What Is Progressive Worldbuilding?
Start here if you want to know what this thing is about
Progressive Worldbuilding Defined
Progressive worldbuilding is the enactment of hopeful ideas, creative problem-solving, and concerted mobilized actions that drive human progress toward the creation of conditions that humans actually want to live in, which encompasses improvements to the current conditions that tend to make humans miserable.*
The term “worldbuilding” has been borrowed from the culture and practices of fantasy fiction. In fiction, worldbuilding is the process of creating imaginary, immersive, and believable worlds that include recognizable elements of our own and in which characters like ourselves live out a story. Imagined geographies, histories, mythologies, religions, traditions, technologies, economics, politics, cultures, and social dynamics make up the constituent elements of built fictional worlds.
Progressive worldbuilding works similarly:
It’s the process of applying our creative faculties in the real world to build a progressively better version of our world, one that respects, aids, and advances the dignity and flourishing of humans, animals, and all the other life forms we coexist with and depend on.
Progressive worldbuilding can also constitute an intentional counteractive strategy that can be collectively engineered to challenge the regressive human instincts, beliefs, ideas, behaviors, and movements that erect hierarchies of abusiveness and exploitation, empower all manner of immoral monsters, erode human dignity, bring about environmental spoliation, and cause widespread but avoidable suffering.
While progressive worldbuilding exists outside of political identification or affiliation, and anyone of any background or persuasion can hold and pursue progressive ideas and ends, the principles of liberalism, democracy, pluralism, and related ideals and ideologies form its foundations.
Progressive worldbuilding is also the infusion of pro-social activism into every moment and dimension of our lives. Everything we do is a vote, contribution, or protest. Everything we do is either an embrace of responsibility or an abdication of it. Everything we do is an investment in the construction of a better, safer, saner, and more resilient world, or a succumbing to the forces of pointless crackbrained destruction.
TheCan you please provide me with access to this document?eatures and frameworks of progressive worldbuilding are multitudinous, which is why I will (hopefully? maybe?) be writing about them for years to come.
To radically simplify matters and facilitate remembrance, here is a basic progressive worldbuilding formula:
A brutally honest analysis of human-caused dysfunction and harm + rapid-iteration problem-solving that counteracts that dysfunction and harm = progressive worldbuilding.
One of the many arguments I will be making in Progressive Worldbuilding is that progressives need to spend less time and money on “studying reality” and more time and money on “creating reality.” For example, what’s more important: Studying the life-destroying consequences of our rapidly metastasizing global climatological emergency? Or changing the world as rapidly as possible before that life-destroying emergency destroys us all? If, hypothetically, we were able to achieve a perfect understanding of the emergency, would that understanding be useful if the world has already been irreversibly destroyed?
If we don’t invest everything we have in building the world we want to live in, right now, we will end up living in a world that other people have built while we were studying how they built it.
Our Perilous Pandemonium
In these perilous times riven by political, social, cultural, and technological mayhem, people are understandably questioning their ability to have any positive impact on anything at all.
This fatalism is not only demoralizing, demotivating, and self-sabotaging, but it’s also something many humans, including this one, are clearly prone to wallow in. The contributions we make to the salvation of ourselves, along with our dangerously fragile and precarious democracies, are not limited to voting, protesting, and giving money to all those campaigns begging for money all the time—in fact, this view, in itself, is, in my view, antithetical to the animating spirit of democracy, liberalism, equality, justice, and other important things.
Throughout this publication, I will argue that counteracting the growing number of colossally complex problems threatening us all demands an everything everywhere all-at-once progressive project that every one of us can and should, without cease and all due haste, commit to right now, regardless of one’s ability, affiliation, or material circumstances.
Here’s why:
Many of us in America these days are freezing, fleeing, flailing, or flapping around like disoriented birds.
Others are burrowing their heads into the slurping, sucking quicksand of wishful, magical, and delusional thinking.
Some of us are pointlessly taking petty potshots at would-be allies with pea shooters for no productive purpose whatsoever.
Some are spinning around in maypoles of circular logic while entirely losing all the threads and blaming everyone but themselves for all the things they demonstrably don’t understand but obstinately think they do.
Some are so worshipfully bent over before the altars of unhinged greed, status acquisition, empty materialism, and shopping addiction that they barely notice much of anything anymore, except all those sparkly, seductive things they think they want because they think they will make them happy and whole, even though everyone should know by now they won’t because they never have and never will.
Some are clicking away their lives in front of phantasmal screens projecting ghostly simulacrums onto their retinas, much like the person I was watching out of my window this morning walking a dog down the street and ignoring all the beauty and interesting stuff in the world while holding his phone 10 inches in front of his nose.
Some are uploading deceptively curated photos of their lives and children to corporate data-mining operations that are busily monetizing all that time people spend uploading photos of their lives, instead of spending that uploaded time with the real living children they are photographing to, presumably, convince other people they are loving, attentive parents with amazing lives unfolding in the real world beyond the digitized world they are clearly spending way too much time in, which we all know they’re doing, of course, because the abundant photographic evidence they’ve supplied over years demonstrably shows that they have spent far too much of their lives not living their lives.
And some are just nihilistically wrecking everything good and holy while pathologically lying about all of it, building multimillion-dollar underground bunkers in far-flung locales, lusting perversely after the end times, and working really hard to bring about the zombie-apocalypse-like apocalypse they’re really convinced other people, who are not them, are trying to bring about.
Forestalling the Descent Into Hopelessness
Amidst all this senselessness, there is an alternative path: Going about the business of building, right now and every day, the world we want to live in.
Countless people across the planet have been doing this very thing for thousands of years, and their examples and legacies can be found everywhere, offering both hope and urgent lessons to us all.
But here’s perhaps a surprising perspective:
Humans do not need a single new idea to start getting this job done right now. There are already so many good ideas strewn about the world that we could spend the next several hundred years doing nothing but implementing them, and we probably wouldn’t come anywhere close to enacting even 10% of them.
One of the central theories motivating Progressive Worldbuilding is that the unconscious shrinking of the imaginative aperture of political possibility and consequent action is, in itself, a major contributing factor to the current pandemonium that now encircles the globe.
My personal view is that we can only forestall a descent into hopelessness, misery, and self-annihilation by (1) peeling ourselves off the couch, going out into the world, and getting important stuff done so that we can (2) experience the resulting rejuvenating and restorative tonic effects that then (3) motivate us get out there, again and again, day after day to get even more important shit done.
In summary, the purpose of this publication, and the system of progressive worldbuilding I will share, discuss, and propose, is to provide as many actionable answers as I can to the question that so many of us are asking ourselves these days:
What the fuck can I do?
~SEA
*NOTE: Progressive worldbuilding is a term of my own creation. Given that I’m the one who made it up, this publication constitutes the entire corpus of original source material on the topic.
Last revised 1.19.26