The object of posterity’s scorn

Bruce Sterling

Forward

What is futurism: science, engineering or industry? Bruce Sterling seeks answers in its strange birth, its hopeful present and its forgotten future

Visionaries, prophets and seers are common to all mankind. But only societies with science can breed futurists.

Business wants to know where to put its money tomorrow. This is "modernisation". Combine the aggressive confidence of science and the speculative needs of business, and you get that unique Western omen-reader, the futurist. His basic task: to foresee what will become "modern" while it is still futuristic. It’s dodgy work, but someone has to try it.

Since no mere human being can possibly know the future, futurism is always peculiar and sometimes hazardous. The precursor work of all futurism, published way back in 1795, was the Marquis de Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit . Condorcet was a brilliant Enlightenment mathematician who daringly threw himself into French revolutionary politics. While hiding underground from the Terror, Condorcet wrote his heartfelt forecast of a golden, rational, technocratic world. They caught him. He died in jail.

Contemporary futurism first appeared in 1901, in a British magazine, The Fortnightly Review . These essays by the young H. G. Wells were grandly titled "Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought" . Wells was a star pupil of "Darwin’s bulldog", T. H. Huxley, so Wells was keen to recast the human past and future in Huxleyan, agnostic, evolutionary terms.

Wellsian futurity is a bracing global lab experiment in which the destiny of mankind can be rationally engineered. Wells enjoyed startling popular success until the passage of time wore him out. Then he penned his last work, Mind at the End of its Tether , in which he claimed there would be no more history, and no more future either.

Futurism somehow went on without Wells, and nowadays is performed in four basic ways, which are well established and have not changed much in decades. These are, in strict order of weirdness: (1) consensus, (2) extrapolation, (3) historical analogy and (4) "generating paths to futurity".

"Consensus" means surveying the people who are breaking new ground, and looking for unifying trends. Futurists of this ilk are Delphi pollsters, venture capitalists, gizmo websites and so forth.

"Extrapolation" takes the statistics generated by business and government and anticipates the curve. Typical players here would be Gartner, RAND, Herman Kahn, Donald Rumsfeld, the Club of Rome, Worldwatch Institute, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and many others living and dead.

"Historical analogy" is commonly the home ground for future-minded political activists: Newt Gingrich, Francis Fukuyama, Gandhi, Václav Havel in his more expansive moods. These people wave the flag for "becoming the change you want to see".

"Generating paths to futurity" throws up the most difficult, dicey milieu : the territory of scenario mavens, human-potential zealots, posthumanists, survivalists, extropians, deep greens, singularitarians, Steve Jobs, and science-fiction writers.

Let’s consider how the futurism business works out as a practical, everyday matter. Let’s imagine that you are a big capitalist investor, and you are thinking about dropping X million pounds (dollars, euros, yen…) to create a plant that assembles refrigerators. You already know that you can do it. You have ideas where you would put it. What you don’t know is whether it is worth your effort and expense.

You might hire a futurist to help you figure that out.

A futurist of Type One, "consensus", will get his interns to collate all the refrigeration industry’s magazines and websites, and will gather the scuttlebutt at refrigeration conferences. Then he’ll tell you that the industry’s mavens have offshored the refrigeration business to Korea and China. Nobody beats the "China price", so you had better become a financier or distributor, not yesterday’s blue-collar manufacturer. After all, that’s what everyone else does. That’s common sense.

A futurist of Type Two, "extrapolation", will coldly examine your inputs, outputs and market statistics. He knows that refrigerators are major white-goods purchases bought once every eight years. So he’s looking for affluent young couples starting new homes, well-paid consumers having kids, who will need big fridges to feed the growing family. After sniffing around, he’ll tell you that since austerity came in, young people don’t get married, don’t have kids, don’t have jobs, and are still using their parents’ refrigerators. So it’s wisest that you not build anything or hire anyone, at least until the economy turns around.

The futurist of Type Three, "historical analogy", will tell you all about depressions. You’re in one, and your reluctance to invest capital and hire workers for your refrigerator plant is a major part of that historical problem. Depressions will go away eventually – unless they turn into Dark Ages. The Chinese had a Dark Age for donkeys’ years, but now the Chinese are on their feet and thriving, which is why everybody’s going over there. Awesome thing, Chinese history.

The Type Four futurist will be severely orthogonal and outside-the-box. He will likely call refrigerators into question as the oversized and hazardous relics of an outdated and unsustainable consumer society. He may recommend a sustainable, ubiquitous, networked and shareable "refrigeration peripheral".

So now you know all about it. Simple, eh? This summary might make you wonder why a futurism industry even exists. The truth is, futurism is never an industry. Futurism is a craft, a thing of the atelier, of the midnight lamp. It’s not all about the glamorous shiny gadgets and the foggy jargon. You need a certain passion and conviction, a certain British depth-of-mind and Continental savoir faire , to wind the future up and set it loose.

Futurist bestsellers are many, yet few of these works last into futurity. Yesterday’s forecasts – even the broadest, deepest, most insightful, best-informed speculations – are rarely remembered, except as the comic objects of posterity’s scorn. Compare that to creative flights of forward-thinking visionary fancy, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Frankenstein is the darling of women’s-studies groups and is about as secure in human memory as any novel can get.

Futurism is outside time, yet topical. It is metaphysical, yet journalistic. Its products pass quickly from the scene. True futurists are not infallible seers. They’re not witchy oracles of mystic pronouncement. Such people are universally desired, yet they have never existed.

We should count ourselves lucky to have certain other people: sharp-eyed, sharp-eared, contemplative people who are able to acquaint us with developments that are genuinely new to us – new, and also of real significance. That skill is not supernatural. But it can transform our world view, and, with time, it will change our world.