Preface

It might be appropriate if this page, and all the others, were blank. It’s often said that the future is an unwritten book. This book, however, is not itself the future, even if you have selected it as your near-future reading. I have not tried to summarize here all of the important and often contradictory ideas about the future that have been expressed so far in human culture, all throughout history. It would be hard to do so, even in the most telegraphic way, in a short book of this sort, and a commentary truly adequate to the task might not fit in any book. Instead, I offer a discussion of how the future has been productively imagined, mainly in Western culture and particularly in the United States. My focus here is on ways that the development of technologies (particularly computing and media technologies) have been bound up with ideas about the future—how future-making has been part of the development of computing and digital media, and how computers have also prompted new hopes and ideas about the future.¹

In this book, I seek to show that it is possible to imagine the future systematically and in sufficient detail, that one can share the imagination of the future with others, and that it is possible to work to develop specific innovations that are components of such a future. By doing so, people, communities, and organizations can influence what lies ahead of all of us. This is not a view of the future as a fog-enshrouded landscape or as something seen in a crystal ball. The future as I discuss it is more like an unwritten book. We can’t just think about how to view it—we need to write it. The future is not something to be predicted, but to be made.

That’s a powerful idea. Of course, researchers, writers, inventors, and others do try to make new futures all the time. But the idea that the future is inevitable, something that can at best be predicted, is actually quite prevalent culturally. If we look ahead to the future only to react, we might be able to improve our chances for survival—but to what end? If we take a view of this sort, dominated by prediction, we give up on many of our own abilities and dreams, trying at best to surf toward profit on a sea of change or perhaps simply trying to avoid drowning in it.

Of course there are good reasons to develop and use predictive powers. If we can determine that an asteroid is going to collide with the Earth, perhaps we can send a drilling crew into space to destroy it. Or, to leave the absurd aside for a moment, after predicting that our climate will change due to human industry and activity, we could decide to do everything possible to stop or reverse that trend. It’s appropriate to predict both those occurrences that are out of our direct control—natural catastrophes—and those that are consequences of our action. But a concept of the future that involves only prediction and reaction, rather than the development of goals and progress toward them, is incomplete. Tracking hurricanes may be prudent, but it is not all we should be doing regarding the future, and will not serve for the development of a better society.

This book was developed specifically for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, considered as a part of this series from the beginning. As I have written it, I’ve tried to always keep the focus on what I consider essential knowledge about the future. There are certain academic activities and business practices that deal quite explicitly with the future, known variously as futures studies, futurology, and scenario planning. To those who find these endeavors useful: very well. This book is not about them, however.² The most essential approach to the future, from my perspective, is found in future-making. Specifically, it’s seen in the already-existing work of writers, artists, designers, inventors, and other innovators who developed and detailed the core components of futures they envisioned. It’s also found in the continuing practices of these recent and current future-makers.

I work as a critic and theorist, and as a maker of poetry, digital art, and related sorts of work, in the field that has been called new media and digital media. My teaching and discussions with people motivated me to write this book. Over the years, as I’ve discussed this digital media field with a variety of people, including many students, I have found they often develop rather skewed and unhelpful views of the work of new media pioneers such as Vannevar Bush (author of the essay “As We May Think”) and Ted Nelson (author of Literary Machines and Computer Lib/Dream Machines). Even those who have closely read the work of these thinkers, and who think quite favorably about these early contributors to the field, often conclude that they were good at predicting some things—for example, they predicted certain aspects of hypertext and the World Wide Web quite accurately, quite impressively—but that they unfortunately failed to predict other things.

This is a bit like saying Thomas Edison predicted the light bulb but failed to predict certain things about it. As it happens, in these cases, neither Bush nor Nelson developed complete public systems that would typically be considered working predecessors to the World Wide Web; they did not complete and illuminate the practical, everyday bulb that we use today in the most material sense. (The same cannot be said about some others I will discuss in this book, such as Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay; they did build the future of digital media by producing working systems that people used.) Without actually completing the present-day World Wide Web, Bush and Nelson have nevertheless clearly been makers of the future, not just predictors of it. Rather than mumbling vague notions and exhortations, they provided blueprints for the development of networked information systems, helping to lead computing to where it is today. We are living in their future.

By the way, Thomas Edison wasn’t the first one with a light bulb, any more than Henry Ford was the inventor of the car. Bulbs had been lit up long before Edison started working on developing one in 1878; Alessandro Volta even showed off a glowing wire, without a bulb around it, all the way back in 1800. What Edison invented, after a lot of trial and error, was a practical light bulb that could be manufactured, sold, and widely used. Trial and error is an important technique that leads to new developments, but having imagination, vision, and deliberate goals is important as well. Making the future can seldom be done without a plan and prototype, and if the idea is to work toward an intentional future, such a vision is particularly important. The 90 percent perspiration may be the larger share of success by far, but producing that is just exercise unless it is mixed with 10 percent inspiration.

In this book, I discuss future-making of several sorts, with my particular emphasis on those types of future-making that are involved with computing and culture. The essential knowledge I am trying to uncover in this discussion is not limited to a particular field of inquiry or to particular practices of invention and art. It is an understanding of how the future has been constructed and how we, today, can continue constructing it. As I identify types of future-making that have been done effectively, I will highlight and summarize the underlying principles and ideas that are at play. These, as best as I can identify them, are the essential points for those who aim to be future-makers—whether they are entrepreneurs, inventors, activists, artists, writers, or otherwise directed ahead.

Notes

1. For another take on how the future has been viewed in the United States, see Samuel 2009, which traces through U.S. cultural attitudes to the future in the twentieth century. Samuel fits several of the technological topics of this book into a broader historical framework; his focus is on historicizing cultural attitudes in the United States, though, and is not the same as mine: uncovering principles and practices for future-making.

2. After I wrote this book and just before it went to press, Jennifer Gidley’s short book, also entitled The Future (but with the subtitle “A Very Short Introduction”), was published (Gidley 2017). For those interested in academic and research approaches to the future of this sort, Gidley seems an ideal person to discuss them, as she is president of the World Futures Studies Federation.