Crude Futures - Spring 2024

A fine dust of existential worry has settled across every common object, every situation, every vision of the future. This publication notices its texture and patterns of accumulation; how it lingers on the palette, bitter and tangy, and never quite washes away. How it’s unlike anything we’ve ever known. The taste is that of crude futures coming into being. 

Born from a reading group started in lockdown and published with the support of media platform New Models, this publication tracks the trajectories and temporalities of modern collapse. Our contributors, drawing from their various disciplinary backgrounds (art, music, activism, design, sustainability, political analysis), capture our unique current moment through media both written and visual. 

The resulting book contains: 

• Paranoid 3D diagrams of the global polycrisis;

• Undercover reporting from the frontlines of Just Stop Oil, musing on sacrifice and guilt in modern activist movements;

• A world-building card game that reshuffles anxieties via collective narrative;

• A grand theory of “social scurvy”: the factors that dissolve or uphold institutional and social cohesion;

• Vignettes of speculative fiction charting snapshots in time from the distant past to our unknown future;

• A close analysis of global shipping routes, their failure points, and how they feed into global conflict;

• Polaroids of desolate Norwegian landscapes;

• A complete disavowal of the future and its associated tropes, apocalypse and utopia; 

• And more, including an annotated bibliography for curious readers. 

Reading it sensitises the reader to strange new risks and potential catastrophic feedback loops, and awakens them to the alien possibilities of our world in collapse.