Why is the future so predictable?
This article is an introduction to the Artifacts from the Future course that Filippo Cuttica and I will be teaching at CIID in Copenhagen from the 15th-19th of July this year as part of the 2019 summer school. The course is in collaboration with the United Nations and is loosely structured around participants contemplating and working with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In this article we will discuss 5 commonly seen tropes in the predominant pop-cultural narratives about our future, either promulgated through the entertainment industry or through various corporate efforts. 5 tropes that this class seeks to challenge.
Close your eyes and describe the future. Try it for a second… Chances are that the images that are flashing in front of your minds eye are the images of pop-culture sci-fi; maybe you see the cyber-dystopia of Blade Runner, or perhaps you are seeing the gleaming “green mega-city” which is the favored trope of real-estate developers and capitalist tech companies alike. Perhaps these visions are accompanied with a mild sensation of dread… or disbelief… or something… an itch that’s hard to define. A feeling that something is not quite right. If you are felling this, then great — you are like us! Together, let’s dig a little deeper and scratch away at some of the underlying assumptions of our neon-chrome shiny, shiny ‘future’.
The Myth of Eternal Growth:
Some of the most pervasive images of the future are the ones created by corporations and industry. We are subjected to these constantly; whether it’s in advertising that promises a bright sparkly AI powered future or in real-estate ads that show images of sanitized street-scapes framed by gleaming glass eco-towers (don’t worry! it’s ‘sustainable’!) or alternately, in Hollywood films where our hero fights a few corrupt bad eggs who are spoiling the bright and abundant future for the rest of us. These are fantasies of perpetual growth and unlimited natural resources. These images are seductive in their perfection. Desirable, not because of their realism — but because they are consumerist lullabies, telling us to just go to sleep — we are all going to be alright. In this version of the future, capitalism and the corporate powers that be, have somehow innovated their way to abundance fueled by our collective consumption — all before the ice caps melt. This narrative is predicated on everything being… well… just like now, just shinier and more ‘future’ in an Apple-aestheticized way. Usually these fantasies center on cities, with very few depictions of the countryside, because it’s a more less unchallenged futurist truism that we will all be living in mega-cities. A truism that conveniently allows us to ignore the countryside and the decimation of the rural (more on this later).
In this version of our collective urban future, the mega-city is something akin to an indoor mall; clean, ordered, often magically sparse of people. Everything is blissfully the same. We’ll still have skyscrapers, they will just be taller, greener and more ‘future’. We’ll still have malls, coca-cola, Nike sneakers, access to clean water, bearable temperatures, free movement of capital and goods and probably not a lot of corporate taxation… just like now. Yet, most of these things we know are unlikely to continue in their present form: climate change is (surprise!) real and we already know that the supply-chains that keep mega-cities and modern late-stage capitalism going are going to be much more fragile — drought, natural disasters, mass climate migration etc., will most likely lead to an era of post-abundance more akin to the middle-ages; where everyone except the rich is hungry, disease ridden and living eight people to a one-room hovel. Yet, somehow we keep perpetuating this version of the future. A vision of the future that only serves the short-termist corporations eager to wring out the last profits before it all goes to hell.
The Myth of Sci-Fi Dystopia:
On the flip side is the Blade Runner dystopia. A neon nightmare where corporations have run amok, governments are shady and corrupt, the earth is in climate upheaval and the technology depicted is almost always in the service of suppression and violence. Most of this is sci-fi — and as such almost always based on extrapolating the present in to the future to give it an air of familiarity.
Down this path it’s easy to be tempted in to the mindset of sci-fi dystopia given recent events: from Cambridge Analytica, to state and corporate use of large scale surveillance programs to social media enabled shootings, toxic sludge, tsunamis, agrarian dust-bowls and so on. Indeed if we give in to this version of the future as an extrapolation of the present, then the future bodes bleak.
However, there is a two-part problem with taking sci-fi as an indicator of where we are headed; One; sci-fi needs a plot and drivers to take that plot forward. Sci-fi, being a narrative genre specifically centered around technology, is prone to using technology as a character in itself, with definite characteristics: it is typically either good or bad, either something that aids our hero or threatens to undo them. Yet technology, though never neutral, is rarely on an ethical binary and is much more complex and multi-faceted than so: the iphone put unlimited access to information in our pocket but also played havoc with our attention spans. Penicillin saved millions, but is also complicit in the rise of super-resistant bacteria. Bacteria that in some sort of Faustian bargain may, in turn, wipe out millions and so it goes, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut. Consequently, an explicit ask on our participants for our course is to not think in terms of mono-narratives and binaries but instead explore multiple applications and their consequences, good or bad, of a given technology.
Secondly, we treat future-casting not as bounded by extrapolation. Extrapolation is a useful tool for anchoring a believable future in a recognizable present, but when treated as a plot driver it’s almost inevitable where we will end up: doom and dystopia. Yet our collective culture is full of dystopian narratives which haven’t quite come true — in the book 1984, George Orwell reacts to authoritarian tendencies he was seeing in society circa second world war. Today, surveillance exists, but so do various strategies of counter-surveillance at all levels: from the grassroots to the institutional. Future-casting then needs to unbound itself from the idea of prediction and extrapolation and align itself to the idea of telling contra-narratives to the immediately obvious. Through this stated goal, not only do we believe that we can tell more accurate and multi-faceted stories, but also that we can propose futures that are outside of the dreariness of dystopia. Stories that can reveal alternative applications of tech and hence strive toward narratives of actionable societal progress, rather than acceptance of the worst parts of the status-quo.
The Exclusion of the Political:
Moving our gaze from sci-fi and back in to the realms of advertising and corporate future vision videos, we see the refusal of dealing explicitly with the political.
As discussed before, sci-fi has a tendency towards over-simplification; the world is a bad place, and hence the politics are bad. In corporate vision videos on the other hand, politics are conspicuously absent—or only political through the things they omit rather than what they explicitly include. But politics, despite being out of vogue, is one of the key measures of societal progress and one that is much more pervasive and impactful than the iphone will ever be. Feudalism, democracy, fascism and socialism are factors that have shaped our mortality rates, our standard of living, our rights and freedoms, our technological progress and so on. However, it’s almost impossible to discuss these factors without discussing the technologies that likewise enabled or counteracted them—our societies are shaped by technology, usually organized by public and private agents under some sort of ideology and law—and vice versa.
Yet the future narratives told by corporates almost always tells a story devoid of politics — or one where technology just simply lives alongside the status quo. According to the Microsofts, IBMs and other tech giants of the world the future holds just more of the same; albeit more efficient and seamless. We will toil at the same office buildings and look at the same graphs (now on holo-screen!), power-suite clad women will step out of futuristic looking airports and order taxis on ever more convenient devices. We will be able to unlock our doors using only our voices and we will all be able to shop in ever-more novel ways, with ever more novel delivery mechanisms. The world is sleek, measured and organized with the cold rationality of efficiency and consumerism.
What they omit from these films is any kind of dialogue with the societal processes and phenomena that shape our lives beyond consumerism: what is the form of government? What are people’s attitudes to gender and sexuality? Will we still have gendered bathrooms? What about the glass ceiling? Is the woman exiting the autonomous car about to walk in to a boardroom full of old white men, who are paid more than her? What about race, ethnicity, geo-politics and so on (and no, including a brown person in the narrative does not count as engaging with geo-politics or ethnicity). One could argue that it’s not a corporations job to be political, but that ludicrously underestimates the influence of corporations on our lives today. And although these videos are of course meant to be nothing more than ads, our worry is that this lack of imagination extends itself up in to the boardrooms and down in to the public. We simply come to expect that ‘convenience’ is the best technology can offer us and is at the core of what ‘users need’, rather than dream bigger about how technology can radically and truly empower people and progress societies forward for the good of all of us. If we are to move past the myopic needs of the user, and in to a more expansive idea of societal needs, we need more practitioners who are trained to think about policy and progress, rather than just the market.
The Exclusion of the Other:
With the exclusion of the political and the narrow focus on the homogeneous ‘user’, future narratives also often erase differences and ignore or exclude whole swathes of people or phenomena that don’t fit neatly in to the narrative. As an example, when have you last seen the countryside dealt with in detail in a futures video or article? Dealing with the countryside forces us to deal with inconvenient problems like climate change, overpopulation, rural blight, deforestation and dust-bowls as well as the huge swathes of people who still don’t live in mega-cities—and importantly don’t fit in to the corporate narrative of endless growth. This tendency to exclude anyone who doesn’t fall in to the ‘affluent western-centric middle class’ consumer bracket means we rarely deal with the futures of the poor, the discriminated against nor people of different genders and sexuality, blithely assuming that they are somehow ‘taken care off’ instead of explicitly and methodically including them in our narratives.
Meanwhile, Hollywood has a tendency to find new and interesting ways of enforcing the status-quo while pretending inclusion. The afro-futurism of Black Panther, while it’s important to celebrate the societal and cultural significance of the film as well as it’s attempt at an new aesthetics— it was also the story of a CIA-backed African nation quelling a black uprising. Likewise heroines in sci-fi are most often sultry and over-sexed, clad in futuristic protective garb which just also happens to cling tightly to their bodies (while male heroes tend to favor body armor with more shapely pectorals). Or we see the stereotype of the (almost always female) sex-bot — the ultimate neoliberal, misogynist fantasy: willing, unfeeling, always for sale. Contrast that with Fathers, which has a clear queer agenda. Or the writing of Ursula K. LeGuinn — most notable the Left Hand of Darkness which explicitly toys with the idea of a non-heteronormative society—or her (for me, personally) formative essay: A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be that explores a different, less masculine, form of innovation. Thankfully some of these tendencies are starting to be revoked, with the inclusion of alternate futures: afro-futurism, Chinese Chaohuan (a Chinese acceleration of technology-centered Magical Realism), Gulf or Khaleeji futurism and even woke Space Opera — yet most of these exist primarily in the realms of entertainment and fiction, rather than policy and progress.
The Exclusion of Reality:
You may have noticed a theme during the course of reading this article: the tendency to refuse the world as it really is within certain aspects of the future casting discipline. It often refuses to take the mess of humanity seriously; distilling everything down in to neat utopian or dystopian visions while cutting out the pieces that don’t fit the narrative.
On the other hand, much of future casting refuses to take the reality of technology seriously. In almost all depictions of technology we only see the device itself — not the system that supports it. Asking Alexa to read the weather out loud or to play Ariana Grande disguises an intricate network of technology, fiber optic cable, server farms, foxconn-esque factories, natural resource extraction, labor, geo-politics and global supply lines. Likewise, everything you see in a sci-fi film or vision video will also need to rely on an equally complex, future version of a supply-chain with all the geo-political realities that we have today. Will the chips and circuitry in Tom Cruise’s next Mission Impossible laser doo-dad come from conflict minerals mined in the Congo? Yes, probably. Will our seamless shopping experiences be reliant on large-scale global trade networks and the exploitation of cheap labour? Possibly. Some believe automation will take the place of cheap labor, yet the question of what then becomes of ‘cheap labor’ is still unanswered. Hence, as future-casters we have to move from the fetishization of the object, and start fetishizing the network of relationships that our objects are embedded in: supply chains, politics, economics, ecology, culture and so on. These are the stories that we need to tell: we need to tell stories not of how the object or technology looks or the details of what it does—but rather how does the world look like with the object or technology in it.
The course we teach aims to create future-casters who can make these stories come to life. We need futures-thinkers and practitioners of all ideologies, disciplines and vantage points, who are ready to take a much more nuanced stance towards technology rather than just simply being subjected to it. At the end of the day, the future must be ours, as all of humanity—and the shaping of it must be a collective, grounds-up imperative, rather than left to careerist politicians and non-democratically elected corporate leaders. The only way we can do that, is by actively taking control of the narrative of our collective future. We sincerely hope you will join us in Copenhagen, July 15th to 19th 2019.
Read more about the Summer School and all the other available courses, the course itself here—and you can enroll directly here.
