Meet and Greet: Who Owns Our Futures?
Thanks to all who came to the Meet and Greet and joined our first Speculative Futures Ottawa discussion.
This summary is for those who were not able to attend, and those who were present at the event but wish to revisit their thoughts.
Venue Sponsor:
“I am just a sheet metal worker, how would I know anything about the future of my city? ”
anonymous participant @ 100in1Day Ottawa
Most people pay attention to their own individual futures more closely, and yet we tend to take our collective futures for granted. What we need to recognize is that we all have a role in not only a single future but also the desire and responsibility towards the collective ones. Although there could be multiple futures, who takes ownership of exhausting the possibilities and find the most “preferable” futures for humankind? Do the capitalists own our futures? Do the dataists own our futures? Do the writers of fictional “what might happen” own our futures? Do we each individually own a tiny insignificant sliver of our collective “futures”?
The possessive “our” implies a collective ownership, but what does it mean to “own” something that is both abstract and has not yet arrived? Perhaps we don’t need to be “better”. Perhaps the question of “who owns our futures” simply asks for re-examining the desires and responsibilities we share as global citizens.
“What do we want to want?”
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
When we speak in terms of the multiplicity of everything beyond the present moment, future becomes futures — also a financial investment term. Can we buy our futures? Do we speculate or hedge? Do we have to be correct about our depiction of all the possible futures? Can we plan sufficiently so we are prepared to respond to the unexpected events we have not predicted?
Our collective ethics, language, and value of that society are being shaped by our communications. Being bombarded with a massive amount of information every moment should make us question, “do we have control over our values anymore?”
At what point in history did having continuous access to information using a digital device became a necessity and a core social value?
When do we know that it is necessary to demand equal digital access be seen as a fundamental right?
Today, our society is evolving very quickly with the developments in digital technology and an abundance of information to be accessed. Are we moving everyone, regardless of their abilities and situations, along with advancement? Or, have we not been moving everyone along with advancement when technological developments have already elevated our capabilities far beyond what people living in the 19th century could ever imagine?
It is interesting to compare the depiction and prediction of future events in fictional works from the past with current ones. The understanding of “what is possible” has evolved very differently. The possible futures we are capable fo predicting today are vastly different from the possible futures from the past: the abstraction of language has changed, the value system has shifted, and the commonly-understood ethics has been challenged. The differences speak to us that the ability to make sense of what is to come depends on the ability to self-curate, filter, and allocate resources when faced with the increasing complexity of information available to us. These abilities are the affordance for envisioning and predicting our collective futures.
Are we moving into a future where digital technology has reached the second half of the exponential curve of acceleration, leaving us pondering how we can improve ourselves to be more compatible with the machines, yet having no real alternatives to choose from at all? Has digital technology became the only “parameters” for our possible futures, or are there futures where we have not been able to imagine a shift, let alone to predict one?
While all that specificity has some value and engages wide interest, the primary value in the study of the future is to accomplish three things. First is to widen the user or the participants’ horizons by making them aware of things likely to influence their concerns. Second is to give them advice, clues and information as to how to relate those future developments to their present actions. Finally, and most important of all, is to pry out of the reader, user or recipient of the futures work an awareness of their assumptions about the future so that those assumptions can be examined, questioned, challenged, and perhaps changed.
Second Thoughts page 789 in Futures Vol 28 # 8, 1996 by Elsevier Science Ltd.
