4.01 | 05.12.20
I’ve had a lot of time lately to think about how the novel coronavirus spread so far so fast, and why we weren’t better prepared for something like this. I’ve been puzzling over one question in particular: What can the art of futurism tell us about how this pandemic arrived and what kind of world is likely to emerge from it?
Futurists—who sometimes prefer to be called scenario planners or foresight thinkers—specialize in helping the rest of us understand the big trends and forces that will shape the world of tomorrow. So here’s what I really wanted to ask one: Is a cataclysm like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 the kind of event we should be able to see coming? If so, then why didn’t we do more to get ready? Why has the federal government’s response to the spread of covid-19 been so inept? And above all, what should we be doing now to get our political and economic institutions back in shape so that they can cope better with the next challenge?
This April I had the opportunity to speak about all things coronavirus with my favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. Jamais is widely known for his work with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, and has a bit of a reputation as the “dark futures” futurist—the one who isn’t afraid to dwell on how things could go wrong. It turned out he’d been thinking about many of the same questions, and that he’d been developing a new analytical framework for just such an occasion. It’s called BANI, and it offers new insights into our strange historical moment, when institutions left brittle by years of deliberate neglect now face shattering stresses.
In this episode, Jamais and and I tour the BANI concept and discuss how we could come out of pandemic with some new tools for confronting catastrophe.
Mentioned In This Episode
Facing the Age of Chaos by Jamais Cascio, April 29, 2020
Open the Future, Jamais Cascio’s personal website
Superstruct, Fall 2008
Strategic Leadership in a VUCA World, with Jonathan Woodson, December 18, 2013
Chaos: Making a New Science, Enhanced Edition, James Gleick, 2011
During a Pandemic, We Urgently Need to Stretch Our Imagination, Jane McGonigal, March 18, 2020
Deep Tech, a twice-monthly podcast from MIT Technology Review
Extraterrestrials, Wade Roush, 2020
Additional Reading and Listening
We’re All Casualties of Trump’s War on Science, Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times, May 11, 2020
After the Pandemic: Writing the Stories of the Future, a new project from the Institute for the Future
The Long Path to a Post-Pandemic Reality, MIT Technology Review Deep Tech podcast, April 22, 2020
How Scientists Could Stop the Next Pandemic Before it Starts, Jennifer Kahn, The New York Times, April 21, 2020
There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis, David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, April 5, 2020
The Pandemic’s Path, Open Source podcast, April 2, 2020
Chapter Guide
00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID
00:08 Soonish Theme
00:22 Futurism in a Time of Pandemic
02:03 Introducing Jamais Cascio
04:12 Explaining VUCA
08:32 Meet BANI
10:43 How BANI Fits Our Moment. Part I: Brittleness in the Pandemic
13:48 Part II: Anxiety
14:17 Part III: Nonlinearity
15:10 Part IV: Incomprehensibility
16:01 Pandemics as Wild Cards
18:48 Planning for Pandemics
19:56 The War Against Expertise
21:44 Responding to Brittleness and Anxiety
23:50 Responding to Nonlinearity
26:03 Responding to Incomprehensibility
27:46 Paths Forward: Thinking More Like Futurists
30:30 Muddling Through
32:36 End Credits, Acknowledgements, and Hub & Spoke promos
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
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Full Transcript
Audio Montage: We can have the future we want, but we have to work for it.
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Season 4 of Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
If you’re like me, you’ve spent the last couple of months of the coronavirus pandemic at home, wavering between despair and hope. Between boredom and anger. Between respect for the medical heroes on the front lines in our hospitals, and sympathy for the victims and their families, and disbelief over the lack of a coherent national strategy to slow the pandemic and restore the economy.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about how the new coronavirus spread so far so fast, and why we weren’t better prepared for something like this.And since I make a podcast about the future, and how we can bend it in certain directions, I’ve been puzzling over one question in particular. What can the art of futurism tell us about this pandemic and the world that’s likely to come after the pandemic.
Of course, futurists go by a few different names. Sometimes they prefer to be called scenario planners or foresight thinkers. But their basic job is to help the rest of us understand the big trends that’ll shape the future so that we can be smarter about picking the future we want and navigating that future once it gets here.
And here’s what I wanted to ask a futurist. Is a cataclysm like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 even the kind of event you can see coming? If you can, then why didn’t we do more before 2020 to get ready? Why has our actual response to the coronavirus been so clumsy and uncoordinated, at least here in the US?
And above all, how should an experience like the spread of COVID-19 shape the way we think about the future? And what should we be doing now to get our political and economic institutions back in shape so that they can cope better with the next challenge?
Well, I happen to know a few futurists. And my favorite one is very smart, funny, and perceptive gentleman named Jamais Cascio. He lives in California, where he does a lot of work with a non-profit think tank in Palo Alto called the Institute for the Future. So I called up Jamais to ask him for a foresight analyst’s take on the pandemic.
Wade Roush: So we've talked once before for this podcast back in the fall of 2016 when I was first launching Soonish. And in that interview you introduced yourself as a professional futurist and an easily distracted generalist. So how do you describe yourself these days?
Jamais Cascio: Doomsayer. Apocaphile. No, I'm still a futurist, still an easily distracted generalist, but I am not fun at parties, is probably the best way to describe me at this point.
Wade Roush: That’s actually not true. I’m sure Jamais is a lot of fun at parties. But his point was that he doesn’t just think about utopian futures. He’s also got a bit of a reputation as the Dark Futures futurist. The one who isn’t afraid to dwell on what can go wrong. He told me one of his recent presentations left so many of his audience members in tears that he decided to add in some pictures of kittens to help people feel better. Anyway, when we connected on Zoom, Jamais shared this concept he’d been playing around with even before the pandemic hit. It’s called BANI. I’ll let Jamais explain what that means. But the more we talked about BANI, the more I felt like it really clarified my own understanding of this crazy moment we’re living through. It gave me a lens for understanding how we got into this mess we’re in, where the United States has 4 percent of the world’s population but more than 30 percent of the world’s cases COVID-19. And why it feels like we’re not getting any closer to a resolution of the crisis. And also what we need to do to get back some control over our future. So here’s how today’s show will work. I’m basically just going to play tape from a couple of long conversations with Jamais, where he explains the BANI idea, and we kind of grope together toward an understanding of what it can tell us about pandemic and what the world might look like after this is all over. But before we learn about BANI, we actually need to meet a director ancestor of BANI named VUCA. Here's Jonathan Woodson, an assistant secretary of defense under President Obama, explaining that concept in a 2013 talk at Harvard University.
Jonathan Woodson: When I was spending time at the U.S. Army War College, where I got a degree in strategic studies and strategic leadership, one of the concepts I was introduced to and became fascinated by was the fact that strategic leaders had to operate in what we called the VUCA world. VUCA is an acronym for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Now you throw those words together and you say what? You know, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Volatile represents what we do in the military and indeed the concept that the War College was its strategic leaders and senior leaders had to feel comfortable operating in the VUCA world. War, by its very nature, is volatile. It's uncertain because every time you develop a battle plan, the enemy is going to change that battle plan after the first encounter. It's complex because you're talking about everything from arms to terrain to culture to political objectives. And it's ambiguous because many times these things are rapidly changing and you get the fog of war, if you will. And it's hard to sort things out.
Wade Roush: Now, like a lot of catchy concepts, VUCA got picked by the business world, and pretty soon it made its way into lots of presentations for CEOs. Here’s one particularly overwrought example from a 2017 video made by the consulting firm Deloitte.
Deloitte clip: Volatility. Uncertainty. Complexity. Ambiguity. This is the world of VUCA. A world where nonstop unforeseen turbulence invades, where events come at us with unforgiving speed, straining organizational odds of survival. In this world, reflexes must be rapid and on target. Who will survive? Only the fittest. Who will triumph? Only the agile.
Wade Roush: But even though VUCA evolved into a buzzword verging on a cliché verging on a joke, Jamais says it had its uses.
Jamais Cascio: You know, here's a piece of language. It has the inherent seriousness. It's from the army. It must mean something. And it's kind of fun to say. “It's a VUCA environment.” And it actually became a very powerful way of articulating the the broad sense of dislocation. Not that everything was completely upended, but everything was sort of tilting on onto its side. It was at that time a very useful way of identifying situations in which you're your standard operations behavior may not work properly.
Wade Roush: As a futurist, Jamais says he ran into the VUCA concept all the time. He even had clients who would ask him to build it into his presentations. But as he thought more about VUCA, he says he started to feel like the idea was so ubiquitous that it was losing its power.
Jamais Cascio: I jokingly said at one point “I eat VUCA for breakfast.” It's that kind of feeling that if everything around us is volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, complex, that term doesn't have much utility, if it's describing everything. It's like that line from The Incredibles. “If everyone is special, nobody is.” Well, if every situation is special, if every situation is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, then nothing is. It's no longer a useful heuristic.
Wade Roush: Ok. So I'm trying to think of another metaphor here. Let's think about a thermometer, maybe, that only could measure temperature up to like 212 degrees, up to the boiling point. And now we're boiling all the time, right? So VUCA isn't necessarily giving you much useful information anymore.
Jamais Cascio: Right. And that's actually a really nice way of putting it. Because it may be we're in a situation where we've topped out. And so we don't know whether we're at, you know, instead of 212, we’re at 214 or 250.
Wade Roush: So Jamais started thinking about how to adapt the idea to make it feel useful again.
Jamais Cascio: A few years back, I was really trying to dig down into the nature of global change. And just looking at what was happening, particularly in climate, but across a spectrum, I realized that we need to identify something beyond VUCA that will allow us to make sense of the world again. What I came up with was, well, the acronym is BANI, B-A-N-I, which has the delightful coincidence of being the Old Norse word for death, which felt very, very appropriate at the time. BANI, B-A-N -I, stands for brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible. And as you can see, each of those is kind of a step beyond. From volatile to brittle, from uncertain to anxious, from complex to non-linear, from ambiguous to incomprehensible. And that felt right. And it felt like it was it was saying something about the world, allowing me to make sense of the world in a way that VUCA had really had lost its ability to do
Wade Roush: Right. Right. Ok, you're not necessarily arguing that VUCA is an invalid way of describing the world. It's just that the world itself has evolved beyond that. So BANI is sort of turning it up to eleven and bringing things back into the realm of describability.
Jamais Cascio: It's very easy to assign nearly everything that’s happening in our world, you know, even pre-COVID, to one of these four categories of being volatile or ambiguous. And now this is a tool with BANI to step back and re-evaluate. Is it just volatile or is it actually a brittle situation that could shatter? You know, is it. Is it just uncertain or is it anxiety inducing in a way that could essentially lead to terror? Is it complex or have we gone beyond complexity into pure chaos?
Wade Roush: Now, VUCA and its new cousin BANI are both just tools for thinking. There’s nothing magical or God-given about them. But as I read what Jamais’s been writing about BANI, and as I talked the idea through with him, I did start to feel like it has a couple of strong selling points. One is that we’re living through a time when it seems like history really is going off the rails and that nothing works the way it was designed to anymore. Especially our political institutions. So, brittle, anxious, and incomprehensible are pretty good subjective descriptions how things feel these days, at least to me. BANI’s other selling point is that if you start walking through it step by step, it really helps to explain what’s going on at this exact moment, when the coronavirus pandemic has brought the world to a near standstill.
Jamais Cascio: A pandemic, certainly a pandemic at the scale and manifestation of COVID, is something that will push a VUCA world past that into a BANI environment. One of the BANI characteristics that is in many ways the most visible is this brittleness concept. This idea that systems that appear strong, that in some ways may even be strong, shatter when they when they receive pressure. We've seen this with our health care system, we've seen this with our ability to communicate and cooperate effectively between the federal and state levels. We had systems that we had just assumed were working. In some ways they were working. But when they get hit by something outside of their context, when they get hit by something bigger than they would normally handle, instead of bending and adapting, what's happened is they're shattering, right?
Wade Roush: Maybe also our system of low-wage and temporary service jobs.
Jamais Cascio: Oh, God, yes. That's an excellent example. The labor structure, the class structure of the United States in particular. The jobs that are truly essential are the ones that get paid the least. Who's essential is the people who are gonna drive around and do a DoorDash delivery. The people who are going to be stocking Costco at 6:00 in the morning. The people who are doing their damnedest to make sure that they're not infecting us as they deliver the fundamental parts of our material existence. And it's not enough just to, you know, give them a nice round of applause and call them heroes.
Wade Roush: It's meaningless if you're not backing it up with job security and health care.
Jamais Cascio: Right, exactly. In some ways, if this pandemic had started six months earlier, we would see Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate, very likely, because this is the illustration of what happens in the United States when you don't have easy to access cheap or free medical care. But yeah, brittleness. Whatever cover we had for it, whatever illusion had been cast upon, it has been ripped away. It's very clear just how fragile the structure of our society had become.
Wade Roush: Right. Although it's not hard to apply the other parts of BANI to the situation as well. And just maybe to run through them quickly…So how does anxiety manifest in this situation?
Jamais Cascio: Well, aside from the simple anxiety of, “Oh, my God, the world is falling apart,” I think of anxious as being the feeling that emerges when there's no good answer. When choices, when decisions have been made without a visible, plausibly positive outcome. There are no good options. That's an anxiety-inducing system, when there are no visibly good options.
Wade Roush: Right. Non-linearity is super clear because for one thing, the pandemic spreads mathematically in an exponential way.
Jamais Cascio: Right. One of the important elements of a chaotic environment, and nonlinearity is part of this, is the sensitivity to initial conditions. Remember in James Gleick’s Chaos, that's a term that gets used repeatedly. Sensitivity to initial conditions. And we can see this in many ways with the different nonlinear curves across the U.S. from different states. California flattened the curve in a way that Ohio didn’t quite manage to. And the way that Georgia is nowhere close to. They all have slightly different initial conditions and different choices being made, leading to very different nonlinear curves.
Wade Roush: Just for the sake of completeness, why don't we try incomprehensibility?
Jamais Cascio: Well, I think incomprehensibility in connection with covid has less to do with the manifestation of the virus and much more to do with the decisions made around the virus. Why did China suppress all information about the virus initially? Why has Trump been making the decisions that he's been making? Why did he talk possibly injecting ultraviolet light into a body, let alone bleach or disinfectant. It makes no sense, it makes your brain hurt.
Wade Roush: So, you can see how BANI offers not just a good description of the pandemic but also a way to get your head around all the weird and surprising side effects it’s causing for our economy and our politics. But it’s also important to understand that in a way, this crisis we’re living through wasn’t surprise at all. Part of the role of futurists and foresight thinkers like Jamais is to model various futures and think about the big trends and forces that could shape history. And they’ve always seen global pandemics as one of those forces. The problem is that pandemics usually start when a microbe mutates or jumps from another species into humans. And you can never tell exactly when that’s going to happen. Which makes them what futurists often call a wild card.
Jamais Cascio: A wild card, being a transformative event with a kind of global reach that leaves a system changed in a way where it can no longer function in the way it did before. What you have to remember with wild cards is not that they’re simply big. They're global. They leave the world in a way where the new system can't go back to the old system.
Wade Roush: In fact, here’s a spooky story from Jamais that demonstrates just how long futurists have been worrying that nature would deal us this exact wild card.
Jamais Cascio: Back in 2008, the Institute for the Future, where do most of my work, put together a massively multiplayer foresight exercise called Superstruct. I worked with Jane McGonigal and Jane did the management of the game. I wrote the scenarios behind it. And one of the scenarios was called Pandemic. And it was an imagined disease called Respiratory Distress Syndrome or REDS. And we basically spent a few weeks going through with a collection of several hundred, maybe a thousand participants from around the world thinking about, OK, how do we respond to this future?
Wade Roush: The Institute for the Future even made some cool fictional videos to enhance the Superstruct simulation. Here’s one from the pandemic scenario.
IFTF video: Welcome to the Global Extinction Awareness System. You are watching Superthreat Number One: Quarantine. In 2019, Respiratory Distress Syndrome, or ReDS, is here, and it’s not going anywhere. Outbreaks are just something we live with. Hardest hit: tropical and subtropical cities.
Wade Roush: Remember, that video is from 2008. So it’s a little uncanny that the real coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 turned up in humans in the real 2019 and that like the fictional disease ReDS, it mainly causes respiratory distress. So the foresight exercise turned out to be frighteningly accurate. But that wasn’t the actual goal. The game designer, Jane McGonigal, wrote on Medium back in March that the most important work of such simulations is to, quote, prepare our minds, to stretch our collective imagination, so we are more flexible, adaptable, agile, and resilient when the “unthinkable” happens, unquote.
Wade Roush: In fact, a pandemic is completely thinkable. We can prepare for epidemics like SARS and MERS and Ebola and Zika. That’s exactly why the National Security Council had a directorate for global health security and biodefense. That directorate’s whole job was to work with other countries and NGOs to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats. Until the Trump White House shut the directorate down in 2018.And this is where BANI comes back in. Part of what Jamais Cascio and his fellow futurists have been trying to get across for years is that we know what to do to prepare for pandemics.
Wade Roush: For instance, the obvious way to keep our healthcare system from growing so brittle that it’s now on the verge of shattering would have been to build in more slack. To have extra hospital beds and to stockpile more masks and ventilators before you need them. But as a society we’ve consistently chosen not to do those things. And we have leaders who’ve climbed to power on the strength of their argument that, that expertise is a form of elitism. That government is inherently ineffective. That planning is somehow a form of tyrrany.
Wade Roush: I just I have this feeling that there's been a war against expertise going on in this country for a long time. It seems like the natural result of that is going to be an environment where even the most skillful futurists, even the people working their hardest to apply a VUCA mindset are going to fail because the situation is just going to spin out of control. And then when it actually does and a real crisis like the pandemic comes along, you wind up in BANI territory. But hey, that's exactly what they were working for. Right. Because it proves that we can't prevent these things and that no one is really in charge. And moreover, it opens up space for deeply authoritarian responses.
Jamais Cascio: So, yes. Expertise is part is part of the resilience of a system. One of my favorite definitions of intelligence is, intelligence is how you know what to do when you don't know what to do. But if trust in expertise has been shattered, f the ability of expertise to produce signal above the noise has been broken, then we've lost that element of resilience. Furthermore, when you have a system where you give equal attention to truth and falsehood, a system where you give equal attention to long term goals and immediate desires, you end up with a system where the bluntest, most obvious responses are the ones that get the most attention. Authoritarianism arises in these kind of situations because it offers an understandable, a comprehensible solution to this kind of incomprehensible environment.
Wade Roush: Once you're in a BANI situation, how can you see your way through it? We've already talked a little bit on email about how BANI situations can devolve into even worse situations. or sometimes if we're smart and wise about it, we can find ways to help them resolve into calmer situations. I know you’ve started to think through some of these possibilities. So could you share some of your thinking?
Jamais Cascio: Sure. We've already talked a bit about the importance of resilience of slack as a way of dealing with a brittle environment. So building up our capacity to to absorb risk, whether that's through having a larger than the officially necessary number of employees, whether it is having more intensive care beds and you than you need that ability to absorb things that move the go beyond your day to day. That is that is accounting for that is pushing back against the brittle.
Jamais Cascio: When we think about anxiety, you think the shift from uncertainty to anxiety. One response that I think is useful is to actually engage in some level of mindfulness. And that's actually become really commonplace term of late, especially around people who are going through therapy or trying to figure out where they are in the world. This idea of trying to understand with clarity what's happening. To contextualize. Whether we can turn that into a broader social process, I'm not sure. I would hope so. I would. I don't see it as impossible. But certainly developing a way of recognizing, accepting, contextualizing and eventually adapting to big changes, that is a way of turning the uncertainty that's become anxiety into something that is salvageable. Trying to figure out, how do you respond to an increasingly anxiety-inducing environment? You can't ignore it. You can't deny it. You have to accept it.
Wade Roush: How do we how do we respond to nonlinearity?
Jamais Cascio: With nonlinearity, I've been thinking in terms of dimensionality. When you think linear or non-linear, that's a two dimensional concept. You're watching the arc of the line. It is the line going straight or is the line arcing up. Well, what happens if you step outside to the third dimension? What is the actual path being taken by that seemingly nonlinear pathway? Is it spiraling? Is it. Is it looping around? Is there some way of seeing it in a different way that makes it more understandable? What is the framework in which this is happening? You know, what is what is a larger context? So we look at the, you know, the pandemic. Well, what is this connecting to?
Wade Roush: Yeah, like, one of the reasons that an exponential growth curve is so frightening in a pandemic is because if you don't have a vaccine or even a treatment for it, you know that the medical system is going to crash. So part of the context here is we're not just thinking about how many new infections there are per day. We're also thinking about all these other dimensions like, OK, how long is it going to take to develop antibody tests and ultimately a vaccine? Those are all parts of the context.
Jamais Cascio: Right. that's actually a really useful way of putting it. How do we put this in a in a larger environment, a larger context that gives it an added dimension that we don't really see if we're focusing solely on it. And so maybe dimensionality isn't the right term. Maybe I'm still groping, I know I'm still groping around for the right way of approaching it. But still, it's the idea of taking moving away from this single line that you're focusing on, moving outside the line and seeing where it fits in a broader, multi-dimensional world.
Wade Roush: Right. Right. Because even after the pandemic is over, we're still gonna be stuck with climate change.
Jamais Cascio: Right. And at the same time, our response to climate change will almost certain will almost certainly be different than it would have been absent the pandemic. We will have seen a different world, whether it’s far cleaner environment, what that might look like. What it looks like recognize an emergency. And so all of these become part of our language and how we respond to the dangers, the ‘BANIness’ of climate disruption.
Wade Roush: And then as an antidote to incomprehensibility, you have suggested intuition or maybe even empathy?
Jamais Cascio: Right. In an incomprehensible world, we don't have complete data. We don't have complete knowledge. So we need to construct meaning out of that. Well, what's the mechanism that allows us to construct meaning? The term that gets used to reflect that mechanism in our in our culture right now is intuition. You're stepping away from simply accumulating a list of presumed facts. And instead you're looking at it. OK, how does this connect to other people? What is the human response to this?
Wade Roush: What would be a more intuitive or empathetic response to the pandemic than the one that we're seeing out of Washington?
Jamais Cascio: Anything. I think a more intuitive or empathetic response to the pandemic than what we're seeing come out of Washington would be. A response, that is. Cognizant of what it would mean to a city, to a state, to a nation to lose so many people and to think about having fifty thousand plus deaths as being more than just a number, we've now crossed that line and now we're counting up to a hundred thousand. And thinking of it in terms of, 50,000 deaths. 50,000 families damaged. 50,000 relationships broken. Or more. And how do you, what is the right approach to speak to that aspect of the pandemic, and not simply how many boxes of N95 respirators do we have.
Wade Roush: In the final part of our conversation I asked Jamais to think with me about two possible paths forward. One where conditions get even worse, and one where we all start thinking a bit more like futurists. That is, where we decide to listen to what the pandemic is trying to teach us, and do the hard work of resdiscovering our own competence.
Wade Roush: So what happens if BANI situations get even more out of control? What happens then?
Jamais Cascio: Things fall apart. The center does not hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Wade Roush: You've come up with another acronym, STEM, and it's not the one that we all know and love.
Jamais Cascio: Oh, no. Yes. With STEM, I’ve been thinking Shattered, Terrified, Exponential and Meaningless. So you go if you go from volatile to brittle to shattered. You go from uncertain to anxious to terrified. You go from complex to non-linear to exponential. I’m not sure about that one, but let’s go with it. You go from ambiguous to incomprehensible to meaningless.
Wade Roush: Right. So we're talking about almost nihilistic, Kafka-esque territory.
Jamais Cascio: Right. Right.
Wade Roush: So we have these alternatives in front of us right now. And we are also in the middle of a national election season. And so we have a lot of levers we could start pulling to try and bend the future in one direction or another.
Jamais Cascio: Do we? And I'm not trying to be cynical. It’s just a real question. What levers do we have at this point that we have good reason to believe will work? So I look at what's happening in D.C., what's happening globally in terms of the rise of authoritarian populism. I look at what's happening with climate. And I truly wonder what we can do because we know what to do. In many respects with a climate in particular, we know what to do. But, we this broad civilizational we, don't seem to be willing to do it. We know what the solutions are. But in every case, whether talking politics or climate or go down the list, the pandemic. The people who have the most to lose by change tend to be the ones in power. And so very difficult to make that change happen.
Wade Roush: Well, you're absolutely right. There are so many cases where we know what to do and yet we don't seem to be able to do it. My optimistic scenario is, we muddle through on the strength of efforts like the regional governors’ coalitions. We managed to resist the temptation to go back outside too soon. We figure out some way to have metered and perhaps cyclical sort of return to normality. We are more ready to go back into work-from-home and self-isolation on a dime if we need to. Biden gets elected in November. Trump doesn't try to stage a coup. And there is a mandate for some kind of New-Deal-scale reorganization of the social contract with government starting next year. That's like the super optimistic scenario. Does any of that sound realistic to you?
Jamais Cascio: Yes. You started out by saying “muddling through. If an optimistic scenario doesn't start with muddling through, then I know it's not real. Muddling through is in almost every case, the best realistic option. And so muddling through and making the right choices, that is entirely possible. There will be problems along the way. It won't come out perfectly. There'll be attempts to do things that are that seem to be the right choice but turn out not to be. There will be people who take advantage of the changes in the world for short term benefit. But in many ways, what an optimistic scenario is, is a scenario in which we recognize the problems and grapple with them. For me, the clearest pathway out of a BANI world is responsibility. Looking at the world realistically. Seeing the scale of the problem. And making some effort.
Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me. Our opening theme music is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. And all of the other music in this episode came from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.
You can follow the show on Twitter at soonishpodcast. At our website, soonishpodcast.org, you can find the show notes and a transcript for this episode, as well as a link to an essay by Jamais Cascio that goes deeper into the whole BANI framework.
A special thank you Jamais, AND to everyone who sent in voice recordings for our new audio montage at the top of the show. That includes:
David Assaf, Jennifer Athey, Tamar Avishai, Ibby Caputo, Kip Clark, Matt Frassica, Charles Gustine, Lucia Prosperi, Warren Prosperi, Paola Rebusco, Giulia Rebusco Stevens, Paul and Patricia Roush, Joel Roston, Jamie Roush, Kieran Athey Roush, Lucy Athey Roush, and Tarick Walton.
To all of you, your renditions of our new motto were really fun to listen to and I deeply appreciate your support.
And if you, dear listener, feel like supporting Soonish with a per-episode donation, you can do that at Patreon.com/soonish. Every dollar helps to keep this one-man independent podcast alive.
Speaking of independent podcasts: Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of smart, idea-driven podcasts. And I’ve got so much Hub & Spoke news to share. For one thing we’ve brought another new show into the collective. It’s called The Briny and it’s the creation of radio producer Matt Frassica, who tells stories about the way we’re changing the sea, and how the sea changes us.
It turns out that during the pandemic there’s been a big uptick in viewership for the webcams at big aquariums like the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And if you’re wondering why people love staring at jellyfish, you should definitely go to thebriny.net to find out.
Elsewhere at Hub & Spoke, Erica Heilman, the creator of Rumble Strip, has produced a truly poignant, heartbreaking, uplifting series of seven episodes about life in this pandemic under the title “Our Show.” They’re built entirely from audio sent in by listeners and they’ve been getting national attention, for good reason. You can find all seven episodes at Rumblestripvermont.com or at transom.org.
I’ve got some other fun news as well. If you like Soonish, you’ll probably like another podcast that I’ve been producing lately for MIT Technology Review magazine. It’s called Deep Tech and it brings feature articles from the magazine to life in audio form. You can hear it at Technology Review’s website at technologyreview/podcasts/deep-tech.
Also, I have a new book out! It’s from the MIT Press and it’s all about the search for extraterrestrial life and extraterrestrial intelligence. And it’s called…wait for it…Extraterrestrials. I’ll be doing a whole Soonish episode about the book soon, but I’d be honored and grateful if you could buy a copy and give it a read. You can find it on Amazon or at mitpress.edu and I’ll also put a link to the book in the show notes at soonishpodcast.org.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for listening and I’ll be back with a new episode…soonish.
Master Yoda: Have the future we want we can. But work for it we must.
