Futurism, like many similar words, means different things depending on whether someone is describing their own work or is describing the work of others. A futurist, self-named, is at least since the 1960s a person who claims to have specific expertise in forecasting trends that has could have value to any organization, business or government that wants to plan for the near-term future. Futurism as a descriptive term might apply to a huge, diffuse but persistently dedicated range of attempts to imagine or predict futures. I wouldn’t call Walt Disney a futurist in the sense of someone claiming training or expertise in forecasting, but he certainly was steeped in futurism as an aesthetic and an ideal.
Both kinds of futurism are habitually wrong about what they expect the world of tomorrow to be, substantially because they usually imagine a future through simple extrapolation from the recent past. If over three decades you’ve gone from a world where most ground travel was via stagecoaches and boat travel was on sailing ships or river barges to a world with steamships, hot-air balloons, and automobiles, with airplanes and zeppelins on the horizon, imagining that the future will be flying cars and perpetually faster travel is a natural vision. Imagining traffic jams, air pollution, and car-centered suburbs isn’t.
Both expert futurism and aesthetic futurism typically get some things right. But then so do psychics: make enough predictions, some of them as obvious as predicting the sun will come up in the east next week, and you’re bound to be right now and again. Occasionally a really visionary person will see something coming when no one else does—Vannevar Bush’s prescient 1947 essay that foresaw much of what the Internet has become is often justifiably cited as such, from a time when almost everyone else involved in the development of computing was thinking in other directions entirely.
More importantly—and I’ll come back to this point again in a bit—futurists of both kinds sometimes gain access to resources and power that allow them to compel the future they’ve envisioned. Corbusier imagined the city of the future and then spent time trying to match up his vision with a government that would let him implement it with authority. Disney saw a future American city and he started to make it in Florida. Sometimes futurists write with sufficiently compelling imagery, in alignment with prevailing ideologies or biases, that they lock large numbers of people inside the imaginary they’ve created. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, along with Soylent Green and other visions of runaway population growth, were enough to make an entire generation of middle-class white liberals in the US and Europe believe that the worst danger to the global environment was population growth, and that some form of governmental constraint on population would be required. That turned out to be wrong in all sorts of ways, but I still run across people my age and older who are still firmly convinced that population growth remains far and away the worst problem threatening the global future. More trivially, the idea of flying cars, despite the obvious and spectacular impracticality of the concept, has been so enthralling that three generations of inventors have quixotically tried to make it happen.
The most important problem with most expert futurism is really that it doesn’t have enough of the other more diffuse kind of futurism in it. Futurism as an imaginative exercise, whether technologically-centered in the mode of Jules Verne or focused on social change and political systems, as in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, is a wide-ranging impulse that can inspire, annoy, provoke or bemuse. It is, at any rate, despite the basic problem with extrapolating from the recent past into the near and medium-term future, a domain of cultural production that can be either instrumental or improvident, controlling or dream-like, as its creators might like. Mining the asteroids with von Neumann robots? Six-person marriages raising children communally? Prepping for the apocalypse in a bunker? It’s all inside this futurist space. I embrace most of it, except when it’s some impervious hubris from a billionaire who is determined to force us all to live in his fantasies. No modern politics can really operate without some imaginative capacity to think both about what a small change might lead to and about how we might change the nature of causality itself in some new architecture of social relations, material reality, and political economy.
Futurism in its expert or consultant mode, however, is usually just (like almost all consultancy) providing a client additional custom-made infrastructure to support what the client already wants to do anyway. Businesses, organizations and governments don’t usually do planning that’s about a wide-open exploration of possible futures, of imaginable desires, or something that opens them up to the contingencies of tomorrow. Planning in all institutional life is usually just a focused opportunity to re-message already-known intentions and to revisit the crises, challenges and problems of the last five to ten years as if they were futureward problems that you will have always already solved correctly the next time you face them.
The problem with futurist experts involved in this kind of work, that I think has its origin story in the experts assembled by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Commission on the Year 2000, convened in 1964, is that they don’t bring unwanted or unexpected thoughts about the future into boardrooms and modelling exercises and planning work. Which, I think, should be their singular professional value in that context, to get organizations and businesses to question whether you can in fact plan for anything, what the relationship between planning and action actually has been and might be, what dreams and possibilities for the future go unspoken in the everyday business of management and work, what black swan events are worth talking about (even if they can’t be planned for). The futurist expert should not be carrying water for some already-poised service, some already-planned decision, some already-available product, some already-made decision to close or merge or rebrand. Futurism, if it’s to have some specific consultative value, should be the worm in the apple, the proposal that no one else can make, the epistemological skepticism with a big enough comparative perspective on how change happens and might happen that it can stir the still waters of expectation, the dream that goes unrepresented, the voice that is never called for in the making of decisions. Big pictures and little tweaks. The harsh warnings of Cassandra, of no value save in the later memory as a just torment to the people with power who could have acted differently.
Is that a hard gig to get? You bet. It’s mostly not what the people who govern and manage businesses, organizations and governments want to hear. They want to be told they’re right about what they already mean to do and that everything else being asked of them is unwise, impractical and unlikely. But there are plenty of other consultants available to be yes-men for rent. Self-labelled futurists need to offer a different service.