Text by Gopal Balakrishnan, Ray Brassier, Ted Chiang, Jace Clayton, Samuel Delany, Silvia Federici, Rivka Galchen, David Graeber, N. Katherine Hayles, Josh Kline, Rachel Kushner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeny Morozov, Hu+o+ng Ngô, Trevor Paglen, Christian Parenti, Srikanth Reddy, David Rieff, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Rush, Astra Taylor, et al.
In summer 2013 Triple Canopy invited writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists and technologists to bet on the future: which future do you want to see realized? How precisely can you describe it? What demands might this future make on the present? The answers were presented as Speculations (“The future is ______”), 50 days of lectures and discussions at MoMA PS1, Triple Canopy’s contribution to the exhibition EXPO 1: New York. This book, a lexicon of the central terms of Speculations, conveys the relationship between ideation and action and suggests viable approaches to interpreting and changing the world. Triple Canopy considers economic interventions (“guaranteed basic income”), political abstractions (“autonomy,” “prometheanism”), figments of the imagination (“planetary colonization”), modes of expression (“science fiction”) and useful neologisms (“hedge-fund utilitarians”).