The 2theFuture team Daydreamed our way 2 ThoughtWorld where we met Daisy, an experienced Thinker known 4 their many Thoughts. ThoughtWorld is the origin of many universes; in this space/place without time, Thinkers, Structures, and Nature co-create in symbiosis. The chemical reactions between neurotransmitters in Thinkers’ brains set off chemical reactions in the natural world wherein Structures, cities, places are created through bonds that replicate connections between neurons. Thinkers’ secrete a chemical known as ThoughtJuice that causes these reactions to create a vast array of Structures from tiny plants 2 entire worlds. If a Thinker Thought it, it exists, as there is no distinction between Thoughts and Reality or a Thinkers’ inner and outer worlds. However, it is not only Thinkers that affect ThoughtWorld; anything that a Thinker Thinks in2 being will reverberate their own neuron messaging back 2 the Thinker, affecting their movements and Thoughts and therefore the rest of ThoughtWorld and the universes it creates. Thinkers, Structures, and Nature push against each other and move together 2 create the topographical choreography of ThoughtWorld.
ThoughtWorld, by the very rules that make up the universe, is antithetical to Lockean notions of property and ownership that put white male humans in hierarchy over all other beings: nature, physical structures, and especially humans who are not white and male and/or especially those that do not ascribe to the idea that nature exists to be controlled and turned in2 property. In ThoughtWorld, it is impossible to own Nature as all beings are understood 2 be actors in the universe and have inherent dignity and agency simply by existing. Even, as on Earth, if someone tries to exert total control over another being, the other being will inevitably regain its autonomy as the universe pushes and pulls. As Octavia Butler, one of the greatest Thinkers of all time reminds us: “Everything you touch you change. Everything you change changes you.”
reading list: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Therapeutic Nations by Dian Million
photos by Olive Louise, modeling by Daisy Maass