notes from scenario_design_201310 based on the question “What will be the legacy of Future Fabulators?”

This is a world tortured by climate chaos and perpetual economic, social and cultural crises that are fueled by blinded (and blinding) neo-liberal certainty. Future Fabulators are a troupe of travelling storytellers, providing alternatives to a dire status-quo. Their lives are experiments in tactical living, nearly invisible, peripheral, briefly inciting joy and excitement, before disappearing underground. They are known as an antagonistic cult of new sociality, They conduct short-lived, ad-hoc experiments in (what used to be known as) public spaces, as a response to their post-collapse reality.

Their experiments fall on a fertile ground - the frustrated, fragmented communities unable to find themselves in the optimistic rhetoric of the powers that be. Future Fabulators became as the oral storytellers of old - sharing stories, news and skills about survival and survivalism, the present and near future, spreading rumors and destabilising slogans. Their ability to turn stories into actions makes their cult-status rise. Their audiences turn the stories into reality, future forecasts into present actions. They are the makers of new weatherlore, the proverbs and aphorisms of climate chaos, that are gradually becoming known as post-collapse prophecies. They travel slowly, using arcane means of transport bricolaged from appropriate technologies. Their troupe is distributed across Europe and while they might meet once every few years, most of their time they work remotely, connected through online storytelling systems and dust-swept archives. Along the way they participate in non-market based, sharing economies, the local pockets of hope amidst much fatigue, disease and death. They are involved in the creation and maintenance of new social and political movements, some of which originated in Future Fabulators' experiments. A sparkle of hope, but one you never know when or where it might appear, before dissolving into darkness again…