creating future

[Alicia Henn]

http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/04/are-we-creating-the-future-by-predicting-it/

An interesting article about different types of futurist.

Alicia

[Eric Scoles]

I skimmed this just now, but one thing that strikes me is that I think she might be almost exactly 180 degrees off on many points. 

For example, she conflates 'professional futurism' with 'foresight strategy', and seems to want to argue that this 'foresight strategy' version of futurism can actually influence the shape of the future. However, most of the "professional futurists" that I can think of are really terrible at predicting the future. (It's possible that she means to explicitly restrict 'professional futurism' to a very small domain that would encompass, say, Basil Liddel-Hart [British military theorist who invented blitzkrieg in the 1920s] but not Alvin Toffler [who made a career out of spectacular but pretty off-base predictions that he and others described as 'futurism' -- i.e., was a prominient and highly-visible 'professional futurist'.]. If that's what she wants to do, she needs to be more explicit about explaining how "foresight strategy" differs from what 'Professional Wrong People' like Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson practice on a daily and highly visible basis.)

The biggest problem I have with this article is that it cites essentially no evidence -- it asks questions ('did Orwell influence the Stasi?') but doesn't examine the questions or explain the reasons for asking them (IMO the answer is 'probably not nearly as much as the Stasi thought he did'). Sure, predictions influence the future -- how is this controversial or even open to question? It's not interesting until you start to examine it, and taxonomies of futurism basically jump the gun: we're stuck with her taxonomy as a way to organize our enterprise, instead of being open to different ways of organizing the efforts. 

For example, if we define "futurism" very broadly as 'trying to respond to what's going to happen', we could separate futurists into reactive and proactive thinkers. Liddel-Hart is a proactive thinker, inasmuch as he's trying to think of a way around the wholesale slaughter evident during the first world war -- trying to formulate an active response to advances in military technology, through fundamental changes in tactics and strategy. I would argue that Kevin Kelly is a reactive thinker, because he thinks he's figured out how things are going to work going forward and he thinks people should react to them in a certain way. I pick those examples because both have been incredibly influential [both arguably in a negative way, but that's almost beside the point]. Liddel-Hart changed the nature of warfare; Kelly was at least as responsible as any other single person for the "magic money portal" phase of the Internet's initial boom-cycle (the idea that there was a "new economy"). Kelly's influence is particularly interesting because there's a certain kind of moral passivity to it: we're not to question the value of this new way of thinking, we're not to question the changes it wreaks, we're just to accept them and deal with them. (Certainly there's lip-service to the idea that people create their own value, but read a bit of teh Cluetrain-era thought-leadership and it becomes very clear that the first and most important thing we're to do is to Accept The New Paradigm like the host on our tongue, and from that will flow the wisdom to Exploit The New Pardigm.)

Alicia

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eric scoles | erics...@gmail.com