Practicing the future in our Imagination: A Manifesto session with Ruha Benjamin

What happens when we stop treating imagination as individual luxury and start wielding it as collective power? Our recent discussion of Ruha Benjamin's Imagination: A Manifesto helped us reshape the stories that shape us.

On the manifesto form

Our conversation with author Ruha Benjamin illuminated why she chose the manifesto form—a deliberate departure from scholarly distance. As Ruha explained, the manifesto signals "the book's anger and frustration, aiming to translate ideas into actionable forms."

Benjamin traced the book's evolution through three temporal layers: the long-term influence of sociological imaginaries from her academic training, the medium-term concept of "imagination as a battlefield" that emerged during her Race After Technology speaking tour, and the immediate catalyst of a publisher seeking actionable ideas. Imagination itself operates across multiple timescales.

Collective imagination imperative

Perhaps the most striking insight emerged around moving from individual to collective imagination. We must resist the tendency to keep imagination personal and instead cultivate collective history and ancestral forms of intelligence.

Ruha emphasized that relationships become "practice spaces for the future," where we can "disrupt linear time" and prefigure the world we want. This isn't abstract—participants shared concrete examples of power-sharing plans and explicit governance structures that transform collective imagination into lived reality.

Preferable futures

A crucial tension emerged: how do we navigate between utopian and dystopian imagination? The conversation revealed that collective imagination requires groundwork—not just dreaming together, but creating structures that can hold and nurture those dreams. We need "affirmative environments" and "open-minded spaces for imagination" to build resilience against the rejection and cynicism that can shut down our collective dreaming—"space, pace, and grace" for safe experimentation.

We also need to practice "moving between probable and preferable futures," suggesting that effective collective imagination operates in the space between what seems inevitable and what we deeply desire.

Embodying imaginative practices

We shared a few approaches for how we are all working on cultivating our imaginative capacity:

• Music as catalyst: Several folks emphasized how sound and rhythm open imaginative pathways
• Embodied play: Physical practices that train imaginative muscles, like a 10 years in the future improvisational dinner party—(m)otherboard loves a dinner party!
• Costumes as "inspiration boards for future outfits" and using clothing to "disarm power in nonverbal ways." Fig leaves were the first technology!

Practicing the future

Our discussion revealed something powerful: when we gather to imagine together, we're not just sharing ideas—we're practicing the future.

And imagining is an ongoing process. Tim reflected on the interaction between concepts of 'narrative' and 'imagination': "In tech-advocacy spaces, lots of focus is put on narrative...but I hear much less focus on imagination—perhaps as a more bottom-up, collective, co-created and textured pathway to change?" Emily offered, "One is the process and the other is the outcome?" In order to come up with alternative narratives we need space for imaginations to run wild together!

(m)otherboard visions...

The conversation culminated with participants sharing their concrete experiments in collective imagination.

• Ryan envisions "a community education initiative structured like a co-op or tenant union! dues supported, collaborative learning with a deep democracy based structure."
• Emily recognized how "part of our work as parents is to grow that imaginative space for our kids."
• Whitney is creating "a walking parable (sound walk) connecting the idea of The Commons with a folktale."
• Jules offered an urgent plan: "My small experiment is to put my big girl pants on and start articulating my objections to society's current trajectory in public as opposed to in my head."
• Meanwhile, Susan wants to "reimagine what re-distributing wealth looks like, where no-strings giving is the norm."
• Ruha herself shared her current focus: "I'm working on a set of projects that relates to FRIENDSHIP as ground zero for imagination, world building, and social transformation."

Mara offered lyrics that tie together the relationship between history and the future in our imaginations:

She said: what is history?
And he said: history is an angel being blown backwards into the future
He said: history is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called progress
—Laurie Anderson, The Dream Before

Continue the conversation

This discussion sparked more questions than answers—exactly as it should. Join us in the Motherboard Slack to continue exploring:

• What experiments in collective imagination are you carrying forward?
• How can we create more "practice spaces for the future" in our communities?
• What does it mean to treat relationships as laboratories for justice?

Mark your calendars: We reconvene September 9 at 8 PM ET to dive deeper into Ruha's Manifesto and explore how imagination becomes action.

Ready to join our collective imagination coalition? Our membership includes access to monthly book club discussions with groundbreaking authors, exclusive Slack community , and resources for turning ideas into community experiments. Become a member today and help us imagine—and build—the world we need.

—The God(m)others