A Sense of Doubt blog post #3290 - What We Talk About When We Talk About The Future
Just this share today.
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What we talk about when we talk about The Future
Dave Karpf is writing a book about WIRED’s brand of techno-optimism through the years. He’s “trying to isolate what the impending digital future looked like back then, in the hopes of deriving some insights regarding how we got to now.” In that process, he has identified “four distinct genres of futurist rhetoric” and goes about presenting them.
Well worth a read, but I think when he talks about a “professional class of futurists — consultants who take business leaders and other influential actors through extensive planning exercises,” he’s generalising quite a bit and glossing over a lot of professionals. He’s portraying some of the big firms, the big-tech sycophants, and the folks doing strategy painted over as foresight. They exist, but they are just one segment of a very varied field of futures.
It’s something I’ve previously written about, these differences in approach and how strategic imperatives, transformational ideals, and societal needs are balanced—or not, as in Karpf’s professionals. See No.276 with a piece by Frank Spencer, No.277 for one by Alex Fergnani, or No.288 with another piece by Spencer where I write about a “loose taxonomy” along “Calculation, Exploration, and Transformation.”
Techno-optimist futurism insists that the path to a better tomorrow can only be discovered through positivity. And it places Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors at the center of the action. […]
The future, Stross is telling us, is just setting. Not all science fiction is meant as a call-to-arms or a grand warning. Sometimes it might be intended as a warning. Other times it might be a roadmap (as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future). But these authors are not oracles. They are artists. […]
My main conclusion thus far is that we should pay particularly attention to load-bearing futures. […]
Pay closer attention to the track record of Futurism-with-a-capital-F. It is often synonymous with the view-from-capital, and its optimistic storytelling masks a political agenda.
Polyfuturism
This one by Theo Priestley is directly in line with my questioning above. He goes quite a bit further and is more critical than I am, but exposes very well the chasm between a very strategy-focused form of foresight and one that considers transformational change (Spencer’s term), diversity, and culture. Priestley believes, and I agree, that too much focus on business needs obfuscates some futures, which is “why cultural futurism, or as I want to call it, Polyfuturism, needs to become a pivotal and central theme in all future studies and foresight practice going forward.”
As I mentioned at the beginning, futures thinking can be used as a lens, so you can read this piece and the one above purely for the discussion about forms of futures, but in this one you can also think about all the variations he talks about (polynesian, queer, indigenous, solarpunk, protopian futures, and more) as potentials, things that could happen but that ‘we’ too often ignore. Which then brings us back to last week’s article by ADH, An Alternate History of Human Potential. There are moral reasons to include a greater diversity of people, but if morals aren’t enough, it’s also ‘just’ a lot of ignored potential we are missing on.
The World has raced towards The Singularity without question but beyond this point everyone has stopped thinking about what the possible or preferable futures could look like and how society could be shaped. […]
The list [of futurisms] is endless and yet all are ignored in pursuit of strategy, profit and ultimately, conformity. Whilst many are steeped in purely speculative science fiction the concepts still form part of cultural ideologies and movements that exist today. […]
Projecting the future often presents a similar problem: The object is foregrounded, while the behavioral impact is occluded. The “Jetsons idea” of jetpacking and meals in a pill missed what actually has changed: The notion of a stable career, or the social ritual of lunch. […]
The future we think we want may not be the preferred outcome that another culture wishes to see manifest and so Polyfuturism has to become part of the discipline irrespective of what the technology, corporate strategy or national interest is.
The downward spiral of technology
Where Karpf critiques the WIRED to Silicon Valley connection and its invention of a future that didn’t pan out, and Priestley critiques the ‘strategification’ of foresight which is not eventing more diverse futures. Here Thomas Klaffke shows us where both of these problems have led us; to tech that is purely profit-focused, is getting less useful, not more, and increasingly enshittified. In this issue of his excellent Creative Desctruction newsletter, Klaffke attaches takes by Ted Gioia, Ed Zitron, Gita Jackson, Cal Newport, and wisdom from philosopher Ivan Illich to show how far we’ve strayed from using our tools, and towards being led by them.
The point is: These technologies aren’t all bad! However, we now create and apply them in a way that doesn’t serve humanity (or, to even think broader, all of nature) but rather a system that prioritizes profits above all else. […]
One of the key problems of our current age is that we’ve focused too much on the ideas of “the engineer” – I mean this in the broadest sense – and their mechanistic perspective rather than looking at non-technological or non-mechanistic solutions and innovations to our problems. […]
The crucial thing however, is the approach! Solving climate change requires system change, solving inequality requires system change, solving racism requires system change, solving the mental health crisis requires system change…
The problem is not that the “machine” of humanity, of earth is broken and therefore needs an upgrade. The problem is that we think of it as a “machine”.
The sublimation hour
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2402.20 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3154 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
1 comment:
Facsinating stuff. I think we could use a lot more future speculation right now, since monumental changes are likely to come at us so blazingly fast — the more creative and positive potentials we can imagine seems to at lease slightly improve our odds of humanity landing in one of those, then the more generally assumed doomer’s dystopia. But yes, even our utopias seem both shaped by capitalism and to serve capitalism’s project.
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