General Seminar is back again! Season 06, Episode 04 is a salon-style discussion to get into the way...
Science Fiction is Strategy
General Seminar S06/E04
Published on April 13, 2025
General Seminar is back again! Season 06, Episode 04 is a salon-style discussion to get into the ways that science fiction is not just for the movies — it is strategy..an inestimably valuable form or foresight. Often left out of the conversation as we ‘overindex’ on the analytic aspects of foresight. But strategy and foresight are not just about the numbers. They are about the possibilities we imagine. Which is where science fiction comes in.
1. Entrepreneurs write science fiction now.
2. Not the entertainment kind.
3. Not to dream.
4. But to strategize.
5. I mean — what is that even?
6. And I don't even know if they realize what they're doing, to be honest.
7. You've got a generation of entrepreneurs who grew up with a vision of the future that was shaped by science fiction.
8. I mean..why else would the man-child billionaire of the 21st century, who grew up watching Star Trek, and feeling the echos of Apollo 11, and the Space Shuttle and dreamed into the speculative futures of Terminator and HAL, and Her — I mean..
9. Am I making my point here?
10. They spend their stacks on building rocket ships, and non-human intelligences, and gewgaws that they basically saw when they were 11, 12, 13 while sitting in their suburban Cineplexes.
11. Of all things..
12. This is the future we are inhabiting..
13. This is it?? Stuck in someone else's dream??
14. [[I wonder what futures will materialize for a generation who grew up on the dreams of Harry Potter-style magic when they get their billions?]]
15. Heading to Mars isn't destiny. It's a childhood dream, and I mean that in the most pedestrian sense of things. That childhood dream could have been entirely different were dream-inclined adolescents dreaming something different.
16. Which, like...raises some questions. Some practical questions. Because I'm kinda done with the whole "what if" thing.
17. I mean, I get it. It's a great way to think about the future. But what if we could actually do something with that thinking?
18. What if we could use science fiction as a tool for strategic thinking and decision-making? What if we could be operationally better at using imagination, and foresight, and design fiction, and science fiction to help create strategic visions of the future? Futures we'd actually want to inhabit?
19. Can we become better at building habitable worlds that draw people into them rather than agonizing about the other guys' futures?
