Paul Graham RavenCognitive bridges: infrastructure fiction vs. investor storytime, and other forms of narrative prototyping for adapting to the Anthropocene (2019)
This is a story about stories. It’s a story about bridges and monorails that will never exist. It’s a story about how we ended up surrounded by roads and railways and pipelines and pylons, and about what those things do, and what they mean. It’s a story about humans and a trap they sprung on themselves long, long ago. It’s a story about complexity and autopoesis, about capitalism and unexpected consequences. It’s a story about change, and agency, and where those things are to be found.
It’s a story about infrastructure. But ultimately it’s a story about stories about the future, and about why we tell them, and about how we might learn to tell better ones.
Biography
Dr. Paul Graham Raven researches the narrative rhetorics of sociotechnical change for Lund University, Sweden, and sometimes works as a consulting critical futurist. He's also a writer and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, and a poet.