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Full Version: Alternative "pop futurism": We all want to know what's coming next
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https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...ic/617867/

EXCERPTS: The pandemic, which has seemed stranger than science fiction in so many ways, has occasioned much debate about the role of speculative fiction in imagining the future: The possibilities of such stories have felt, to some, like answers amid uncertainty, even as others have questioned the limits of dystopian visions. But perhaps an equally relevant literature to revisit is speculative nonfiction: the constantly evolving genre we might call “pop futurism.”

What are the telltale signs of a “pop futurist” book? It sketches out possible tomorrows, highlights emergent trends to watch, and promises ways for even nonspecialists to apply these insights to their own life and work. It’s likely to sport an arresting cover, a style dating back to the work that arguably pioneered this genre and still casts a long shadow. Future Shock—the book by Alvin Toffler that helped popularize “futurism” as a concept in mainstream culture and business, and which recently marked its 50th anniversary—was printed in multiple colorways so that it would jar the eye as a neon rainbow beaming off bookstore shelves. Other titles have kinetic lettering that judders off the page, as if traveling at high speed. The writing’s tone usually sits somewhere between start-up pitch and self-help mantra, with the oracular confidence of the returned time traveler.

Though their contents have varied over time, refracted through the concerns of each era, the appeal of pop-futurist books remains the same: We all want to know what’s coming next. They tap the ancient power of the future to fascinate and frighten, in a way that both soothes and feeds our contemporary anxieties. Like all good pop-science or self-help texts, they vow to separate signal from noise and give us a bit of comforting control (however illusory) in a chaotic world. They offer clues about where the future is heading, no matter how muddled the present looks.

But the most important promise underlying much of the canon inaugurated by Future Shock is that with the right foresight, readers can not only prepare for what’s coming, but also profit from it. This whiff of insider trading presents the future as a commodity, an exercise in temporal arbitrage in which knowledge of new developments yields a financial edge. It’s no coincidence that the authors of such works have historically skewed white, male, and capitalist in mindset; many of them work as futurists, consulting in the gray area between business, government, technology, advertising, and science fiction.

This mercantile approach has dominated pop futurism, though it may be changing. This past year saw an astonishing number of new entrants to the field—strangely apt at a time of deep uncertainty about what will happen tomorrow, never mind the next decade. Could such a historically swaggering genre still provide some solace, let alone true insights?

[....] In The Good Ancestor, the philosopher Roman Krznaric calmly calls for a reorientation toward the future, not to benefit us (as is typically the pitch of the pop-futurist book), but to benefit our far-off descendants. He uses the term cathedral thinking to describe epic projects that will not be completed within our lifetimes, but that are crucial to start now—similar to the work of generations who built medieval cathedrals that only their great-grandchildren would see finished. If Future Shock and its ilk crystallized the image of the future as a great wave roaring toward us, inevitable and crushing, the central metaphor throughout Krznaric’s book ... is the acorn. The point is not just to, say, plant trees ... but to emphasize the agency of the present moment and the potential, however imperfect, to influence the future.

This theme is perhaps most inventively explored in pop-futurist projects that go beyond the confines of the book entirely. One is Afro-Rithms From the Future, a card game that challenges players to imagine future scenarios with an explicit focus on issues of social justice and inequality. The game has been in closed-testing mode; demos were offered at UNESCO’s Futures Literacy Summit in December, and a public beta version will be released soon. It was developed by a team including Ahmed Best, a futurist, an actor, and an artist, and Lonny Brooks, an associate professor of communication at California State University, East Bay, who works with a number of futurist outfits. The game draws on Afrofuturist thought and art to encourage radical visions of a more just world, and group discussion to model the types of present-day changes that could lead us there...

[...] Even before the coronavirus pandemic surged across the world in early 2020, the catastrophic threats facing the planet—climate change, rising nationalism, systemic inequality, technology that is creating more problems than it solves—had shattered any sense of a stable tomorrow. Our default image of the future has become far more Children of Men than The Jetsons, and even our stock cyberpunk dystopias have started to seem quaint. But as the faintest of silver linings, perhaps this is the year when we’ll be able to see most clearly that we need an entirely new way of talking about the future if we are to shape it into something equitable and sustainable for all.

Now, just as in 1970, the future is made by intricate interactions of people, systems, communities, material and environmental conditions—and by the stories that influence those relationships. This new chapter of pop futurism shows its enduring appeal as a familiar dialect, even if the message it carries is now an urgently different one. It might still have the potential to illustrate new visions of the future for a healthier world, but it needs to feel as vivid and magnetic as Future Shock did 50 years ago. As Toffler and his acolytes once made the accelerated, profit-driven future dazzling, the next generation of thinkers is trying to reconcile this paradox—to conjure slower, more restorative, community-driven futures that are just as irresistible... (MORE - details)