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I just came back from Lisbon, where last week the second edition of the Future Days Conference took place. It’s a gathering that brings together the more progressive thinkers and activists in the wide field of futures and intersecting disciplines. This event took place in one of the most impressive conference venues I’ve ever seen, which you can see here.
Highlights from the talks at Future Days
Among the mostly fantastic talks were the likes of the ones by Payal Arora, Sohail Inayatullah, gem barton, Lex Fefegah, and Simon Höher. I’m excited for their release on the Future Days YouTube channel. In the meantime, I made short summaries of my highlights as Instagram Reels for Follow the Rabbit:
As the theme “Towards Symbiotic Futures” suggests, there was a lot of talk about more-than-human, inclusion, decolonization, and so on in the workshops and conversations. However, the theme also highlights a problem with the discourse: the conference felt largely disconnected from the current global situation. Future Days mentioned Trump and Gaza in passing. There were very superficial touches on AI here and there.
For me, the conference at times felt like an elaborate escapism without ever really pushing in the direction of concrete action. That’s probably my bias. So I tried to make the best of it and offer some provocations in the participants’ WhatsApp group, which I‘ll share with you here:
Thoughts for day 1 of Future Days:
This morning, I’m trying to wrap my head around “symbiotic futures” in the face of our current situation (gesticulates wildly at the world in general) while my Instagram feed is full of videos from Barcelona in the blackout celebrating sheer humanity.
Here are some loose thoughts:
Symbiotic futures sound wonderfully harmonious, yet three recurring, mostly unexamined dynamics keep tripping us up.
- Ecological—We romanticize natural mutualism even though most species-level “partnerships” are fragile, context-bound, and can flip into competition the moment one side over-extracts.
- Human–Tech— We celebrate co-agency with AI and neuro-interfaces, yet real power still rests with those who own the black-box goals and data.
- Socio-economic—“Win-win” rhetoric can conceal extractive value flows; if distribution isn’t transparent, symbiosis turns into a cover for inequality.
A conflict-symbiotic lens reframes the ideal. In many resilient ecosystems (think mycorrhizal networks—👋🏻 Jess Jorgensen), stability emerges because nutrients are distributed unevenly, creating productive tension that prevents any one actor from crashing the whole. Futures that deliberately encode friction, accountability, and renegotiation loops may prove sturdier than friction-free utopias.
Enter anti-dystopia. Coined by science-fiction scholar Isabella Hermann, anti-dystopian narratives refuse the binary of shiny utopia vs. inevitable doom. They start with today’s messy polycrisis, acknowledge very real threats, and then pivot toward collective resistance and practical repair. Agency and imperfection are features, not bugs—think imperfect but mobilized.
Provocation: Which parts of our progressive echo chamber treat “symbiosis” as a foregone win, and how might inviting real conflict crack open the biases we haven’t questioned yet?
Thoughts for day 2 of Future Days:
Here’s a provocation for today: Do hyper-optimistic visions that skip the messy work of agency and power turn into escapist screensavers for the mind?
Here is my final provocation for Future Days 2025:
People outside of our conference bubble have a single challenge for us: “Tell me about a future I want to be part of.” What is your response?
Despite my quarrel with the conference theme, I had a wonderful time meeting old and new acquaintances. A big shout-out to all of you.
My thoughts from the fishbowl conversation
At the conclusion of Future Days 2025, Nadim Choucair, the host of the Curiosity That Matters podcast, led a roundtable discussion. He asked me to join him to kick things off and to share some thoughts based on my article ‘Futures as a Mirror of Society.’
Here’s what I shared (in a clean-up version):
As a critical futurist, my work differs notably from many of my colleagues. Rather than dedicating my time only to creating new scenarios or future visions, I’m deeply interested in existing future narratives—the images of the future already circulating in our society. These narratives are revealing because they tell us something significant about our present: our values, hopes, wishes, and expectations.
Unpacking Dominant Future Narratives
What fascinates me is asking where these expectations come from and examining the agendas behind these narratives. For example, whenever Sam Altman writes a blog post about the future with AGI, I don’t learn much about AGI itself—but I learn a great deal about Sam Altman’s agenda, how he makes his money, and how he intends to keep making it. However, because he is a prominent figure in AI, many people tend to read his narrative and accept it without question. “He must know the future,” they assume.
I’m particularly interested in how these narratives about futures influence our daily lives without our awareness. For my master’s thesis, I wrote about “future imaginaries”—these societal agreements about what the future will bring that we rarely question.
The Value of Preposterous Futures
The interesting part about “preposterous futures,” if you go back to the futures cone, is that those scenarios, which seem outrageous and impossible, make clearer what we take for granted. The problem with futures we take for granted is that we’re barely aware of how deeply ingrained they are.
If I were to go outside the Future Days venue and ask people what they expect from the future of AI, I’d likely hear standard responses, like, “It’s probably going to replace many jobs.” But that’s just one narrative that has gained traction in society. What if it’s different?
From Abstract to Concrete
The challenge I see for all of us is that there’s a real danger in creating these beautiful, positive, desired futures labeled as inclusive, decolonial, and all these hashtags we like to use—without asking what they actually mean. I think that’s the question people outside our bubble are really asking: “What’s going to be different? In what ways might my life evolve over the next five years if that indeed occurs?”
How do we break this down? How do I imagine day-to-day life? How do I wake up? What will be different? Do I go to work? Where do I live? With whom do I live? These seemingly small questions are crucial for making future visions more tangible. The more we can paint a picture where people think, “I can actually see myself in that,” the more effective our work becomes.
When creating these preposterous futures, I believe it’s essential to eventually move from the abstract to the concrete. That’s what I consider most important: how do we break down these visions?
Starting with Radical Visions
There’s an intriguing tension between practicality and radical thinking in futures work. My approach would be to start with the preposterous—imagine the most radical future, the most extreme vision based on your values—and then work backward to the present. Ask, “How do we begin moving toward this?”
You’ll develop entirely different action paths if you first envision the truly desired, preposterous future instead of immediately saying, “No, that’s too crazy; we need to keep it practical.” The radical vision comes first, but then it needs to be broken down: what does it actually mean for daily life? That’s when we see how radical it truly is.
This approach also allows us to say, “Yes, I believe we can get there because I can see a path,” rather than the vision remaining too abstract and seemingly unattainable.
If there’s anything here that you have a question about or want to discuss further: I’m doing office hours every Wednesday. Just book a free 15-minute slot.