What we talk about when we talk about The Future

A few thoughts on four genres of futurism

Today I want to share a bit of book-adjacent thinking. This isn’t precisely material that is going to end up in the book. Rather, it’s a bit of rumination that keeps distracting me amidst the research.

(For new readers, more details on the book project here.)

So the main intent of this post is to air out an idea that has been distracting me, in the hopes that it will become less of a distraction. A secondary purpose is that I think it’s pretty interesting, and you might as well.

Okay, with that preamble out of the way: let’s talk about futurisms (plural).

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The book project is anchored in the back catalog of WIRED magazine. It’s a simple enough exercise: the magazine has been around for 30 years, both documenting, celebrating, and advocating for the digital revolution that has permanently been in a state of imminent arrival. (As William Gibson once remarked, “the future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed”)

I’m trying to isolate what the impending digital future looked like back then, in the hopes of deriving some insights regarding how we got to now — how the society we currently inhabit diverged from the one the futurists displayed such confidence they were building. I believe we can learn a few things from digital futures’ past, and it can aid us in making better choices that build a better tomorrow.

One problem: not all futures carry the same weight. Some are, well, more load-bearing than others. Others are just idle talk and prognostication.

I believe, in the course of my reading, that I’ve come across four distinct genres of futurist rhetoric. Each has its own strengths, limitations, and boundaries. “The future” plays a different role in the hands of the pundit, the professional optimist/futurist, the Cassandra and the sci-fi author.

I think it is worth spelling out the core features and limitations of each of these types of writing. Because it’s not as simple as jotting down all the future-predictions that appears in the magazine, and then evaluating how that prediction turned out (this is the approach taken by Steven P. Schnaars in Megamistakes, and essentially what Philip Tetlock did in Expert Political Judgment. Those are fine books, but of a different sort than the one I’m attempting to write.)

Pundit futurism

Punditry often traffics in the future, but it is a low-stakes endeavor. This is the most common sort of future-forecasting. It is a routine feature of commentary on politics, entertainment, finance, sports, and technology. And that isn’t always a bad thing.

The ideal-type example is the sports commentariat. Put three broadcasters behind a desk before the big game, and have them pontificate on who is going to win. The actual answer, as every viewer knows, is well we don’t know. That’s why they play the game! But that’s a rubbish answer. It defies the boundaries of the genre. The whole point of the endeavor is to offer entertaining, speculative hunches.

One of the main features of pundit-futurism is the quick cadence of the genre. The pundit is tasked with helping to make sense of an event that just happened or is soon pending. Their job is to say something clever, and hopefully informative. But the focus is on the present; the future just plays a supporting role. It is there to heighten the stakes.

Plenty of punditry — especially in domestic politics — is neither clever nor informative. It is a genre rife with trashy hot-takes. Financial punditry of the Jim Cramer sort has often been an exercise in building an audience of retail investors who can play the part of the Greater Fool. Political punditry, especially in Presidential elections, tends to crowd out the substantive stacks with meaningless horserace commentary.

But this type of futurism is common for a good reason. Most of our attention is attuned to the here-and-now. No one ever actually inhabits the future. So these lightweight, adjacent futures can serve the purpose of helping readers to think through where the world is headed.

The Professional, Techno-optimist Futurist

Unlike with punditry, this is Futurism with a capital “F.” It moves at a slow, deliberate pace, and it is intently focused on divining what the future will be like. This is the futurism of the Long Now Foundation and its 10,000 Year Clock. It’s the Futurism of the Long Boom, the Futurism of the Roaring Zeros. It is practiced by a professional class of futurists — consultants who take business leaders and other influential actors through extensive planning exercises. [As luck would have it, Matt from Lost Tempo published a riveting first-person critique of industrial futurism just this week. Take a look. It’s great.]

To be clear, not all futurists are ideologically committed to optimism. There is nothing inherent to scenario planning exercises requiring the participants to trumpet the brightest scenario as the most likely.

But the particular flavor of futurism that was popularized and promoted in Silicon Valley circles (especially in WIRED magazine’s 90s heyday) comes with factory-installed rose-tinted glasses that cannot be removed. It is this sort of futurism that Marc Andreessen and his peer network are trying to resurrect today. And, as Fred Turner documents, it has a deep cultural legacy dating back to the 60s Bay area counterculture.

I’ve written quite a few pieces critiquing techno-optimism before. It boils down to two main points.

First: I think its incentives are aligned toward telling wealthy people what they want to hear. This sort of scenario planning tends to be deployed as a time-killer — a means of keeping stakeholders entertained, so they will then feel like they’ve given input without ever laying gloves on an actual resource allocation decision.

Second: The ideological commitment to optimism masks a political agenda. Techno-optimist futurism insists that the path to a better tomorrow can only be discovered through positivity. And it places Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors at the center of the action. They are the motive force of history. The rest of us — citizens, regulators, skeptical journalists, and elected officials especially — are meant to stay on the sidelines, thinking happy thoughts. Staying positive means staying out of the way. (Regulations, after all, are for worriers. Regulations are a drag. Just let the innovators innovate.)

When pressed, these techno-optimist futurists will usually deflect criticisms by insisting they were not making a prediction, just sharing a good-news scenario. But that’s a hollow defense. As I wrote in The Curse of the Long Boom, “Scenarios like this are really just predictions with built-in plausible deniability. This kind of scenario is just a prediction clad in fake mustache and jaunty hat.”

Cassandra-futurism (the future as a warning)

Then there are the Cassandras. Cassandras treat the future as a warning, trying to draw attention to what the future will look like if we do not take action now. I know this rhetorical style well. I spent my formative years in the American environmental movement, after all.

(It is also, incidentally, a genre that was almost entirely absent from early techno-optimist venues like WIRED magazine.)

The first thing to understand about Cassandra-futurists is that (to quote David Brower, IIRC), they are “the only people predicting the future who hope to be wrong.”

The second thing to understand is that, of all the types of futurism, they are the most convinced that people today have agency in shaping tomorrow. This is what separates Cassandras from outright Doomers. They are not merely saying “the end is nigh.” they are saying “the end is nigh, unless…”

Awkwardly, this means when the Cassandras are successfully heeded, they tend not to get much credit for the resulting success.

The two obvious examples are the Ozone hole and Y2K. The Cassandras weren’t wrong about the Ozone hole. Their warning was headed, and collective action was taken at the international level. Y2K was not a false alarm. It was a massive engineering problem, which was met with a massive engineering solution.

Things got better, because people sounded the alarm and were taken seriously. Had they not, things would have gone much worse.

The problem with this argumentative style is that it can be rhetorically indistinguishable from moral panics. “We will be ruined if we don’t do ____” can be a terrible argument if it is not grounded in reality, or if the (social) science is suspect, or if it is provides cover for heinous political schemes.

So Cassandra-futurism should be approached and evaluated carefully, but seriously. When grounded in clear, evidence-based research — both on the problem and the proposed policy solutions — it can be the most valuable and impactful type of futurism. This ought to be a slow-cadence endeavor. It also, at its best, ought to be a pragmatic endeavor — a type of futurism less mired in pessimism than focused on the mechanisms by which a better path can be trod.

The Sci-fi futurist

Then there is science fiction, which is not quite futurism, but is hopelessly tangled up in all of it.

There’s a fantastic interview with Ray Bradbury in the October 1998 issue of WIRED magazine. He’s combative, contradictory, cantankerous… just absolutely zero fucks left to give. Bradbury lambasts Danny Hillis’s 10,000 Year Clock, remarking “He’s completely wrong. You can’t think of the future, because you’re not going to be there.” The interviewer notes that Bradbury’s own novels (Farenheit 451 in particular) are set in the future. And, to this, Bradbury replies, “I utilized those things in the novel because I was trying to prevent a future, not predict one.”

It calls to mind Alex Blechman’s Torment Nexus tweet —science fiction as a warning, mistaken for a roadmap. (Or, as Cyd Harrell used to say, “cyberpunk is not an instruction manual.”)

Charlie Stross wrote a brilliant essay on this subject a few months ago, “We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus.” The essay has range, and really deserves to be read in its entirety. A couple of passages stand out for my purposes here:

Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas. (emphasis added)

Elsewhere in the piece, Stross declares “The future is a marketing tool.” He also pulls the curtain back on what sort of futures the industry encourages and rewards (“the slaughterhouse with attached sausage factory”)

So I exist in a symbiotic relationship with my readers. They keep buying my books as long as they remain enjoyable. And my publishers keep publishing my books as long as the readers keep buying them. So like other SF writers I've got a financial incentive to write books that readers find enjoyable, and that usually means conforming to their pre-existing biases. Which are rooted in the ideas they absorbed previously. Science fiction as a genre has inertia, and it's hard to get new ideas to stick if they force the readers out of their comfort zone.

The future, Stross is telling us, is just setting. Not all science fiction is meant as a call-to-arms or a grand warning. Sometimes it might be intended as a warning. Other times it might be a roadmap (as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future). But these authors are not oracles. They are artists.

Science fiction, as a genre, gives the author an opportunity to explore the details of what a different future would look like — to play out the thought experiment and build a world that feels real to the reader.

One byproduct of the genre is that, of the four types of futurism, science fiction takes the future the most seriously. But we have to bear in mind that it is also still fiction. Sci-fi futurism doesn’t traffic in the sort of pragmatic warnings or proposed solutions that Cassandra futurism offers. There need be no policy proposal, no fidelity to our present-day limitations. Its political impact is prefigurative in nature, helping to shape how we see the world.

Stross tells us to “always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.” I think we should pay attention to those ideas, while keeping in mind what they are useful for.

(I’ve mentioned this previously, but there was a delightful moment at the WIRED30 “scifi IRL” panel last month, when Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz were asked whether they consider their work futurism. They both smirked, and explained that futurism is a different endeavor than scifi. Both dabble in it with their nonfiction work. Anders referred to it as a “side hustle.” I wish I could find video of that event. It was so good.)

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So what, exactly, was the purpose of this little excursion through the various futurisms?

My main conclusion thus far is that we should pay particularly attention to load-bearing futures.

Discount the pundit-futurism, but don’t outright discard it. These glancing references to the future are mostly intended to highlight the present. Treat them accordingly.

Pay closer attention to the track record of Futurism-with-a-capital-F. It is often synonymous with the view-from-capital, and its optimistic storytelling masks a political agenda.

Tread carefully with Cassandra-futurism. It can be the most pragmatic of the four types, but can be easily confused with the worst sorts of moral-panic punditry. Take the claims of the Cassandras seriously enough to fairly evaluate them.

And, heh, “be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.” Because Charlie Stross tells us to. And he is quite a convincing fellow.

Not all futurisms are created equal. If we are going to draw lessons from digital futures’ past, we also have to get used to sorting out the genre boundaries.

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