Creative Futurism Studio

A house on the river

"The solution is not to avoid the river, but to build a house on its banks - planting trees which are nourished by it, and gathering their fruits".

What is Creative Futurism?

We live in a time of rapid technological acceleration, yet many struggle to frame these shifts in a way that feels meaningful and human.Creative Futurism helps fill that gap - offering a radical new perspective that combines systems thinking with poetic imagination.On this site, you can explore dimensions of Creative Futurism through philosophy, poetry, sound and narrative.To learn more about working together, click here

Projects

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Renaissance

The political vision of Creative FuturismA manifesto for societal regeneration rooted in creativityExpressed in a book and a network of interconnected projectsYou can read the manifesto below, or return to home

1. Creativity is the antidote to fragmentation.The world we live in is fragmented. Everyone lives on their own algorithm. Immersed within their personal narrative. Sometimes it feels like nothing sticks. Like we’re shouting into the void. Sometimes it feels like we can do anything, but none of it matters. We live in a kind of plastic utopia. Everything should be great - but it feels off. What are we missing? (Lean closer - what is the river whispering to us?)2. Society is already decentralized.A society based on creativity is not a new idea. It’s something we’ve been trying to create for a while. In the 1970s, culture shifted away from single narratives to embrace individual diversity. As time went on, society became increasingly more liberal. We stopped believing in the authority of politicians and schools. These systems still exist, but they are self-managed. The only thing keeping them together is personal incentives. There is no single narrative here, but individual creativity.3. Self-management is the modern religion.Modern culture is aware of its own fragmentation. And that’s why it imposes a single rule: the ideology of self-management. This means managing your personal interests in a way that doesn’t impact upon the lives of others. It also means being responsible for instilling this ethic in others (your kids, students, citizens, employees). The whole system is channelled towards deepening fragmentation. The more fragmented things become, the more it feels the need to suppress. This makes it impossible for creativity to have an impact, or for shared problems to be solved.4. Algorithms are power structures.The modern world is run like an algorithm: balancing between individual outputs and finding ways to categorize people into self-reinforcing echo chambers. Algorithms aren’t ideologically neutral. They are created by humans. The goal is to find ways of controlling desire in order to intensify it. Whether you are designing the algorithm or taking part in it, the goal is the same. But this attempt to categorize people makes their feelings seem meaningless. Rather than setting people free, we are denying their individuality. The poetry of human life is obscured between hard brick walls.5. Growth requires interaction.In a world without interaction, there is no possibility of growth. At work, we learn to manage algorithms. At home, we are managed by the algorithms. At no point is there a possibility to express ourselves in an impactful way. Growth happens when we express ourselves and listen to the feedback of the world around us. Through this, we can gradually calibrate our intuitions to everything else. When individuals grow, the world grows with them. We need supportive spaces where this can happen.6. Government should allow innovation.Nurturing individual creativity isn’t about isolated self-pleasure, but unlocking the flourishing of society as a whole. This should be the first goal of any legitimate government. Policy programs are too often focused on serving private interests - whether business donors, voter groups, or powerful voices in the media. Land use is controlled by regulations which prevent people from starting small businesses or building enough housing to reduce prices. Our whole society should be focused on creating conditions that foster entrepreneurship.7. AI can empower humanity.There is nothing inevitable about the way that we use AI. It is up to us whether we choose to use it for empowerment, or to increase control. Accelerated medical research can vastly improve treatment. AI tutors can turn schools into places of fluid, creative learning. Automating business procedures creates space to focus on forward-thinking innovation. Abolishing government bureaucracy will allow us to redistribute resources towards individual flourishing. We can use AI to fill in the gaps of organization, so that the majority of our time is focused on growth.8. Individuality is the future.The history of human civilization has been an ever increasing tendency towards diversity. The more powerful our tools become, the greater complexity of human experience we can express. Unlocking human potential is a positive feedback loop, because it leads to even better tools for unlocking creativity. We are reaching a point where this process becomes completely unobstructed. We need to create systems that foster individual creativity, for the benefit of people and for the benefit of society.9. Gardens, not factories.Most of our social institutions have been built for purposes which are detached from modern life. Hospitals originate from monasteries. Schools from factories. Governments from monarchies. Businesses from feudal landownership. This is not only irrational, it is a tremendous waste of human potential. Instead of seeing life as something that needs to be controlled, we should see it as more like a garden. The more love and life we give to it, the more it gives back to us. This is an open-ended, collaborative process - not a fixed, deterministic order. In this world, the more that life diverges from the center, the more the system flourishes.10. Human experience is like a river.Human experience has no fixed form, it is continually changing. Everything we create is absorbed into the world around us - changing it, feeding us with new insights. Archaic power structures attempt to impose order on this flux, and are frustrated when it all falls through. But we cannot dissolve into the river either, because this would be to deny our role within it. Fragmentation is not meaninglessness. It is not a substanceless void. It is a river of potentiality. It can and will be made sense of. The solution to fragmentation is not to avoid the river, but to build a house on its banks - planting trees which are nourished by it, and gathering their fruits. This mindset doesn’t depend on anything else - it is a way of life that can begin today.

The Participatory Society

The philosophical framework of Creative FuturismA 70,000-word book describing how we can remodel our systems around the principle of participationThese ideas continue to evolve on a dedicated SubstackYou can read a short excerpt below, or return to home

Towards the participatory societyFor many people in the world today, life seems to be continuing as normal. We wake up, go to work, see our family, see our friends, treat ourselves occasionally with a meal or a holiday. Everything seems to fit into a neat, linear context. But bubbling beneath the surface, something radical and groundbreaking is slowly stretching its limbs, getting ready to take shape. Our neat, compartmentalised reality is about to give way to something new, and we need to be ready for when it does.The contemporary world has been radically altered by the effects of COVID-19, which has fundamentally reshaped the ways in which we work, interact, and prioritise social needs. Our era was already defined by disintegration and fragmentation, but the pandemic accelerated this tendency to its apex. In the previous decade, it seemed as if the collective optimism of the early 21st century was gradually coming to a close, as the world became beset by institutional crises and economic stagnation. After the pandemic, it feels as if shared narratives of social progress have been forgotten about entirely. Instead, what we have is a society which has become comfortable with its individualisation, as long periods of lockdown demonstrated social order without personal contact.While this radically compartmentalised social order may work for a while, it is likely to be pushed beyond breaking point in the coming years. This is due to the emergence of artificial intelligence, which has the potential to change the world as we know it. AI disrupts the careful distinction between public and private life by rendering a large proportion of human labour worthless to our processes of socioeconomic organisation. Any task that requires following standardised rules will have the potential to be automated. This means that the value of human work will be determined according to its unique contribution. Rather than following rules which are detached from our lived experience, the value of labour will be directly tied to spontaneous responses in the environment. Therefore, the strict distinction between private and public life that characterises our age will cease to be workable. To prepare for this shift, our institutions must begin to adapt.Although there has been some disparate discussion on the potential impacts of AI, what we are lacking is a cohesive, practical framework that is able to conceptualise this shift as a whole. All too often, discussion about the future reflects the compartmentalisation of our own times. For example, we might look at how AI is likely to affect a single dimension of the economy. Or, we might stop short at imagining what life would be like in an automated world, seeing it as so removed from our current experience that it is not possible to conceptualise. The participatory society aims to fill this gap in the discourse, uniting thought across disciplines to imagine and guide the AI transition for the benefit of all.Two years following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT to the general public, large language models are already reshaping the way work is carried out. ChatGPT is now one of the most visited websites in the world, with 300 million weekly users. Many people in white-collar jobs are already regularly relying on the assistance of AI to conduct their daily work. With recent advancements, such as the “o” series, these LLMs are now able to do so much more than simple language generation tasks. The next generation of AI models are able to deliberate on their own reasoning, allowing them to achieve levels of accuracy in their responses that often surpass human experts in specialised fields.Not only are these models already more accurate than highly-trained experts, they are able to complete tasks at a speed that would be inconceivable to the human mind. A cognitive task that might take a skilled worker a full working day could be achieved by an artificial intelligence model in a matter of minutes. Our society is yet to fully comprehend what this gain in efficiency means for everyday human experience. As we move through 2025 and 2026, it is highly likely that we will begin to see a shift towards adopting artificial intelligence into existing economic practices. This transition will challenge our understanding of human roles, forcing us to rethink expertise and participation in a rapidly transforming economy.The conceptual framework of the participatory society is more important now than ever. The goal is to fill the gap in our current artificial intelligence discourse by focusing on the holistic social impact of AI. In particular, this involves looking at how society will continue to organise itself in a world that transcends traditional institutional structures. This is a world which has moved beyond the conventional distinction between public and private life, instead operating entirely through the spontaneous participation of individuals. The proposal of this book is that a society with widespread integration of artificial intelligence is best understood as a participatory society, where institutions are continuously shaped through individual innovation and engagement. In a participatory society, the open-ended sense-making practices of individuals are no longer secondary to the social order, but central to the way that it organises itself . . .Finish the chapter

Metamorphoses

The emotional core of Creative FuturismA repertoire of piano pieces paired with evocative poemsExploring themes of nurture, eros and mythologyYou can listen and read below, or return to home

the other shoreawash in the boundless ocean,
thoughts come and go - like bubbles
ascending to the surface
where they pop;
becoming one with the night air.
remaining on top,
i absorb these dusky hues.you are like an old book
radiating truth - precious
every word and syllable.
laments of men and women
echo through these pages -
singing for another land,
a unifying frequency.

zabriskie pointalone in the desert
the hot sun scorches
illusions of separateness.feet bare and warmed
by the sand caressed
with its unearthly light.the heart undivided
like both sides of the moon -
round and dimensioned,
but held in a single breath.the mind wanders,
catching the glints of
this eternal sunshine.

Sourface

The communal dimension of Creative FuturismA band and creative collective, combining storytelling with traditional music formatsShows that blend music with art, poetry, and dance - opening space for radical creativityListen to our music below, or return to home

Research

The theoretical backbone of Creative FuturismLearn more below, or return to home

BA European Social and Political Studies, UCL (2021) - Dissertation examining radical democracy as a solution to neoliberal governance

Cataract (2022) - An analysis of contemporary digital culture as the result of deeper historical undercurrents

Purpose (2023) - Theorizing a society of self-actualization through contemporary culture, politics and economics

More Than Atoms (2024) - Exploring how systems which integrate individuality emerge in response to atomization

Work With Me

I'm open to collaborations, speaking opportunities, and consulting with organizations aligned with the values of Creative Futurism.If you're interested in working together - whether on a project, a conversation, or something still taking shape - I'd love to hear from you.Let's make the future a place worth heading to.Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @matt.isles