Working definition. Rehearsal is a temporary enactment that lets people experience how a future behaves, not merely discuss how it sounds.
Inherited meaning
Theatre, music, emergency planning, ritual, and social movements all rehearse. They create a bounded space where timing, relationship, failure, and adaptation become visible before the decisive performance or crisis.
Meaning in the imagination economy
AI can produce persuasive future images while concealing whether the imagined arrangement works in life. Rehearsal closes that gap. It turns a scenario into roles, choices, handoffs, emotions, and ordinary routines that can be felt and contested.
What changes in practice
Stage the future with the people who would inhabit it. Run a day, a conflict, and a failure—not only the ideal journey. Change the design wherever participants must pretend to have agency they do not possess.