Blue Skies Social Research & Green Grass Experimentation
MAX RAMSAHOYE - 2025
In the hard sciences, ‘blue skies science’ or ‘fundamental research’ is where scientists engage in speculative theorising and experimentation surrounding emerging technologies that are yet to have immediate practical applications or (political, commercial or military) utility. As a parallel, ‘blue skies social science’ or ‘fundamental sociological research’, is where heterodox social scientists imagine alternative systems and societies to the status quo (the 'post-status quo'), design how these systems would function in the real-world and develop theories of change of how the first prototypes can be created. In contrast to applied social science, that addresses more targeted problems in policy and business, blue skies social science adopts a first-principles, systems-level approach that explores the foundations of human behaviour and social organisation.
After the first phase of blue skies social science, pragmatic utopianism moves towards what we call ‘green grass social experimentation’: moving theory into practice by proto-typing different forms of systems and societies at small-scales. In this way pragmatic utopians are proto-topians: rather than pursuing a final, end-state or a ‘perfect society’ as traditional utopians do, as prototopians we aim to simply do society better than before in an iterative process of improvement. Over time, this prototopian process may realise a society that is comparatively utopian compared to the ongoing dystopias and catastrophes of the current world-system we live in. Core to protopianism is the epistemic humility to recognise that we cannot and should not rigidly plan future societies, but rather create the conditions for them to emerge and adapt themselves as complex systems enacted by the people within them.
*This two-step process maps neatly onto Schmachtenberger's framing of 'Civilisation Design & Transition' and the delineation of essential criteria prior to real-world instantation
* Importantly, as a form of utopianism, protopianism, is distinct from an incrementalism or gradualism that only seeks to moderately reform existing systems; to make them marginally better within their own limited parameters.
* Whilst inherently interdisciplinary, social philosophy or social theory is perhaps the most apt formal domain to situate the project of blue skies social research within.
* The 'post-status quo' is the open possibility space of alternative worlds beyond our own. From capitalism to post-capitalism, nationalism to post-nationalism, humanism to post-humanism, it is the imaginary of what is not and what comes after.
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Blue Skies Social Research
A work-in-progress project of the research group to create a liminal lexicon and conceptual commons. Emerging from our collective intelligence, the project aims to formulate a coherent system of ideas that advances the theory of the metacrisis and a second renaissance.