Protopia: Leaning into the Future: How to Change Our World for the Better ebook

Joanna Erbel

Wychylone w przyszłość. Jak zmienić świat na lepsze

Translated by Emil Tchorek

Edited by Amy Coombes

Cover design by Patrycja Drzazga

Book design by Damian Velkan Mełgieś

Published by Fosforos Ltd

Melville Watts Close

Lydney GL15 5FQ

www.fosforos.pl

© Copyright by Joanna Erbel, 2025

© Copyright for foreword by Rafał Matyja, 2025

© Copyright for this edition by Fosforos, Lydney 2026

All rights reserved

Electronic edition

ISBN 978-1-995773-38-4

This book is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author.

Contents

Foreword: A walk along the horizon

The present future

Anything could always go wrong

The default city

Introduction: The future is already here

Time for change

We create the future as we choose our metaphors

The seeds of a better future germinate slowly

Description of chapters

Chapter 1. Between utopia and dystopia

The power of the story

Imagination training

Solarpunk: when goodness rules

Protopia — towards a better future

Chapter 2. The power of small changes

Touch to believe — the power of prototyping

Choice architecture — context makes a difference

Focus on the real

Opening to the random

Chapter 3. What drives innovation?

Pass it on — the relay of ideas

From niche to mainstream activities — compromises and missed opportunities

Acting agile (with values)

The economy of attention

Chapter 4. It is cities that create innovation

A porous city and the power of diversity

Let your body be your guide

The hybrid neighbourhood

Innovation as a public service

Chapter 5. The return of good — investing in the future

Local currencies build wealth

Building a cooperation ecosystem

Reconstruction through cooperatives: the power of local potential

Anchoring the future in your neighbourhood

Chapter 6. Cooperatives as vehicles for development

The solarpunk cooperative in the heart of Warsaw

Development cooperatives — from participatory democracy to economic democracy

A fractal development model — working with local resources

The spiral of resilience — creating your own gravity

Chapter 7. Here comes the new

Pride in what is to come

Empathic effectiveness

Community of interest and territory

The future is born in smaller towns

Acknowledgements

Footnotes

Cover

Title page

Contents

Beginning of the text

Footnotes

Foreword: A walk along the horizon

Rafał Matyja

A world mired in uncertainty is in want of some perspective; not another forecast based on false premises, outdated models and the hubris of experts. Not a prophecy built on hunches and anxieties more fit for another Netflix script rather than a premise for action. We need a perspective for organising meaningful action, a perspective beyond musings over government policy, economic prosperity or the international balance of power. We need to stop behaving like compulsive gamblers trying to predict the lottery or the football pools in the vain hope of winning a fortune, prosperity and a secure life.

Joanna Erbel’s book is a record of thinking about the future that is free from the prediction and forecasting that is characteristic of our era. It is a walk on the horizon composed of possible events of which the probability is not determined. It is an exercise in imagination that the author calls leaning into the future, not to calculate risk but explore ideas for action. As Erbel writes:

To lean into the future is to see the known world from a different perspective and then to find a place in it for yourself. If there is one thing we can learn from others, it is how to narrate this change, because working on the future is now not just working on matter, but above all, working on narrative.

The space of the walk is therefore narrative, and not only texts, but also our thoughts, plans and projects. “For work on the future,” Erbel writes, “is not only work on imagination but also work on energy”.

The author disregards the experts and the advisers’ game rules requiring that everything must start with an alarming diagnosis of reality, from which key problems are extracted and solutions developed. Here, everything is basically a solution, a hint, a suggestion or a strengthening; this is a reversal of the order of the political thinking we have got used to because we do not get a prescription for changing the rules of social life, we are not dealing with an ideology that has all the answers. Rather, these are stories of events that no one has yet gathered and presented as a method. Their selection principle is simple, being based on Erbel’s belief that “small local actions pave the way for wider trends and prototyping reality is a way of testing ideas”. This is a fundamental thesis allowing us to design action differently that, moreover, moves us from a sense of helplessness to a simple indication of the path to follow.

The present future

The path indicator is a method of acting by designing and testing small changes that may shape the future. There is none of the pathos of grand strategies with their implicit assumption that nothing significant will change in decades other than the plans of governments and other public authorities. Strategies like this have attempted to reduce the future tense to a promise shaping the present. Though it seems like a bad joke, they have only succeeded in stretching the present out into years beyond the limits of any probability.

Erbel’s method is exactly the opposite: it is about rooting the uncertain future in today’s actions. It is not the present that includes the future but, on the contrary, the future becomes, as it were, an element of the present. Erbel does not hide her fascination with the interpenetration of times, which she sees not only in the products of mass culture and public debate narratives, but in large-scale technological transformations, small-scale housing activities and the initiatives of urban activists. She also sees this in the experience of the pandemic, in which the unbearably long present was permeated by questions about a new normality and a world after the most rigorous restrictions had been lifted.

This exercise, however, is more serious than games of political fiction or the bouncing between utopia and dystopia that are characteristic of our current emotional condition. Playing this game with time brings to mind the words of Agata Bielik-Robson who, in Another Modernity (Inna nowoczesność), described the burden of our thinking in these terms:

Western culture is strictly historical: it grows through a constant accumulation of events, precedents and occasional wisdom. It forgets nothing and drags behind it an ever-heavier load of historical souvenirs. (...) As it grows older, the challenges it poses becomes increasingly hard for its members to accept.

The present tense in our culture not only tries to control the future by planning and forecasting it, but it also continues to download the entire record of the past irrespective of whether it is necessary or unnecessary. The present clogs up our minds constantly and makes us multiply every possible risk many times over, depriving ourselves of the opportunity to act.

Meanwhile, the author wants to free our minds of this reloading of the present and writes that “Any rapid change is both a threat to social well-being and an opportunity to reject stagnant dysfunctional solutions. Like so many other crises, the coronavirus pandemic accelerated social change in various dimensions, demonstrating not only the truth of Gibson’s thesis of ubiquitous manifestations of the future but also that opposing futures can emerge simultaneously.”

Therefore, Erbel does not set out to predict or even design the future but concentrates on selecting the material from which the future can be built. She reduces the challenges to the necessary minimum, so they only form a very general frame because “We live in times requiring a change in thinking. We must prevent impending climate catastrophe and rebuild the socio-economic system, taking care of both the environment and ensuring that as many people as possible enjoy good living conditions.” And she looks for small ways, even tricks, that instead of bouncing between utopia and dystopia, between hope for building a happy order and a premonition of impending disaster, allow a perspective of protopia to emerge. Protopia is, according to Erbel, a state that is “still better than today and yesterday even if it is only a little bit better”. It is difficult to imagine it as a coherent whole, because it consists not only of solutions, but also of problems and a complex process of deciding what to do when faced with obstacles. At the same time, believing in protopia itself, as a process that is continuous improvement, requires a large dose of optimism.

Anything could always go wrong

More importantly, also from a pessimistic perspective, this proposal is optimal. Recent decades have shown that not only dreamers’ projects but also the exquisitely calculated models of pragmatists are prone to failure. The economic crisis of 2008 was unleashed by supposedly hard-headed people, enjoying the authority of global capitalism with all its securities. The problems in the European project were not caused by its dreamers, but by the mistakes of experts who thought they were in control of the continent’s history over at least a few decades. Anything could always go wrong.

This pessimistic viewpoint supports Erbel’s theses, even if her position will seem fundamentally unreasonable to some pessimists. It is true that many of the postulates in this book may miss the mark and that one project or another will fail — Erbel also describes failed projects here. But if the warning of a reliable pessimist is that “everything can fail”, then what is a certain failure is a simple continuation of the self-satisfied modernity of the 1990s or an attempt to use this globalist-internet pill as an ideological vehicle for the future. It is the project then formed that has proved to be the most fragile or, to use Taleb’s language, the least “anti-fragile”, unfit to withstand even the relatively simple challenges of populism or the nihilism of authoritarian governments.

Protopia is a rejection of negative tendencies but also, in its hidden dimension, the acceptance of failure. Our entire cultural and educational ideology calls for experimentation and innovation, while at the same time, in its organisational and educational dimension, it stigmatises failure or carelessness. It eliminates the possibility of failure, it rewards the “eternal winners”, always promoting small stake wins while never risking ambitious ventures that may end otherwise.

While indicating this way out, Erbel also shows as a method that “Progressive solutions once worked out in one place then spread virally across the country. This is how it was with the civil budget, the first edition of which was held in 2010 in Sopot, with the civil panel in Gdańsk in 2017 (both these processes are due to Marcin Gerwin’s determination), woonerfs in Łódź, comprehensive thinking about designing new housing estates, which was started in Wrocław with the New Żerniki project and many other solutions. This viral spread of once-incubated projects is the potential for the change we have in Poland”. There is no lamentation about bad political solutions or complaining about the cultural specificity of Poles. There is a modern belief in the possibility (not inevitability) of positive change.

Paradoxically, therefore, Erbel’s book should be backed by a broad alliance of moderate optimists and moderate pessimists who accept that failure is our daily bread and that the real problem is the risk of dissipating energy, the will to change and the readiness to try again.

The default city

This book’s energy and optimism attract attention to its anti-dystopian message. But Erbel is also anti-utopian. She repeatedly, though rather in passing, shares astute observations about human nature, the problems of collective action, institutional barriers and bad habits. She advises us to take our weaknesses rather than our strengths into account in our designs. She warns that:

although we would like to think of ourselves as people who do not succumb to context in matters of life’s importance, we are no more thoughtful when deciding where and how we live than when we decide what flavour ice cream to eat. As the research cited by Thaler and Sunstein shows, no matter what the default options are, people stick with them, even when there is more at stake than just choosing our mobile phone ringtone. There are two practical lessons in this: first, when thinking about change, we should not underestimate the power of inertia, and second, we can (and should) use this power to make it easier for people to make choices that are good for them.

The metaphor to which I have paid particular attention concerns designing cities or, more broadly, all shared spaces so they become “easy to use”. The author cites Stickler’s argument that “people are much more likely to turn right than left. Turning against the flow of traffic can take a few minutes. Few have the patience. Turning right is faster, safer and, thanks to the optimisation applied by retail planners, follows the main direction of traffic flow”. The default city, then, is a call to seek dialogue with our simple inclinations, to take them into account or, as Erbel would probably write, to “listen to our bodies”.

The default city, however, is not only easy to use; it is also open to further change. It is a city that we create, believing neither in the powers of authority nor in any “hidden hand” of the market, the magic capitalist successor to providence. We know that capitalist order plays on our propensity for distinction, for appropriating space and removing those with whom we do not identify. The game is not to defenestrate developers or retail and service chains but to learn to dictate terms to them, to create antibodies to draw on the energy and ingenuity of residents rather than turning our cities into global market dead ends; to create ecosystems of cooperation, not closed communities of taxpayers managed by efficient managers who are only held to account once every five years.

There is a lot of this concern for the local aspect in the book, both at the level of sophisticated metropolitan communities, which are bursting with ideas and initiatives, and at that of small towns, usually described as poor relatives of metropolises that can only afford one proper coffee shop. While not refraining from presenting examples of successful metropolitan initiatives, Erbel stresses elsewhere that:

big cities are burdened with harmful dreams, where success is equated with working on a high floor of a glass office building. Concrete-itis and glorification of glass skyscrapers and the scarcity of trees cause not only a lack of healthy air but also intellectual heaviness. There is discussion about the future more boring than the one between the tailor-suited winners of the transformation on panels in air-conditioned conventions.

The author therefore complements the examples of Chrzanów and Sejny as well as Warsaw, Wrocław and the Upper Silesian conurbation. What is more, she encourages those who doubted the smaller centres long ago.

“Social capital,” she writes, “is strong where individuals are weak. But we now live in a time when we feel weak and need new strategies for building local resilience that are simple enough to be accessible not just to the elite or a narrow circle of experts, but to every one of us. Relying on our neighbourhood, our local area, the space we know, can be a good strategy for the future. It is also a chance to build a sense of belonging, which will make us eager to get involved in the affairs of our own micro-world”.

In Erbel’s vision, “it is the smaller cities that will create new narratives, each with a slightly different specificity, but which can be the seed of new thinking about the future”. The default city of the near future is thus a city tailored to human needs, not overgrown on steroids of some capitalist or statist grand vision.

Erbel often repeats that the condition of our creative effectiveness is to maintain positive energy and awareness that we are working in the logic of prototyping, which she defines very precisely: “prototyping reality is a hacking of our cognitive system and at the same time a proven method of innovating in urban space”. It requires an effort to consider this space as susceptible to change rather than worrying that not everything may go our way. “The limits of our influence on reality and change shrink and expand”, the author reassures.

The projects she writes about are not based on the hope that people will change and that the resistant will be supported by persuasion or, ultimately, coercion. There is very little old-style political calculation or blueprints for the dream political party in this book — no sketches of spectacular electoral victories or advice for a good prince or a reformist government. This is a method with a core of behaviourally tested and spontaneously discussed micro-revolutions. It is an idea for a hundred defeats and several dozen victories, for which it is not necessary to exercise power or wield the government of souls, but only to change one’s thinking even if we reject a large part of the advice, arguments and hints offered.

Joanna Erbel’s text should not be read as a handbook for a revolutionary nor as yet another manual on how to become a citizen in a fortnight. The book is a walk from which we can take unstructured impressions, which we can repeat many times, no longer by reading from beginning to end, but by choosing appropriate chapters, paragraphs and sentences. It is a partner in thinking about what is possible and useful and, at the same time, an energetic support when everything seems to be too difficult. Then, according to the author’s advice, one should go for a walk...

Introduction: The future is already here

In May 2020, a few weeks after the coronavirus pandemic engulfed the world, Charlie Brooker, the scriptwriter for Black Mirror, said he would not be writing the sixth season of the iconic futurological Netflix series after all. His reason was simple: our reality is already scary enough.1 The distant future had entered our present, so instead of watching it on Netflix, all we needed to do was look out the window or read the latest news. The scenes in episodes of the show became part of our reality during the pandemic: Boston Dynamics robodogs were patrolling Singapore parks, herding sheep in New Zealand and will soon be supporting US police patrols and the US military. The robodog may seem innocent, like a nice, cuddly child’s toy, but all you have to do is watch Black Mirror “Metalhead” (S04, E05) to see how this robot can transform from an innocent neighborhood guard into a death machine.I. It is unsettling to realise that, from now on, we could come face to face with a machine like this not only on our screens but also in the street. We may have had similar feelings about other episodes, especially those about far-reaching surveillance or mass deaths in a sudden plague. The dystopian future has become our everyday reality. It was a reminder that, as William Gibson, founder of the concept of cyberpunk, had noted long ago, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed”.2

This thesis of the future’s ubiquitous manifestation can be taken as an encouragement to look for both dystopian manifestations and elements of reality that are beacons of positive change. This became apparent in the pandemic when, alongside increased control in the cities, we also observed positives like high levels of social engagement. Notices with offers to go shopping for elderly neighbours appeared en masse in building stairwells. In the virtual space, local self-help groups were active, such as the Visible Hand (Widzialna Ręka). In Warsaw, the informal group Senior w Koronie was established and quickly turned into a foundation, showing how a crisis does not necessarily lead to social collapse but, on the contrary, can trigger a response of solidarity. This is pointed out by Rutger Bregman, who counters the deeply rooted myth, supported by dystopian pop culture narratives, that “humans are selfish, aggressive and quick to panic” and that “civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation”.3 In his latest book Humankind: A Hopeful History, he writes: “In actuality, the opposite is true. It’s when crisis hits — when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise — that we humans become our best selves”.4 Disasters are a test for our humanity, which we pass successfully. However, we do much worse when it comes to systemic management of this potential because the dynamics of events during natural disasters are almost always the same: adversity strikes, and in response there is a wave of spontaneous cooperation — it is then that the authorities panic and unleash a second disaster.5 The other side of spontaneous cooperation is usually regulatory movements and the temptation to impose authoritarian solutions. Neighbourhood self-help is sometimes the reverse of the same thing as the introduction of surveillance technology. However, our future is not just tossing a coin — it is a choice we make as a society through processes that are more or less democratic.

Any rapid change is both a threat to social well-being and an opportunity to reject stagnant dysfunctional arrangements. Like many other crises, the coronavirus pandemic accelerated social change in various dimensions and demonstrated not only that Gibson’s thesis of ubiquitous manifestations of the future is true, but also that opposing versions of it can appear simultaneously. However, the images of the future that catch our futurological eye depends largely on what we are looking for and also how we approach the world — whether we see it in dark colours and tend to anticipate future threats, or we see everything that is good and scalable. Both cognitive dispositions have an important function in shaping the future, but we should view them as tools to better respond to emerging challenges rather than manifestations of the inevitable course of events. After all, the future of the glimpses we can already see includes both elements of a better, democratic, solidarity-based world and solutions that are the first step towards the growth of authoritarianism and the control of every aspect of our privacy.

Equally important, then, is what we choose to see, and our responses to it. Noticing how the future manifest may encourage us to act in a conservative way and protect the status quo or go out to meet oncoming events actively. An example of a tension like this strongly influencing the public sphere for several decades is the process of women’s emancipation. A group of people, mostly women and a certain number of men, are actively involved in the promotion of gender equality while some men (and a certain group of women) defend patriarchal family models as a stabilising element of reality. Another example is the growing support for sustainable transport in cities in opposition to new civil movements defending the right of drivers to park wherever they like. We see social commitment both on the emancipatory and on the conservative side. The differences are therefore less and less about the tools applied by each group, but rather about the vision of the world they represent. Values, which are the torches that light our way, are becoming increasingly important.

The response to the manifestations of the future can be very different. We react to the world around us more or less actively, depending on personal temperament and our own real possibilities of influence. After all, we always live in a given context and our actions are limited by age, social background, gender and many other factors. If we live in the central districts of a large city, we have much more opportunity to choose a sustainable mode of transport than if we live someplace that can only be reached by car. But there is one choice we have when we find ourselves in a new place, a new solution comes up or a new person appears in our midst, bringing us closer to the future of which we dream. Do we react enthusiastically? Or do we, distrustful that the world could be better, deny this new phenomenon the potential to grow into a success?

Likewise with the manifestations of dystopia — we can react to them or not. Small changes can later translate into systemic solutions that, in the next stage, may change what the world around us looks like. Both conservatives and progressives know this. Sometimes we are at the forefront of change, other times we remain silent users and the users of new solutions. It takes both attitudes to change the world.

Time for change

We are living in times that require a change in thinking. We must halt the climate catastrophe and rebuild the socio-economic system. We must take care of the environment and also ensure that as many people as possible have a decent place to live. The rise of extremism, increasingly unpredictable weather conditions and a growing sense of insecurity are all signals that the current course of development has come to an end, and we need a change: one that promotes cooperation rather than competition as we care for ourselves and our loved ones, though not at the expense of others. This is the time when we need to start thinking about building resilience based on local ecosystems of cooperation, or in practice, supporting our closest neighbours. The principle of reciprocity, which is one of the foundations of building social trust, should again become the basis of our action. We need to believe that sharing with others means multiplying values and that this really translates into the quality of our lives.

Solidarity does make sense because what is good returns to us. This is the ethical and political postulate that should guide us if, in a decade or so, we want to wake up in a world that is better (or at least not worse) than the one we have today. Therefore, we need to change our thinking and start working together on visions of a better future and focus our energy on the steps that will lead us to it, rather than just criticising the world around us. What lies ahead is an exercise in imagination and the accompanying practice of protecting what is good and believing that, despite the obstacles, we will succeed in achieving our goal. It is an act of sincere faith that is not religious but deeply humanistic, based on the principle of looking for the best within us and refraining from spreading division, especially towards those with whom we share far-reaching dreams.

There will never be a better time than now. The coronavirus pandemic that engulfed the planet and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provided us with a common denominator on which to base our thinking about the challenges of the future. Despite the many tragic casualties, our civilisation has passed the test, and an arduous process of regeneration lies ahead of us. We know that there is no going back to the way things were because the pandemic has changed the way we think; we have a different approach to the way we organise our work, our health services, our education, our travel or how we define what a good place to live in might be. It is time for change, which until now had always arrived too soon. COVID-19 has struck at the very foundations of our lives, and we have managed, largely not because of what seemed to be the core of systemic activity, but because of what happened within the scope of our personal decision-making. It was not the smoothly functioning state machine that was the foundation of any sense of security — this was guaranteed by local communities. In order to emerge from the crisis, what mattered more than the game on Centre Court was what was developing on the margins, in our neighbourhoods and at local government level. The local aspect took on new meaning as the level at which we should build new resilience in response to global challenges. The old alter-globalist “Think globally, act locally” slogan became pandemic practice and has provided a new foundation for a future vision of development.

We are facing a necessary change of emphasis and a slow process of transition to a different socio-economic model. In times of constant uncertainty, the challenge is to build an anti-fragility, a new resilience that will allow us to survive successive crises. The emergence of a new order will be based on shared responsibility for local community and our wider life context. This is not a new story. It reverberated years ago in cooperative narratives, in ecofeminist texts praising diversity and biodiversity and in more conservative approaches like local patriotism or talk of the future as a “new Middle Ages”. The emerging new is at the same time a return to the old. If we were to use metaphors, it is not flying into space or crossing the Red Sea but walking a spiral where we return to the same point again and again, wiser with new knowledge. It is not a revolution but an evolution. Not a quick leap, but a long march that we start once again.

The returning goodis an attempt to present the foundation on which we can build the world based on three principles. The first is the conviction that narratives shape reality and that the responsibility for creating them lies with us. Without positive stories about a better world that show a possible way forward, it will be difficult to face current challenges. The second is to recognise that small local initiatives pave the way for wider trends and that prototyping reality is a way to test ideas. This is why we need to sow the seeds of a better world and nurture them, because without implementation, the vision is just an idea, and practice is needed to promote good solutions more widely. After all, only practice can convince those who need to touch something to believe in it. Let us test different solutions and give ourselves space to make mistakes so that we can gain the opportunity to be positively surprised by developments. The third principle is the belief that the development of the world is cyclical, and that ideas (like the idea of cooperatives) succeed each other as ever more perfect versions of a certain social logic, rather than as a return to the past and a failure of development. Moreover, the rule of cyclicity assumes that the solutions we have created will be challenged in the future in relation to a context that has yet to emerge. A revision of assumptions based on the same postulates that we have propounded like this should be welcomed as a sign that we are moving on. We have a long road ahead of us that is full of arduous challenges, one of the most fundamental of which will always be the attempt to describe the world so that we can understand the processes taking place around us.

We create the future as we choose our metaphors

In a world of constant transformation, we need stability. One way to cope with the unpredictability of the world is to look for its universal laws. Our brain seeks patterns and feels safe in an orderly environment. Science has the same supportive function here as religion and magic –it allows societies to function. In practice, however, it is not universal laws but metaphors that govern our lives. We look at the processes around us in one way when we take an organic perspective close to the world of plants and mushrooms, treating ourselves as part of a wider ecosystem, and quite another when we reduce our description of ourselves to the level of the animal world, where the weak lose out to the strong. Metaphors from the animal world are popular and frequent in public debate as an argument for neoliberal solutions and betting on strong individuals; the big fish eat the minnows while the weaker must make room for the stronger. The young replace the old, and a woman cyclist will lose out to an SUV in a direct impact.

But are we really just predators hunting prey to feed our young? A society where only muscle power and sharpness of our claws count? Or are we rather representatives of a species that has created a complex civilisation, building its success on the ability to create stories, think abstractly and cooperate? I am much closer to the latter approach. Not only because I feel safer thinking about a peaceful vision of the world’s development, but also because this vision of cooperation is our superpower, allowing us to transcend biological limitations and ensuring our survival. Besides the ability to cooperate, our other strength is the creation of language, which is the way we create our social world, so let us use it responsibly.

Choosing how to view reality is not a matter of gaining access to the truth, but an intellectual decision we make every single day. Surrendering to catastrophic visions is easy, because that is how the human brain works, having been trained over thousands of years to perceive danger. We tend to pay more attention to the negative than the positive.6 But getting out of animalism means being aware of one’s emotions and being able to think long-term. So, if we want to respond responsibly to the challenges we encounter, we must learn to reject unpleasant thoughts and stop fuelling negative emotions like anxiety, sadness, fear, jealousy and feeling threatened. Only in this way will we be able to transcend our limitations and face our difficulties. So let us use metaphors that build our strength, carefully and responsibly referring to the language of the natural sciences and other disciplines. In a world where economic forecasts are as accurate as meteorological ones, we know that the ultimate truth in a given perspective will be tested not by a scientific model but by social practice. We now need metaphors to activate our potential so that we can effectively meet the challenges of the present.

The metaphors we use should be adjusted to our ambitions and level of social development. Modern societies evolve not by natural selection, where innovation comes with the next living thing, but by testing new solutions to improve our quality of life. We are doing quite well: life expectancy is up, infant mortality is down, slavery is no longer legal, we have fewer oil spills, HIV is down and the number of countries with capital punishment is also down. Fewer people are dying in plane crashes and natural disasters. The number of countries where women have the right to vote and the percentage of humanity living in democratic countries is increasing. Solar panels are becoming cheaper and the area of the Earth covered by various forms of nature conservation is growing.7 However, in caring for our species, we have overstretched natural resources, while globalisation and the free market, which were supposed to bring universal prosperity and democracy, support increasing social stratification and the dictates of authoritarian global corporations. We also forget that the ability to work together, which made the transition from a world of animals to a world of humans possible, is our greatest resource, and it is on this that we should build the future, rather than just individual strategies for survival. We will always be stronger together than we will be alone.

The seeds of a better future germinate slowly

Opening to cooperation means opening to diversity and seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole. Ecosystemic thinking requires an abandonment of both individualism and the illusion that simple solutions will be the remedy to the ills of this world. It also means abandoning the longing for totalitarian solutions. By this, I do not only mean visions of an omnipotent state that will organise every element of our lives, but also a certain fantasy that a golden key will be found that can open all the locks or a universal remedy for the problems of this world, the application of which, as if by magic, will change our lives for the better and we will live happily ever after. This will not be the case. Reality is too complex for this dream to come true. We can see this for example in the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a total pandemic covering the whole globe, but the reactions to the new situation varied from country to country and city to city, not to mention the fact that, despite a certain commonality of experience, how we experienced it depended on how big our apartment was, whether we had children, whether our job allowed us to work remotely, what state of health we were in and many other factors embedded in social stratification. This navigating between individual experience and global trends will be with us for years to come. And the responses to the challenges we face should be both supportive and diverse. This is a difficult challenge, but not an impossible one. And the starting point should not be unification, as in many utopian projects, but the maintenance of diversity, because only in this way will we be able to preserve the space for difference and the space for change that makes us human.

The good news is that by applying this perspective of social development, our different talents have a chance to find their place in society as complementary elements of the whole. The manifestations of this approach can be seen in the business world. It has already become common knowledge that diversifying an inert portfolio is beneficial, biodiversity adds value, and cultural and neurodiversity at work make it possible to look at a problem from more perspectives and find a better solution. So, in the same way, we should see and appreciate the multidimensional nature of reality in other areas of life.

Being open to diversity also means being attentive to new phenomena that may seed larger trends. Bearing in mind that it could be too early or too late for change, we should give a chance to new ideas germinating on the margins. Some will turn out to be inadequate for today’s challenges or will never emerge from their niche. But there will be some that will start to gain popularity over time and enter the mainstream. The potential of their impact can only be determined post factum, with the benefit of hindsight, as one’s intuitions about the future are never perfect, only better or worse; life is only simple in hindsight.

What may initially seem to be completely unpromising initiatives may therefore turn out to be revolutionary. In fact, we all know examples of such people or phenomena. They may be old classmates from primary or secondary school, who cannot find their place, and who are now making a career in science or politics. It could be the class troublemakers and the truants who are now making a name for themselves in the business world. It is also examples of alternative spaces, like Warsaw’s club cafes, from which urban movements have emerged. It may be a handful of cyclists riding their bikes all year round like it was an extreme all-weather sport, irrespective of the quality of infrastructure, who paved the way to cycle-friendly cities. It could indeed be the first food cooperatives or vegan pubs.

There will also be phenomena that have played their part and disappeared, like bright stars of the class who are now leading quiet lives. This is what happened with art in public spaces: it faded out after we became accustomed to spending time in non-commercial urban space. It was replaced by small architecture as a permanent and now hardly avant-garde element of cities. The same happened with urban movements, which played their role as movements of constructive protest and then weakened when their demands were taken over by mainstream politicians. And some of the people involved in them — me included — entered official structures or party politics at some point. We did the job there, and now we do something else. Most of us have the same values as before, but the tools have changed.

So, when we see germinating projects that seem either too weak or premature, we have three choices. We can watch them from afar. We can test how well they will cope in a difficult situation, adding to their worries. Or we can support their development, because we know that beginnings are difficult, and every new action is a walk in the dark. For prototyping, the future is based on vision and practical intuition, neither of which protects against making mistakes.

So, if we want a different, better future, we need to learn to look out for these manifestations of the new world and support them, giving them space for their stumbling and awkward beginnings. What should guide us is to imagine society as a complex entity, in which diverse elements (including some we would not have thought of before) form an interesting, evolving and crisis-resilient whole. To use a metaphor: we should see it more as a perennial flower meadow than a football pitch, as a lively marketplace rather than a shopping centre, a multifunctional district rather than a closed community. And in this multiplicity, we should also be seeing a place for ourselves.

Description of chapters

This book is not an instruction manual, but a collection of stories and examples of activities from Poland and the world, which I hope will allow us to take a better direction or at least start a discussion on how to think hopefully about what lies ahead. Some are responses to the new pandemic context, others are projects that have developed for years but were previously considered marginal or impossible to transplant or take root in the Polish context. COVID-19 has shed new light on the world around us, the changing reality and the need to answer the question “What next?” have become an incentive to take a closer look at solutions that previously escaped our attention.

The solutions described may inspire you to act but consider them as an incomplete toolbox and an incentive for your own further research rather than a finite set of solutions. These examples are linked by a vision of a sustainable world; they are due consideration as examples of different logics to reach a goal rather than as models to be copied. Innovation requires the adaptation of proven solutions to new situations. It is to this adaptation process and the story these different solutions tell that I would like to draw your attention to. I do not want to look for a one-size-fits-all approach, but to show that we can create narratives about the future, and not just submit to universal rules that govern the world. We are not omnipotent, but we are not completely powerless either. What is more, we must take responsibility not only for our daily choices, but above all, for our visions of the future, because only they will allow us to better navigate in a world full of uncertainty, where we will have to change the tools we use every now and then.

The book consists of this introduction and seven chapters. In the first chapter, I will show how the imposition of dystopian scenarios as the default vision of the future paralyses our actions. It is my intention to convince you that instead of thinking about extremely optimistic or pessimistic visions, we should bet on radical pragmatism. The way out of the dystopia-utopia opposition is an approach called protopia, based on the consistent pursuit, here and now, of a better development scenario. In chapter two, I describe how small changes can revolutionise the way we think about the world and why it is so important to prototype progressive solutions, even on a small scale. Chapter three is about the mechanisms that bring innovation and show why I believe it takes different potentials for new ones to emerge, develop and grow. Chapter four is about cities as spaces of innovation. It is also a proposal to look at innovation as a public service, something that we should all have access to daily. Chapter five focuses on collaborative ecosystems, local currencies and other forms of energy circulation that support local economies, including cooperatives as one form of such activity. Chapter six discusses how cooperatives can become vehicles for local development and how to use local resources to build resilience, understood as the ability to adapt to new circumstances. I also show how switching to a spiral development model allows us to better understand the processes of change. The focus of chapter seven is on patterns of thinking about the future and sets out to explain why abandoning the linear growth model as the main reference point is a shift in thinking, not just about economics, but about our world in general.

The English edition of this book has a revised title. Before the original title, “Leaning into the Future: How to Change the World for the Better”, there is “Protopia”. The concept of “protopia” turned out to be crucial to understanding the logic of this book, therefore I felt it needed more emphasis. At the same time, I hope it will carry this word coined by Kevin Kelly further. So, I invite you to immerse yourself in the world of various protopias.

Chapter 1. Between utopia and dystopia

I cannot recall which science fiction disaster film I watched first. It was probably 1998’s Armageddon with Bruce Willis, who, along with Steve Buscemi and a team of brave astronauts, sets off on a mission to neutralise an asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth. Or maybe it was the 1997 film The Fifth Element, also starring Bruce Willis, with Milla Jovovich, where, in the far future in the twenty-third century, the characters set out to save the world from the forces of evil? I find it difficult to reconstruct the plots years later, but the unease that these films left in me is still close. Visions of a future where everyday life is a struggle for survival and exodus from Earth to different planets aroused fear and discord in me, as did the visions of an inhuman metropolis with flying cars. This is probably why I was (and still am) unable to watch Star Wars or any brilliant work of post-apocalyptic cinema with any pleasure. What is more, due to the lack of optimistic visions of the future, I quickly started avoiding sci-fi, convinced that futurology requires thinking about disasters or moving to space. This was until I came across other visions of the future world and realised that the first lesson was to stop identifying futurology with post-apocalypticism.

Our visual culture is full of images of the end of the world. We all know what our planet would look like after an apocalypse: scorched earth and air we cannot breathe due to the overwhelming heat. Dust all around, clogging up machines and setting our civilisation back by centuries to the level of nomadic people. What is more, there is no water and fresh food is scarce. There are floods and acid rain, depopulated cities full of crumbling buildings, violence and the breakdown of social structures. And, as a result, it is a daily struggle for basic resources and a constant sense of danger as if there was a war, but it is one that will never end because it is not a war between people, but the slow extermination of our species. Images like this also arrest my mind when we talk about impending climate change and the vision of 2050, which is the end of the world as we know it. I am not alone in this. You will find it in the statements of both male and female researchers as well as those demonstrating in youth climate strike marches.

This life-threatening reality is the image evoked by protesters to rouse us from our lethargy and prod us into action. The problem is that the year 2050 is less than thirty years away, and if this is the scenario that awaits us, the changes are about to accelerate. This vision is paralysing. No wonder more and more people are suffering from climate depression, i.e. an acute sense of lack of meaning in life related to the inevitability of climate change and its negative consequences. It particularly affects the young, whose adulthood will take place after the predicted end of the world. And although the traumatic events have not yet occurred, they are felt as real experiences and put us in a state of pre-traumatic stress.8 This sense of powerlessness is heightened when the great figures of the world turn away, offering no comprehensive solutions. You cannot enlist in an ecological work group or join a comprehensive energy and nutritional autonomy project for your neighbourhood. There is no instruction manual for dealing with the future. All that is left is fear and the search for individual strategies with no guarantee that these will have any positive effect. After all, in the face of a disaster, we as individuals can do very little because our actions are so localised and diffused. So, we are left alone with this fear of the future. The only thing we have in common as societies is a vision of the surrounding dystopia organising our collective imagination.

The power of the story

We are trained in apocalyptic imagination from early childhood, effectively provided by the film industry as every new generation is familiarised with these depressing images. Game developers, led by the creators of the recently acclaimed Cyberpunk2077 are at it as well. We absorb these images as diligent students of catastrophic scenarios and, because our preconceptions encourage the satisfaction of end-of-the-world imagery, anxiety-inducing and catastrophic visions, we willingly surrender to them. Although they are frightening, their repetition creates a sense of security, like any familiar, accepted pattern. We become enmeshed in a toxic relationship in which our curiosity and interest in the future are managed by narratives that show, when it comes to the collective future, we will either live in a post-apocalyptic world or soon die irrespective of what we do.

Additionally, catastrophic scenarios are satisfying as they appeal to our most primal survival instincts. They build tension and then quickly relieve it; after all, it is only a film, and we are still alive. They satiate our reptilian brain, the most primitive part of the human cognitive system, which focuses on immediate reactions to stimuli, instead of looking at a given situation from a distance and trying to break the vicious circle. It is a mechanism similar to the one we have had physically imprinted on us since the origins of our species when we had to flee from predators, and which has allowed us to survive until now. An alternative to disaster films are romantic comedies, the other side of the pop culture pack that, even if they may include increasingly feminist, queer or simply emancipatory narratives, provides us with intimate relationship utopias, usually set in the world we know. They also effectively distract us from imagining a shared future that would benefit society. It is also impossible to fail to mention the most profitable branch of cinema today, escapist fantasy, which almost always ensures that the world is saved by superheroes and superheroines who leave the cleaning up until after the credits.

When the main theme is the vision of a future society, pop culture feeds us with images of impending disaster; when it comes to intimate relationships, it feeds us with visions of the perfect life. This causes cognitive schizophrenia and makes us over-optimistic about romantic relationships but pessimistic about human development. As a result, it is much easier for us to imagine an ideal relationship than an ideal society, because our trust and openness to others has been injected into sugar-coated visions of romantic love. And at the same time, we are so lacking in optimism when we think about the future of the world. But does it have to be this way? Can we not, for a moment, reverse this and be more sceptical about the fairy tales of a prince or princess on a white horse freeing us from the evils of this world, while at the same time being more open to thinking about long-term change as a positive scenario? Of course, this is not the point; the point is about getting in touch with reality. To reject romanticism in both its positive and negative guises and take some responsibility for what is going on around us. Give yourself (and others) the space to make mistakes and assume that, maybe not immediately but in the long term, the effort put into building a better world will pay off and good will return.

The future is not written in the stars. The success of social projects and intimate relationships is not about meeting someone who is destined for us any more than we are doomed to extinction. Reality is created in a dynamic process in which every day, seemingly insignificant issues are decisive, rather than being an abstract predetermined fate. This is true in both personal and professional relationships; we never really know what will happen to us. And the same is true of social systems, which are based on daily reproduced rituals that organise our eating habits and how we work or spend time together. The disruption of everyday processes, be it a general strike or a climate change school strike started by teenager Greta Thunberg, can set off a wave that changes our view of reality. Whether we are in the here and now or we are designing initiatives, we never know what the breaking point will be or exactly what effect our actions will have. We can reconstruct them retrospectively, but seldom can we predict them in advance.