60 PAGES. THOUSANDS OF SIGNALS. ~50 CONTRIBUTORS. 12 EXPERTS. 1 COMMUNITY. A FUTURE IN SYNC.

We know, you know, NASA knows, Timothée Chalamet knows: The vibes are decidedly off. We’ve lost our footing. We can’t find our rhythm. And it’s disorienting.

If this report hasn’t hit you in the feels already, it will now. Because this bit is visceral — at least, it was for us. We’re seeing post-narrative discomfort converging on fatigue, driving a feeling we can only describe as paralysis; it’s no wonder we’re hunkering down and slipping into nihilism. All of this is — almost painfully — relatable. 

In the wise words of Red Redding: “Every man has a breaking point.” And as we swirl around in this particular vortex, it seems we’ve collectively reached ours.

What started as one Signal (it was about a hospital building trying to figure out how to help its patients feel more in sync) amounted to all of this. And for so many in the community, the process was deeply cathartic. Because this was an exploration that truly touched us all. That captured the moment we’re living through as a global collective and reflected on what got us here to begin with. 

Most reports stop before they ever get started (in our humble opinion), failing to extend their thinking into imagined futures that drive meaningful implications for what’s to come. So for us, this is where things get really interesting.

RADAR Instigator: Fancy

The live version of this report was jam-packed with play: from easter eggs and doodling and an in-report personality quiz that gave you your very own playful archetype, to a print-and-play activity book and a miro-turned-multiplayer-playground.

An impromptu game of hide-and-seek in the park. A random, silly little dance after a small, personal victory. The calm surface of a lake inviting an irresistible urge to pick up a stone and skip it. Moments like these happen every day, everywhere, all around the world. These displays of universal human behavior are unprompted, natural, and remind us that there’s something powerful — in the deepest, molecular level of our cells, across our bodies and minds — that motivates us to play.

Our journey through time makes clear that the more power that play demonstrates — the more resistance, contempt, and hostility it meets — the more potent it grows. It’s this cycle that gives us an inkling into what play truly is.

Such playful questioning may start at the margins, but the disenfranchised margins are growing. 

In the sections that follow, you’ll meet our five character types: The Enchantress, The Healer, The Mediator, The Teacher, and The Artist — each of whom brings something uniquely playful to the table, and helps us unlock a piece of play within ourselves and in the world. To truly manifest A More Play-Full Future, we’ll need all five cards in our hand, since their diversity of experience is critical to rounding out our relationship with play in every dimension.

If play is what we say it is, it's not enough for it to exist on these pages. Below, you’ll find two opportunities to turn this research into reality — in your life and in the world.

We believe that the future is community-owned.

In keeping with our desire for each report to embody its theme, the live version of this report got all kinds of weird with machine intelligence (and let's just say, November 2023 was a different world in that regard). We've done our best to capture what we could in this archive, but just like each new moment we share with artificial intelligence before the next new thing hits, there's a 'you had to be there' quality that we simply can't replicate. 

What makes humanity, uniquely human? What separates us? Makes us special?

The emergence of a post-individual world has been one of our most well-explored topics since the start of RADAR — whether it was through our first collective report, A Future In Sync, or our community thesis, Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence Economy. So it’s no surprise that we’re particularly interested in evolving ideas of cooperation and collaboration. It’s a conversation that’s interesting enough when it’s squarely in the domain of humans — but non-human agents take it to another level, forcing us to reconsider the nature of how we treat and relate to one another, the world around us, and our more-than-human counterparts. 

In A Future In Sync, we explored the out-of-synchronizing driver of atomization, and the resulting discomfort of navigating a post-narrative world. Little did we realize that not much more than a year later, we’d be talking about yet another splosh of fuel on the fire. But here we are.

Now that we’ve explored what hangs in the balance, and peeked into the Protopic Portals that present potentially positive paths forward, we wanted to put a ‘blueprint for a better future’ together in earnest. After all, that’s always the intent of RADAR’s research: to be a beacon that draws believers and builders (and, as a participant pointed out in our Into: A Centaur Future event last week, builders who believe) toward collective action. 

Before we go, we wanted to play you a clip of the talk Amelia Winger-Bearskin gave at our Into: A Centaur Future event. It’s 5 minutes, but we promise, it’s important. 

We believe that the future is community-owned.

the letter we shared with our community, and the broader public, on November 11th. 

More than just a virtual event or a moment to look back, LoveFest was an opportunity for folks to immerse in the systems, stories, and practices that could make this vision real and join us in co-creating a better future with love at the center.