I'm coining a new word: the Protopian.
Tired of the dystopian/negative futures and well aware of the naive polly-anna limitations of Utopias, I hearby name the protopian: a positive portrayal of the future.
Protopians differ from utopias in that they deal with difficult problems without succumbing (and limiting themselves) to negative portrayals. Protopians are fundamentally a positive portrayal of the future with both style and substance. Protopians are both stories and people who think positively about the future. Problem solvers who don't shy from big problems, nor limit themselves to solving problems with existing tools, mindsets and paradigms.
ps. After writing this post, I did a little research on this term and found that KevinKelly recently wrote a post on it. I swear I did not see this until after I wrote to above. Excerpted:
I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.
I would be more radical about my definition of a protopia and not limit the definition to being just a little bit better than the present.
pps. I got my inspiration for this post in composing a tweet about an upcoming future project.
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