Hacking the present to create alternative futures

​Pacifica Means Peace is a project dedicated to envisioning a future of peaceful coexistence between the USA, China, and all the other countries in the Pacific Rim. The project uses a participatory futures approach to explore the futures we collectively wish to avoid and those we aspire to create.

​The stakes in fostering a peaceful future between these two great powers couldn’t be higher. Cooperation between the USA and China would advance global efforts in science, trade, and addressing shared challenges like climate change, creating pathways for mutual growth and shared prosperity. Conversely, ongoing conflict—whether in the form of trade wars, cultural disconnects, or real war—would be deeply damaging, halting progress and amplifying global instability with no real victors.

​To begin breaking down the rigid narratives that tend to default to conflict, Pacifica Means Peace engages participants in envisioning alternative futures through a series of structured workshops.

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​This next experiment will use a hacking-mutational approach to exploring peace in the pacific through an online participatory futures engagement.

​We’ll be using the metaphor of trip hazards to identify potential events or dynamics that would lead to pathological path dependencies, eg hardened or locked in trajectories leading us to escalating conflict situations. Instead of looking for historical trip hazards, as we did in the last workshop, this time we’ll be looking for trip hazards that exists today and in the near future.

​The three themes where we’ll be looking for trip hazards will be in the areas of:

• ​Climate

• ​Security

• ​And the interface between technological and economic rivalry

​These three themes will delve into particularities, for example with climate change we may look at the context of Pacific Island nations, and the power struggles between China and the U.S. The intertwining of climate vulnerability and geopolitical competition has led to limited choices for these nations. For security we may examine the threat of a blockade of Taiwan. Both Taiwan and China are locked into a trajectory that has made it difficult to resolve their differences, and any significant deviation from this path would require a dramatic shift in long-standing policies and perceptions. Finally we’ll look at the intersection of technology and economy, as tit-for-tat trade tariffs and technology embargoes are part of an escalation of conflict centred on technological and economic rivalry.

​Once we identify the trip hazard in three particular thematic areas, we will then work in groups to “hack” this particular situation, envisioning how we would prefer this particular moment to unfold. After this we will explore what future this hack has led us to, how the trim tabbing of this particular situation has led to an alternative future. We will then look at what the implications are for the present.

​The process will follow the same steps that we took in the last workshop:

• ​Familiarisation

• ​Mutation

• ​Exploration

• ​Significance

​We’ll be applying “win-win” principles to these conflict “trip hazards”, for example using ideas related to the need for collaborative governance, the planetary commons, and drawing on the work of Johan Galtung.