City Planning Heaven Sent (thesis)
- Molly Sauter

Answer 22

• Smart-city visions (especially the Sidewalk Labs “Quayside” project) present the city as a perfect digital future—but this utopian mandate often conceals power, surveillance, corporate control, and privatization.
• The “city planning heaven-sent” narrative suggests technology will solve urban problems—but fails to consider who is included, who is excluded, and who controls the data.

Question 23

City Planning Heaven Sent (key concepts)
- Molly Sauter

Answer 23

• City as platform: The smart-city model treats the urban experience as a network of sensors, data, and algorithms, shifting governance from public to corporate platforms.
• Privatized governance: Public-private partnerships (e.g., Sidewalk Labs) blur lines between civic infrastructure and corporate R&D, raising questions about transparency, accountability, and public control of data.
• Utopian façade vs reality: The imagery of smart cities (renderings, flyers, marketing) presents ideal futures, but these often reproduce inequalities, discreetly exclude certain groups, and put technological efficiency above democratic choice.

Question 24

City Planning Heaven Sent (examples)
- Molly Sauter

Answer 24

• Example: Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project in Toronto—a demonstration area for “digital city living.” Despite public-facing co-design labs, critics pointed out opaque contracts, unclear data governance, and corporate predominance.
• Implication: Smart-city utopias may defuture alternative urban futures by locking in one “tech-efficient” path and closing off other ways of living.
• For exam: Useful for questions about utopia vs dystopia, who gets a future, smart technology in cities, and alternative design imaginaries.

Question 25

City Planning Heaven Sent (my opinion of reading) - Molly Sauter

Answer 25

- Sidewalk’s invitation is to imagine yourself as a product of their future. What kind of life could you have, what kind of person could you be, in Sidewalk’s city -