Not everyone will be let into the future. These words can awaken or, instead, lull you to live your life as it goes. These words challenge any person on the planet who believes that their time, forces, experience, personality matter for the humankind and are needed for the future.
We, the Kruzhok Movement, proclaim: if anybody wants to decide for us whether we are worthy of the future or shall be left behind, – they don't stand a chance.
For us, future means development for all of mankind, overcoming traumas of the past and injustice of the present. If we don't think as if from the future, if we don't hear the voices of the future in the present, if we don't act, – the present will be forever. Everything will remain as it is: fight over resources on the verge of mutual annihilation, irresponsible destruction of our common home, a threat of losing world's diversity and every civilization's right for development, non-stop surviving, losing time on consuming useless things, tacit approval of flagrant social-economic inequality.
In thinking about the future and strenuous strive for it, there can be no inequality, be it economic, social, national, religious, or age-related. Thinking through, projecting, prototyping the future is a game for all, but a very demanding game.
Working on what's beneficial now, we lose our freedom. We spend most of our lives in institutions and organizations, working on some things momentary. Creating conditions for self-organization for the sake of different activity – mutual development and growing the future – is the mission of the Kruzhok Movement.
The Kruzhok Movement brings together communities of enthusiasts that gather to create protopies of the future. These enthusiasts are scientists, chief designers, entrepreneurs, engineers, poets, educators, who, here and now, create images, values, and lifestyles of the future. They dare to overcome inertia and benefits of today and invest their time, energy, and resources in what does not yet exist but will come to being.
Kruzhok Movement members should not wait for being given a chance to do meaningful things or being taken into some comfortable future. In gaps and lapses of existing practices and institutions, they should assemble communities to solve problems, help mutual development, and create testing grounds for practices of the future (residences, schools, fab labs, networks, and the like.)
The network of the Kruzhok Movement members includes independent, responsible, and autonomous teams that value the Deed and Doing over statuses and privileges. These teams will see what lies beyond the technical advancement of the modern world: consequences for mankind, new lifestyle, new relations and institutes.
A network of communities supporting each other and themselves on terms of mutual respect and common doing is the Kruzhok Movement.
Russian kruzhki of the twentieth century were a unique experience of creating communities to invent technologies of the future bending only to will and self-determination of enthusiasts. Zhukovsky's aeronautical kruzhok, Zander's team of rocket scientists, kruzhki of Schedrovitsky, Lotman, Ilyenkov and others were not special interest clubs but testing grounds for practices of the future, that later grew into research institutes, schools, and whole industries. Some technological breakthroughs of the information age were born in similar autonomies – as hacker movement grew out of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club. Importantly, these kruzhki addressed problems that humanity will only face in the future. Which kruzhok gives rise to a technology that will determine our everyday life tomorrow?
The Kruzhok Movement in Russia is well aware of its crucial role for civilizational reproduction and technological sovereignty of Russia. But the future in one country is impossible: it's the whole humanity, the whole Universe that develops. We start in Russia and look for like-minded people elsewhere to create testing grounds for the practices of the future and make a step from the past to the future – together.
Join the Kruzhok Movement in word and deed:
Contact us at info@kruzhok.org, learn about us at http://kruzhok.org/en/.
Русский