Will The Real Futurists Please Stand Up?

If there was a time in history I would have loved to witness firsthand, one of them would have been to visit the World’s Fair, Futurama, and World of Tomorrow back in the 1930s and 40s. The Roaring Twenties, with all its decadence and "fuck you, economy" passion, gave way to a time of unbridled imagination and envisioning future possibilities with no constraints. We hadn’t even harnessed the atom at that point, emerging from one war and economic depression to rebound and reimagine the world around us filled with wonder.

So what the f*ck happened to all that?

Around the same time as the first set of World’s Fairs kicked off, H.G. Wells coined the term ‘foresight’. As it stands today, it still encompasses what we know as futurology, futurism (not the art form), future studies, and so on. It’s worth looking at the Wikipedia entry for the full history of how the profession grew from its origins because it moved through phases of imagining the future to providing statistical probabilities of several futures.

“I began to see the future not as a totally impenetrable realm about which we can know absolutely nothing, but rather as an exciting frontier, offering enormous possibilities but also extraordinary dangers. We cannot possibly know everything that lies ahead, but with effort we can glimpse the possibilities of our future. This weak but incredibly valuable knowledge is critically important if we are to make wise decisions.” — Edward Cornish, founder of the World Future Society

One of the biggest modern shapers of foresight and future studies was Edward Cornish—founder of the World Future Society. Back in the 60s and 70s he and the organization were pretty instrumental in helping to formalize a lot of the methods and tools practitioners used, bringing the profession to the White House no less. Unfortunately, the WFS today is nothing but a website and online forum that can only be described as worse than a subreddit. It holds no cachet or influence anymore and the legacy that Cornish spent decades building was bought out and handed to people who couldn’t future themselves out of a plastic bag.

There is some poetic irony in that the World Future Society only exists now in the Wayback Machine. The current WFS owners have sadly razed the Wikipedia entry to the ground to remove its 60-year history.

However, history lessons aside, something raw disappeared in the modernity of futurology. “Futurists are practitioners of the foresight profession, which seeks to provide organizations and individuals with images of the future to help them prepare for contingencies and to maximize opportunities.” as the Wiki entry concludes and that is where the magic ends.

In a relentless pursuit to be accepted as a tool of the corporate and political world, futurists became just another bunch of McKinsey knock-offs, using their methods to ensure that their current employer can hit their KPIs and Quarterly results, or strategize for the next wild card event (which I may add, it seems nobody predicted Covid at all or even helped their corporate employer to prepare for a pandemic). It’s now about predicting marketing, social trends, and consumer intents instead of dreaming and extrapolating what could be.

This has, unfortunately, become a problem in itself because as it becomes nothing more than trend spotting and extrapolation of percentages and blog posts so too has it attracted an unsavory bunch of charlatans who haven’t spent a single day on a foresight project, study, report, talk and so on.

Throw a dart at the LinkedIn community and you’ll spear several hundred in one shot who claim to be Futurist but on checking their background you find they have nothing but Sales Assistants for Boots (Retail Futurist), Fashion Futurist (Changing Room Assistants at Zara), Planetary Futurist (owned a florist) to Education Futurist (ran an online marketing course on LinkedIn) listed.

And they make more money than the practitioners because they’re not buried under reports and statistics but out there on podcasts and keynotes spitting out whatever listicles they read on a PowerPoint written by a GPT model at a creative agency.

Futurism has become a cheap hobby for everyone who just looks up Google Word trends and extrapolates what the hottest thing for next year is going to be. Being a Futurist is like being the new Influencer or Evangelist. It’s a badge that tries to separate itself from the previous generation’s jaded job title that nobody wants anymore because the last mega-trending subject sullied it. It doesn’t take much to be a futurist now, just tweet/x something on a hashtag about your industry, add “AI” or “Spatial Computing” in the sentence, and voila —

F U T U R I S T I C.

If you’re talking about a particular subject or trend and it’s already here then this is not foresight it is marketing; you’re an evangelist. You make money selling advisory services explaining what this means for people and companies to take advantage of it and stand at conferences showing people charts like the above and making bold statements about why it will become the norm in 3 years.

This nonsense spawned exponentially during the pandemic because, suddenly, the future of work was an easy target. People and execs panicked, and they didn’t know what the fuck was going to happen, so why not ask someone who calls themselves a Futurist who talks about the Future of Work, virtual work meetings, and metaverse workplaces? They’ll know how to handle this.

And then you have various strains of futurists, all trying to differentiate themselves by inventing something else to appear hip.

For context:

• Nowist — someone who can’t tell you about future possibilities but can talk all day long about what’s happening today.

  
  

• Near Futurist — someone who can’t tell you about future possibilities but can talk all day long about what’s happening tomorrow.

  
  

• Practical Futurist — someone who failed to get into Accenture but can talk all day long about strategy.

Shit, even I went by the title Anti-futurist at one point to get away from it all. Now I feel like a Hauntologist, a term derived from Hauntology, a word I found in a book that explained the feeling and lamentation of promised and imagined futures that failed to materialize.

So, now even the practicing futurists are ever so subtly removing or tweaking the title from their public profiles because there is little to be gained from the association with the term.

And you can’t criticize the profession. That’s bad juju. They’ll hunt you down with pitchforks behind the membership paywalls.

You can’t talk about the bad stuff and negative consequences in futurist outlooks openly either because futurism is supposed to be about tripping the light fantastic to utopia whilst you suck on some techno-optimists teat. I was asked several years ago to give an end keynote at an event in Peru on artificial intelligence. Make it happy they said. I didn’t, the realities of extrapolating many different scenarios means you can’t just tell them the fluffy stuff because that doesn’t prepare them for the economic reality — especially in a region that isn’t a typical Westernised first-world clone of Silicon Valley. You are bound to explain everything.

This is what separates some futurists from each other. There are those who will only spit the current narrative or positive Valley rhetoric because it will secure more work and make them more appealing to engage with as an influencer for the corporate shilling, and there are those who would rather tell it like it could be, warts and all with no compromise.

The very sad part though, is that there is no room for real imagination anymore in this brave new world of future studies.

If you take a look at the various narratives across futurology and possibilities of the future they are nowhere near as grandiose or as visionary as one hundred years ago. Back then, imagination was unbounded and unconstrained, unfettered by numbers and correlation but now visions are cocooned and constrained by technology and trend spotting and their perception of progress and change. There is nothing from the late 19th and early 20th century that wasn’t imagined for today, just the timelines were always a bit optimistic and funky. You can even find old cartoons of people using video-calling devices drawn in late 1800s.

But now? No-one is imagining, only copying what they’ve read in a Gartner report. Far too many people think that imagination is tied to money or investment or needs an existing technology to back it up. This is the fucking problem now. “I can’t imagine something big or wild because people won’t believe it or invest in it.” Who fucking cares?! We’ve lost the ability to dream better futures because we’ve been conditioned to believe there has to be a pitch deck that accompanies it.

Ask a TikTok futurist and you’ll get the usual crap like “we’ll all be wearing augmented reality glasses in the next 5 years” or “AI in healthcare and robotic surgery” or “digital culture in the metaverse”. Even the old guard like Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil have given up trying and regurgitating the same, tired ideas about nano-this and quantum-that.

Is there nothing new to imagine in futurism?

There is a little glimmer of hope though.

There is a method called Science Fiction Prototyping that combines the past with the present, including interviews with notable science fiction authors to provide the tools needed to “design the future with science fiction” and this is where the real future and direction of futurism lies, in a sense going back to its roots in science fiction and H.G. Wells to imagine bigger possibilities, both good and bad and putting them on display to inspire the public like we did before.

And no, the abomination that is CES does not count ffs.

To combine outrageous imagination with the various methodologies that sit within future studies could offer, oddly enough, potential futures in itself for the profession that is so stuck in the past that it has no real future. Even a school child imagines bigger and brighter visions of the possible and the probable and I should know, I interviewed a primary school year for a project and what they came up with was more fun, probable, positive and imaginative than those sitting on $500k contracts.

Being a futurist should be more about Gedankenexperimente than statistics. But we have lost the drive to put our thoughts out there because the current trend is to shoot anything down that doesn’t remotely feel real or achievable or backed by something you read on Arxiv. And so we end up in this cycle of repeating the same crap over and over but using the latest marketing term to keep the prediction fresh (see the trend above chart above as a reminder)

So now we near the end of this rant. Didn’t see it coming, did you…not much of a futurist are you, but then again you’re exactly what futurism does need — someone who hasn’t been soiled by the stuffy academia of it all or who doesn’t care about the keynote glamour but is genuinely interested in the agency they possess to not only imagine and inform but shape the future they want to see at the same time.

We will have positive and utopian and harmonic visions, protopian visions of an inclusive future, and dystopian visions that lead us to hell. The trick is knowing how to plan and prepare for every one of them and their possibilities and dangers, and to not be afraid to speak about them however harsh.

For every dystopian future, there is a positive one to imagine out of it that could occur from a single decision we all possess the power to influence but you must know hell to recognise heaven, and that’s the real power of futurism.

So, where have all the futurists gone? We’re still out there. Waiting. You might catch a glimpse of one in the corner of your eye at a conference, but if you turn to look they’ve vanished. Or try to take a photo of one but all that comes back is a blurred photo despite owning a 108MP smartphone camera.

I’ll end this piece by stating two things.

(1) There are not many futurists I respect anymore but those I do are all women.

(2) I scared some people by saying I trained a ChatGPT model for future studies and it was pretty effective once you knew how to use it. And that in itself tells you why we need to go back to the future.