Is the past, present, and future fixed?
Is there a case against path dependency?
Many futurists are comfortable with the idea of alternative futures. It is the notion that, from any specific point in time looking forward, there is a multiplicity of possible futures that could occur. Each of these possible futures is competing to come in to being, depending upon the right set of circumstances giving rise to each of those distinct futures. However, what happens if we adopt this mode of thinking to the past and the present as well as the future? Could we reasonably consider alternative histories and alternative presents? What would be the benefit of doing that? And what techniques would help us to generate those alternative pasts and presents?
We often think of the past in terms of being fixed by what actually happened. And yet, at any fixed point of time in the past, many alternatives presented themselves to the people of that time. In the present, we largely experience the past decisions of our ancestors, whether from the distant past or from a more recent past. Decisions could have been made differently that would have opened up a wide variety of alternative possibilities for us today, but we accept that path dependency.
We don’t have to delve too far back in time to think about this issue. For example, how would things be different now if Scotland were to have voted for independence in 2014? How would things have worked out if the United Kingdom had voted to remain in the EU in 2016? We know that neither of these things happened, but if we were to assume that they had, then we get an interesting range of alternative possible outcomes for today. This speculation provides us with a set of paths not travelled to arrive at different states for the present.
This is quite obviously an exercise in speculative fiction. As it happens, there is a large and well-established genre of fiction that is known as ‘Alternative Histories’. Normally the fiction starts at a key moment in history, usually a key point of bifurcation, that goes on to examine the road not travelled. For example, there are many books along the lines of ‘The Guns of The South’ by Harry Turtledove, where, at some key point in the American Civil War, the Confederacy are triumphant. Alternatively, another line might be such as ‘Pavane’ by Keith Roberts, where Elizabeth I is assassinated in 1588 and the Spanish Armada successfully lands in England. The key point here is to acknowledge the roads not travelled in the past; and to use the techniques of foresight to explore what might then have been.
The principal reason for doing this is to understand better the present. In much of our thinking, we have an inclination towards path dependency. This is the situation where we take as axiomatic the legacy of the past. In terms of the futures triangle, we call it the weight of history. Developing a sense for alternative histories gives us a platform from which we can consider alternative iterations of the present. How our current lives could have been different.
If we rely upon the present as our starting point for the study of the future, we have already closed off a number of potential avenues into the future simply because we are unable to think of an alternative starting point. This results in a range of futures that look remarkably like the present, only more so. For example, following the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, there was much talk about a post-capitalist future. Very little of this talk amounted to much because the social and institutional fabric of capitalism was not varied in this thinking. If the foundations of a political and economic system are left in place, we cannot really be surprised that the successor system looks very similar to what had come before. One could argue that Russian history in the twentieth century provides a number of examples to support the point — the failure of imperialism, followed by the failure of communism, followed by the failure of capitalism, and an expected near term failure of kleptocracy.
If we want to consider radical alternatives to the present, onto which we can hang alternative futures that have a radically different tinge themselves, then we might like to reach back to develop a set of alternative histories from which such a timeline could be developed. For example, in English law, the concept of corporate personality can be traced back to the case of Salomon v A. Salomon and Company in 1897. The judgement was made that a company is separate to the directors and shareholders of that company, and it has its own legal personality. From this decision, much of the managerial and financial capitalism of the twentieth century ensued. But what if the case has been decided the other way? What if a company were not to be separate from its directors and shareholders? How might twentieth century capitalism have developed? And where would that have placed us today?
In more modern times the US Communications Decency Act of 1996 held that providers of ‘interactive computer services’ are platforms in law and not publishers. This is a piece of legislation that has paved the way for the development of social media as we understand it today and provided the foundations for platform capitalism. What if this legislation had not been passed? How different would the world of today be? This is not an idle question. In an attempt to counter some of the excesses of the online world, current legislators are seeking to nullify the Communications Decency Act in an attempt to travel back in time and to reset the present in an endeavour to unlock a future with far less pornography, exploitation, and hate online. If the Communications Decency Act is an example of some of the benefits of considering an alternative history as a way to generate an alternative present, and then pave the way for an alternative future, the question arises of how is this achieved?
One technique that is frequently used in our practice is gaming to generate alternatives. If we think of games as narrative systems, we can use them to develop alternative narratives about the past, present, and future. The games can be closed — which means that they are played out in terms of their own internal logic — or they can be open — which allows the players to develop an internal logic of their own. They can be co-operative in order to develop a collaborative narrative, or they can be competitive in order to develop an opposed narrative. The key outcome from the gaming process is the development of a narrative that might be better expressed as an alternative timeline.
Naturally, these alternative narratives are fictional and speculative. They could be derived from the extrapolation of existing trends, or they could be derived from a different axiomatic set completely. This type of speculative futures fiction has been quite common in security and defence circles for some time, and it should come as no surprise that the military engages science fiction writers in the creation of speculative fictional future scenarios. The technique has started to gain traction in commercial and financial circles, especially where there is a degree of inter-play in global financial markets, such as a disorderly Italian exit from the Euro or a US sovereign default.
From developing a narrative and timeline, it is a short hop to develop a set of fictional characters to overlay on top of the basic plotline and to create a set of situations that draw out the drama inherent in those plotlines. This can help the practitioner to develop a full-bodied piece of speculative futures fiction. It doesn’t need to be science fiction, although the futures practitioner will be mindful that the state of technology doesn’t stand still over a longer period of time.
The tools of foresight can be used to develop a set of alternative histories and alternative presents, in addition to a range of alternative futures. If the object of the futures exercise is to develop a range of radically different futures, perhaps this might be a more appropriate starting point? Gaming provides a technique to develop a set of alternative timelines, through which plot and character development can be undertaken. In this way, we can circumvent the problem of path dependency in much of futures thinking and develop a fuller range alternative futures. It ought to make us better futurists producing better futures.
© Stephen Aguilar-Millan 2023
