A System of Ideas: Seeing the Whole
I've been developing a series of ideas over several years, through books, essays, research, keynotes and my work with organisations.
Some began with questions about technology and identity. Others emerged from thinking about brands, institutions, prediction, artificial intelligence and the production of futures.
Over time, something became clearer. These weren't entirely separate enquiries. They were different ways of examining the relationship between the systems shaping our world and the people living within them.
So I've brought twelve of these concepts together in A System of Ideas, a conceptual map showing how they connect, overlap and sometimes challenge one another.
From the Database Condition to Database Self and Database Brand, from Big Futurity to Too Much Future, and from Machine-Readable Self to Me, the map makes visible the relationships across this growing body of work.
At its centre is System & Self, my original futures framework and methodology.
The map isn't a forecast, a hierarchy or a claim that everything leads inevitably to the same conclusion. It is an evolving representation of a connected inquiry.
It is also a way of making the architecture of my thinking visible.
Because the underlying question remains:
What happens between the systems shaping our futures and the selves capable of shaping them in return?