ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents an enquiry into what can and should be done to confront what puts a human future at risk. It articulates a set of theoretical notions essential to the futuring people engage in. The book explains why they place computing at the center of their thinking about the future. It focuses on selection of appropriate values and fashioning them into a coherent set of alternatives, based on selected computing practices. The book identifies new ways to measure what is important in promoting this new way of life and to track the progress toward the new values made by the institutions. It explains a further anthropological premise, the idea that humans are capable of intervening collectively and deliberately in social formation reproduction (SFR), the processes that perpetuate their socio-cultural systems. The book shows why pessimism about current SFR justifies thinking beyond capital.
