In your opinion, why are futurists facing an increasing amount of antipathy from the public, as evidenced by what appears to be a rising rhetorical tide of "you promised me jetpacks" commentary and an uptick in articles and blog posts taking the futures field, or at least high profile practitioners, to task? One of the most scathing recent pieces in this trend was Evgeny Morozov's "The Naked at the TED," targeting the Khannas, and by extension, the Tofflers et al.
Here's my quick assessment:
1. Increasing economic, emotional and social uncertainty drives people to seek answers, insight and re-assurance
2. Both professional clients and regular people turn to whomever they can find for sensemaking and advice
3. They find most "futurists" in bed with the elites that they perceive to be responsible for their anxiety and uncertainty
4. They turn against the oracle from whom they sought solace
I hesitate to draw too much from the Morozov piece, though. Is the antipathy really any stronger than usual? Economy good, people happy, overlook uncertainty. Economy bad, people seek scapegoats.
That said, I do have a lot of sympathy for Neil Stephenson's lament that we've "turned away from doing big things", here & here:
Thoughts? And what the heck is Branch, anyway?
Here is the link to the full Stephenson article, "Innovation Starvation":
Interesting question. My temptation would be to attribute some of it to the persistence and 'stickiness' of Baby Boomer legacy futures, which the mainstream 'futures profession' continues to sustain and promulgate, as a maladaptive social imaginary, sustained by an army of greying sages on stages.
So, evaporative cooling within the profession, where the best and the brightest kind of simmer through the top into other things, a media ecology that rewards sensationalism and extreme claims, and the new(ish) background hum of VUCA which contrasts poorly with the shiny future that might have been.
Wrote this for my Masters degree, which could be relevant:
It's interesting because I did not see that Morozov piece as anti-futures as much as it was anti-technology utopianism, as best exemplified by TED.
The people who seemed to be getting dinged a lot are those who practice all of the qualities discussed in Eric's most recent books. It's the "Hey, I'm a futurist! Listen to me prognosticate (about techno-utopianism)!" The critics, to their credit, are recognizing that there are no easy answers, no matter how many TED fellows talk about the potential golden age if everyone had a smartphone.
It's a Catch-22 because serious practitioners have their heads down and are doing the hard work, while the dilettantes have all the time in the world to swan around from conference to conference.
I think there is an issue with the name futures that also makes it easy to ridicule. It conjures connotations of 1950s Asimov sci-fi and 16th C Nostradamus and John Dee. While strategic foresight is less sexy, I think it would build more respect in the long run.
Why does hyper-technophile futurism get more attention, good and bad, than, say, CKent's brand of "strategic foresight?" Hmm...could it be...SATAN?
There are some forms of public speculation about our institutions that are safe. Talk about gadgets from an "ooh, shiny and hip" perspective is both non-threatening to entrenched powers, and also makes Boomers' hearts go aflutter with childhood dreams. Talk about technology and geopolitics in regards to, say, the concentration of wealth and power and its weakening of democratic institutions: NOT SAFE - GET BACK TO JABBERING ABOUT iPAD, YOU MONKEYS.
Actually, it's hip again in some circles to be a "futurist" - so long as you fulfill that pattern of talking about the "disruptive" (but not actually disruptive) power of Tweeting, and, like the Khannas, throw in some crap about programmable contact lenses that keep you from seeing scary homeless people. (For real, look it up.) But that TED/WIRED circle, flush with ad money from BMW and Philippe Patek watches, does not find futurism about demographics or peak oil or poverty or waterways or city design or, shit, ANYTHING ELSE useful. Because that's either scary or the domain of what the Real Money is up to.
All-tech-futurism, receiving either praise or controversy, is a way to keep you from thinking about bigger ideas.
I find that all-tech futurism is design to actually neuter critical thought about the future, providing a reasonable facsimile of real analysis as a place holder. I also believe that the science-lite books (which outsell anything a futurist has done in 20 years 3000 to 1) achieve the same thing, which I argued here (ericgarland.co), thereby requiring Malcolm Gladwell to personally defend himself against a bunch of rabid PhD scientists. Which was pretty funny.
Set my futurists free. Let's have some messy, passionate, detailed ARGUMENTS about what's going on. Bring in the intelligence community, scientists, the guys who run TED, and whoever else. Anything but slouching toward the future, the way we are doing now.
I also think there is an issue with pieces like this writersofthefuture.com, that seem to equate success as a futurist with being right. The more that legit practitioners can steer the general public away from the idea predicting specific events, the better off we are.
Like Christopher, I think that the Morozov piece is not so much an attack on futurism in general but TED-style rhetoric in particular (it's the Year of Peak TED, culminating in the baaad Prometheus campaign) - as part of his fight against Silicon Valley techno-optimism. It's not so much about futurism because it seems like neither Morozov or the Khannas have a decent grasp on what it is ( A. Khanna: "what is unique about [our] new [futurist] institute is its focus on social implications." bits.blogs.nytimes.com ) . Probably neither Morozov *nor the Khannas* feel that they really need to have a decent grasp on formal futures. So there's a general problem of definition and awareness - general view of futures as very hazy & a big open tent
and that's not necessarily to say that there isn't increased skepticism/backlash about technophile positive visions/narratives of the future out there, particularly given the increased disconnect (with the Silicon Valley current/recent boom) between the Bay Area reality distortion field and most of the rest of the economy
I believe Scott is partly referencing this T-shirt in his original post : threadless.com
The naming of the design - "Damn Scientists" - is, I suspect, due to the designer (John Slabyk, Art Director for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign!) not being confident that enough hipster-ish people had a grasp of what a futurist is.
(I openly admit to owning this T-shirt and feeling awkward about wearing it in public. Yardwork OK though)
Zhan, I'm actually wearing that shirt at the moment.
Great thoughts. Keep 'em coming.
Ah, well - great minds dress alike.
What other recent major articles in this vein have people come across?
Personally, I think the people who ask "Where is my jetpack?!" are annoyed that the major advances we've made since the Mad Men era are social and communications-oriented, rather than purely technical. I once heard Paul Krugman ask Charles Stross why the American kitchen still looks the same way that it did during the initial airdates of The Jetsons -- he was annoyed that his Jetsons future had not come to pass. I turned to my seatmate and said: "Of course it looks different; there's a man in there, now." But for some people, that's not an advancement.
I fear it's rather egocentrist of us to assume that the general public has any particular opinion of futurists whatsoever.
Otherwise, it probably depends on which version of the future you are selling and to whom.
I think we've learned by now that the public has the strongest affinity for any future, as long as it's not complex, as long as who are the heroes and villains are clear, as long as those align with their preexisting assumptions in that regard.
When we just follow this simple recipe and, as wise man once said
"The market for something to believe in is infinite."
or wait, was it...
"Never try to sell a meteor to a dinosaur. It just wastes your time and annoys the dinosaur."
Frankly, Tom, I didn't think anyone cared much, but the "where is the future we were promised?" meme is at least that. Clearly, Morozov etc aren't genpop, but if there is an emerging meme, it suggests a dissatisfaction with the gap between the forecasts, good, bad and lazy, and perceptions of reality. While this could have happened anytime in the past 50 years, I find it interesting that it bubbles up now.
One could say that when times are good, no one much cares about the solidity of a forecast (as Wall Street and Silicon Valley showed us). Now that the payoff isn't materializing, people start to question.
People have been always dissatisfied with futurists. Twenty years ago 'futurehype' was the term used to capture this sentiment of unfulfilled promises: publishersweekly.com
The book is still worth reading, though it was written before the internet explosion.
There are two problems here: (1) Futurists, especially those who enter the public sphere, don't seem to learn from their failed predecessors -- ironically! Morozov et al., who know something of futurism's checkered history, are ultimately just calling for a 'truth in advertising' or 'health warning' statement placed in front of futurist products. (2) Many people -- even very smart ones like the economic anthropologist David Graeber -- appear to have taken those original promises of jetpacks at face value when first made. I must say, as someone of roughly Graeber's age, that even as a kid in the 60s I never quite thought that the Jetsons would become reality soon. The public's failure to be able to think critically about the future is by no means the fault of the futurists.
Here's Graeber's interesting lament about broken techno-promises: thebaffler.com
People have been always dissatisfied with futurists. Twenty years ago 'futurehype' was the term used to capture this sentiment of unfulfilled promises: publishersweekly.com
The book is still worth reading, though it was written before the internet explosion.
There are two problems here: (1) Futurists, especially those who enter the public sphere, don't seem to learn from their failed predecessors -- ironically! Morozov et al., who know something of futurism's checkered history, are ultimately just calling for a 'truth in advertising' or 'health warning' statement placed in front of futurist products.
(2) Many people -- even very smart ones like the economic anthropologist David Graeber -- appear to have taken those original promises of jetpacks at face value when first made. I must say, as someone of roughly Graeber's age, that even as a kid in the 60s I never quite thought that the Jetsons would become reality soon. The public's failure to be able to think critically about the future is by no means the fault of the futurists.
Here's Graeber's interesting lament about broken techno-promises: thebaffler.com
Sorry for the unnecessary multiple postings!
Apart from the reasons discussed, there might be some skepticism about the understanding, and the value, of what *futurist* do and how they can contribute to society/clients/etc. This is a problem i often encounter with clients (and i don't even use the term "futurist" to describe my job!) who fear the outcome might be too far-fetched ("arf, you live in the future") or too abstract ("why should I care?"). Most of the value is then to show why it's important to care about certain upcoming changes.
Two additions:
1) The media rewards extremism. Phil Tetlock has great insight into why media pundits (of the futures sort and otherwise) tend towards the extreme, dramatic predictions. It gets them airtime and no one ever looks back.
That is part of what the Good Judgement Project was supposed to be about (it was also a thinly veiled Ender's Game, in my opinion).
2) I love Madeline's point above. Social futures change far more than technology does. Jamais Cascio has written about this (wired.com), as have Andrew Curry (thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com) and myself (urbnfutr.theurbn.com)
Finally, Nicolas is right. Few really understand what we do, including some of us ourselves!
PS - It also strikes me that this Branch thing might quite a useful platform (and group) for fielding project related questions, as well...
A kind of analog / organic crowdsourcing platform. Not sure how different it is from Quora, but I like have a record of everything instead of just an email chain.
Just a thought.
I think Richard Rowe’s piece on “Futures tipping point” is quite relevant – most people (and I was certainly one of them prior to starting out on my Foresight journey) would have most contact with pop (gadget) futures and would associate the term ‘futurist’ as technology expert. The audience for futures work diminishes pretty rapidly as the depth gets greater (problem, critical, epistemological.... do we say we are foresight practitioners down here?) and the discussions harder. As has been pointed out media tends to sensationalize this kind of output anyway – e.g. I’m thinking of the “back to the horse and cart” headlines that the UK Intelligent Infrastructure systems review got.
(sorry for multiple posts) But Foresight/Futures processes are generally great fun, interesting and in my experience so far people seem to want more. So perhaps process participation comes before appreciation of output and need for discussion... which is a bit of a vicious circle of course....But I think Richard’s point about the need for “Sticky Foresight” remains true...
Branch does, at first blush, look like a good place to have these discussions which is the exact reason I signed up.
BTW - if Futurist gets the wrong reaction and Strategic Foresight Practitioner is a bit long winded is there a better name? ......Any advances on Timelord :-)
Personally, I'm not a fan of "strategic foresight" or even "foresight" as a term.
I have grudgingly come to realize that "futurist" is a useful term, only because it differentiates our kind of work from other forms of strategy.
In the end, what we do is basically strategy, with a future orientation. That is why I prefer to call myself a "strategist" and policy guy, as well as a "scenario planner".
Many non-experts tend to get the idea of scenarios, which doesn't carry the baggage of "futurist" per se but connotes a futures orientation.
End of the day, it's all personal preference relative to the particular markets / communities you're involved in (IMO).
Yeah, I'm heading that way. I've found conversations that start with foresight end up with "oh, you mean futurist?"
The underlying question for most people when they encounter a future scenario is - What will my role be?
People want to feel secure and reject narratives that they can't project themselves into...that make them feel expendable. Security comes in many forms:
There is the "everything will be better" narrative (the TED narrative). You won't have to meaningfully change, you will just have more nifty gadgets. This is novelty couched in the security that nothing foundational will be affected.
General uncertainty can be made palatable if couched in a "we're all in this together" narrative. The future is uncertain but we know what we need to do to eliminate uncertainty - beat the Russians, go green, etc.
A corollary is the "change will be centralized/concentrated" narrative, which makes decentralized change palatable by projecting it onto a few big trends. The implication being that change won't be so difficult if you are in the know (which of course you are by having encountered the narrative itself).
As Eric Garland noted, Gladwell et al specialize in the "It seems confusing but it's really quite simple" narrative. In this variant the central dialectic or trend is replaced by a central principle. Implication - If you understand the principle then your place in the future is secure.
I won't belabor the list further. Point being - narratives perceived as unequivocally threatening are generally ignored (at best) or demonized.
Thanks for your feedback! Team Branch
