The Overwhelming Present
Reply
Category Archives: Future
The Future is whatever is in your head
Thanks to Tim for this. Just got around to reading it and it seems fairly on the money to me….
A Century of Tomorrows’ Review: The Future Looks Familiar
With the social and technological upheavals of the modern world came the widespread idea that a utopia —or a planetary catastrophe —was just around the corner.
By Katrina Gulliver (2024)
In the year 2000, people will get around with personal flying suits and have food brought to them by pneumatic tube. That’s the kind of vision of tomorrow that was being presented a century earlier. The future was coming, and it would be magical. Techno optimism, with a dash of fantasy.
By the late 20th century, the future boosters were competing with doomers, who warned of overpopulation, environmental catastrophe, nuclear war. The future was coming all right, and you might not like it.
In “A Century of Tomorrows,” Glenn Adamson, a cultural historian and the author of “Fewer, Better Things” (2018) offers a sweeping survey of future predictions, from 19th-century science fiction to Grace Jones at Studio 54. As Mr. Adamson describes it, futurology is growing in importance. “The increasing legitimacy of futurology is one of modernity’s defining features: In an era of acceleration, when the future seems to arrive faster and faster, technical and scientific means have been deployed both in the service of that acceleration and in an attempt to predict its course.” But, depending on how you define it, futurology has always been important. In the ancient world, emperors would turn to their haruspex to predict the outcome of a battle. Shamans would be consulted for their visions of what lay ahead.
Mysticism has long been interwoven with “scientific” futurology. Mr. Adamson demonstrates this with a story about tarot cards. The modern deck, with which most of us are familiar, was created in 1909. Far from a lingering remnant of medieval culture, it was a reinvention for the era of mass production, sold with a mythology. Its designers were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of many occult groups that emerged in the late 1800s. They reimagined the tarot from centuries earlier, adjusting the figures and symbolism to fit their view. Mass production meant millions of decks could be sold. But to the public it was the idea of continuity to history that was part of the tarot’s appeal. We want to see the future, but believe we’re doing so while using ancient wisdom. To reach ahead while still feeling a comforting tether to our forebears.
Other developments did allow us to see the future, in some ways. “Consider the field of meteorology,” Mr. Adamson writes, which emerged in the mid-19th century. “The key conceptual breakthrough was that—as in the tarot, but in a more empirical sense—the future was contained within the present. That is, a lot of tomorrow’s weather is already here today; it’s just somewhere else, usually a little farther west.”
It’s easy to look at futurologists and see in their visions a clear reflection of the anxieties of their time. Fiction writers of the late 19th century, such as H.G. Wells, were responding to the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of the machine age: Would humans be made redundant in this mechanized world, or would we be the beneficiaries of a technologically enhanced future? Mr. Adamson mentions one writer, Samuel Butler, who mused in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” that humans might evolve into machines.
A turn against industrialization led some to romanticize a soft-focus vision of rural life. This was visible in the aesthetics of the Arts & Crafts movement, and attempts to shape new styles of living based on traditional forms. The Garden City movement in England, for example, sought to change the model of housing, with planned towns close to agricultural food supplies. (Others, such as the Bolsheviks, wanted to reshape things more radically.)
The author discusses Buckminster Fuller with his geodesic domes as offering one vision of the future (brought to mass attention at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, which featured a domed pavilion). Fuller didn’t invent the dome, but he patented and popularized the concept in the U.S. Today there’s one at Disney’s Epcot theme park in Florida called “Spaceship Earth.” Such tessellated domes are now part of the visual vernacular in movies showing architecture of the future or on other planets.
The range of ideologies Mr. Adamson brings into the big tent of futurology is broad indeed. Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism is mentioned, as is Steve Jobs and Apple Computer. By Mr. Adamson’s standard, political activists and creators must be futurologists, as they attempt to conjure a future that is different from the one they believe is going to occur. Any desire for change is a wish for a different future.
The atomic bomb showed us how quickly a future could be ended, and writers responded with visions of the postapocalyptic world, often ones in which gender and racial dynamics are upended. Samuel R. Delany’s story “Aye, and Gomorrah” is a clear argument for gay liberation, and includes the line “you don’t choose your perversions.” Alternatively, we have Ursula Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness,” which she later argued was a thought experiment “not to predict the future” but to “describe reality, the present world.”
The counterculture movements of the ’60s and ’70s had their own ideas of the future, or at least of redesigning how they lived—although, as Mr. Adamson points out, hippie-ism was a symptom of affluence: These middle-class kids could afford to drop out. They wanted lifestyles that reflected their values and allowed them to break free of social strictures. In his telling, LSD was a futurological aid, letting users step free of the perception of time. However, while acid trips might have shown hippies a vision of the future, this wasn’t something that could scale. And it didn’t solve the practical problems of creating a new world. Someone in the commune still had to make the lentil stew.
Meanwhile, the hippies’ classmates who didn’t drop out, who got jobs and bought houses in the suburbs, were soon reading bestselling doomer tomes: Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968), Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” (1970) and the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” (1972). The world was overpopulated and everything was going to hell. This fit neatly with America’s growing cynicism and the oil crisis, but had some disastrous effects, including encouraging coercive sterilization in developing countries.
Then came the fall of the Soviet Union. After that, attempts to imagine a new humanity quickly fizzled out. Science-fiction cinema, for instance, has now moved from a genre in which “the future was figured as an exciting encounter with another world, intersecting our own,” to a series of tropes about the zombie apocalypse. Our future paranoia has turned introspective, and the danger is us.
The futurologists we encounter today are thought-leader gurus, or men on Instagram telling you what the stock market is going to do. Doomers tell us the end is nigh, but it still might be worth buying crypto. The future is either a wave we should want to catch or a dystopian hellscape we should dread.
We’ve been living in the post-2000 future for nearly 25 years. I still sleep on a box-spring mattress and cook oatmeal on the stove in the same way my great-grandmother did. I don’t have a wing suit. The future must be running late.
The Year 2000 as seen by Children in 1966
2025
Greetings to my loyal and lovely readers and welcome to 2025.
Spotted this the other day. The article goes on to say that Jung said that the way in which a society talks about UFOs (and I might add to this sci-fi generally)` provides insights into our deepest fantasies. On a related note, here’s a preduction. The further we erect monuments to technology and workship at the alter of AI, the more we will believe in illogical, mystical and spiritual forces. There is an emerging desire for magic in the age of math.
But hard if you are a futurist..
From The Marginalian (the marginalian.org)
Children’s Book of the Future…we had help!
Massive shout out to the designers on Children’s Book of the Future. Would have been duller without you both. Cinthya @cinth.alvarez, and Bettina @bettina.ms @DKbooks Thank you!!!
The Future is almost here
@dkbooks
The future really is here
Pre-order the future here. Publication date in the UK is June 5. US is June 25 I believe.
https://www.dk.com/uk/book/9780241647479-the-childrens-book-of-the-future
The Future of Futures
A university in the United Kingdom recently asked its students to write essays on whether the future was open or closed — an open future being one where anything could happen, a closed future being where a single or fixed future had become inevitable. Without exception the students all wrote essays about closed futures.
But if there is one thing we can be certain of concerning the future, it is surely that it will always be uncertain. There must always be many ways in which the future could unfold or be amended.
We have been engaged as futurists for more than 30 years with the needs of businesses, governments, and non-profit organisations to grasp the nettle when it comes to the question of “What’s next?” and to investigate how future-proof is our organization to the cluster of change agents circling our operating environment.
Over this time, we have come to think of the future as a terra incognita, a landscape that some people may claim to have seen, but one where the terrain remains mostly unknown beyond some basic geographical and geological elements. The millions of people that will, as Oxford’s William MacAskill outlines in his breathtaking book What We Owe the Future, inhabit this cloud-covered land are also largely unknown, so we have an ethical responsibility to rehearse how we should behave towards them to optimize the outcomes both for them and ourselves.
But the more we have grappled with the uncertainties of the future it has become increasingly clear that the future only exists in the present. Adapting Benedetto Croce’s aphorism about history, all futures are contemporary futures. They are not, after all, imagined destinations but rather complex world views through which we look at today. They are reflections of who we are, where we have been and where it is that we would like to travel next.
All futures are contemporary futures. They are not, after all, imagined destinations but rather complex world views through which we look at today. They are reflections of who we are, where we have been and where it is that we would like to travel next.
T. S. Eliot, like many artists (for example, where would modernist architecture be without Mondrian?), got there before us. In Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, he said:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
….
human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Cataloguing these world views is not hard provided we own up to what we are really doing. It is notable that we futurists are rarely employed to predict or forecast the future. Rather we are hired to either validate a journey that is already well underway or to fashion alternative futures or scenarios that flow logically from the contemporary present.
An Australian client interested in the future of primary industries, selected one future scenario from the four worlds we had created as a preferred future and set about using this “prediction” as the purpose of the scenario planning exercise. In other words, the future was an excuse to justify a pre-existing view of the future or perhaps to reassure everyone that everything would turn out alright.
In scenario work the most important building blocks are what we call the critical uncertainties shaping the external environment in which scenario-client organisations operate. Over the last 30 years, across 30 or so projects, the favored drivers of change we have encountered have been in areas such as China & Geopolitics, Climate Change & Environmental Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence & Technology, Generational & Social Change, Economics & Happiness – not forgetting Culture Arts, & Entertainment
Foresight is, inevitably, an indulgence. If you are on a sinking ship, which perhaps the university students thought they were, the exercise can be little more than distraction. The proverbial deckchairs onboard the Titanic.
But foresight remains an activity which encourages us to think in abstract ways – literally by conjuring up artefacts that have no independent existence from our emotions and intelligence. This is most evident in the field of macro-economics which has become the melting pot in which the forces driving the environment in which we live collide with each other. They create abstractions that we then use to validate public policies that seek to optimise outcomes for nations and the world.
Think of inflation, unemployment, GDP, aggregate demand/supply, and economic growth as just some of the key variables that governments slavishly rely upon to determine their fiscal and monetary policies. What do all these items have in common? Simply, it is that they do not exist. You can’t touch them or feel them.
Rather, they are abstractions reliant on the algorithmic values that are used to generate what data is collected and why – reliant on the underlying world views of those collecting the data.
For example, when you attempt to disentangle the mishmash of driving forces that create inflation, it becomes impossible to generate logical descriptions of future environments. There is simply too much going on for the future to settle. This is perhaps the contemporary problem with futures and thus its future.
Perhaps Douglas Rushkoff was right, with all futures collapsing into a chaotic present.
After all, how can you engage people into thinking about unfamiliar futures when the recent past contains a reality TV star becoming the U.S. president, the UK waving goodbye to its European cousins, a virus inflicting infection upon the world, and a tank war in Europe that oscillates between the trenches of 1914 and the futuristic fantasies of H G Wells. Everything happens, everywhere, all at once. Unfathomable parallel universes simultaneously collapsing into a black hole from which the light of “it might be alright” cannot escape.
No wonder Major Tom became a junkie (David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes) and no surprise that William Gibson, anticipating AI in his seminal cyber-punk novel Neuromancer, eventually gave up writing novels set in the future. The present is quite strange enough thank you very much. There is no bandwidth left to think beyond the present. Even the so-called news has become too much to bear. If it bleeds it leads, but if it calms our fears it disappears. Too much reality? Escape into a virtual insanity. At least you won’t be alone.
Our current engagement with AI similarly tells us a lot about the impossibility of the future. AI is more than a critical uncertainty with a range of potential futures. It is a basket of unknown unknowns whose systemic consequences are Black Swans beyond our comprehension.
Even death and taxes come to grief in an AI future funded by Tech Titans using the spoils of privacy invasion and algorithmic recommendation to fund massive rockets (Freud anyone?) and/or longevity research (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray perhaps?)
It is unsurprising then that we live in a world without a future. As a result, cultural attention and financial investment is moving to a compressed and accelerated present. Two cultural phenomena support this point of view. The first is the rise of populism fuelled by social media, the second is AI.
We are living in a world where news – fake or otherwise – travels quickly and conversations based on providers like Tik Tok, Instagram and Twitter are interested only in the here and now, so much so that in many channels the uploaded content has a very short life before it disappears. The cycle of news is quickening and shortening every day. Here today and gone today.
The second phenomenon is more one of social psychology. Mindfulness is the case in point. It teaches that preoccupation with what might become a deterministic tomorrow needs to be abandoned in place of a total non-judgmental preoccupation with the present.
As T.S. Eliot prompted the concepts of present and future worlds that are muddling and confused as well as steeped in uncertainty as to their origin.
He also cast doubt on the idea of the past, and would have endorsed Russian economist and politician Yavlinsky’s comments in a futures workshop in Provence some years back when he declared that for Russia the greatest level of uncertainty belonged to the past. How can we agree on our future if we can’t agree on our past”? And anyway, the future is too far away to matter.
Maybe the students with closed minds are right after all?
No future indeed.
Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman. Extracted from Compass magazine, December 2023.
My next book…
