
Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot (2015) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot-rp
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nikhizzle
One prominent counterpoint to this article is the school of Afrofuturism.
Lately, we have seen a resurgence in this thought line ranging from Black
Panther to Janelle Monae. But those of us in technology often are not aware of
this very important, visionary futuristic movement.

I'll also add if you haven't seen Black Panther, go and see it. Most science
fiction reminds me of Kowloon by day, Tokyo by night. It is so refreshing to
see a different, Africa-centric view of the future. Think Nairobi 2080.

~~~
djpr
I agree with and excited about this development. I'm an academically trained
futurist and I'm continually frustrated by the future as being techno-
solutionist-driven and mostly Western or some Hong Kong/Tokyo future.

Black Panther, I hope, will help people to be inspired by other ideas of what
the future can be - from different cultural lenses, changes in view of
technology, changes in ways of doing etc.

It's about decolonizing the future and opening the door to other ways of
being.

Here's one of my favorite piece of futures work that I like to talk about.
It's about the future of human relationships:
[https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of-
marriage/](https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of-marriage/)

Yes, it's still techno-driven and still very San Francisco, but at least its
not about flying cars or fancy tech, just different ways of being.

~~~
loosetypes
> "I'm an academically trained futurist"

What does this mean?

> "and I'm continually frustrated by the future as being techno-solutionist-
> driven and mostly Western or some Hong Kong/Tokyo future."

The future as it is and has been coming to pass? How we, today and recently,
culturally portray the idea of the future?

~~~
ACow_Adonis
I cringe every time i have to call myself a data scientist, but I guess I
should be thankful I don't have to yet call myself an academically trained
futurist :P

~~~
djpr
Haha, yes, I'd trade futurist for data scientist.

In academic circles, we're called foresight or futures studies field but no
one knows what that is.

~~~
madamelic
I can't believe this is a real thing. I really thought you were pulling a
high-quality troll.

It legitimately sounds like you belong working at the Ministry of Magic.

~~~
djpr
madamelic, yeah I've gotten a lot of funny looks from people. When I explain
that its relates to scenario planning, it sounds a bit less silly.

There are some govts, like in Finland or Singapore, that invest heavily in
futures studies. Singapore Gov't has multiple foresight teams within the prime
minister's office, ministry of trade etc. UAE has a quasi-Ministery of the
Future: [https://www.mocaf.gov.ae/en](https://www.mocaf.gov.ae/en)

I'd rather be working at the Ministry of Magic though. :p

~~~
madamelic
Oh, I wasn't like putting down your work. From what I found poking around it
sounds like an important field.

Just the name cracked me up. :)

------
ivanbakel
I think futurists with a progressive bent can also be guilty of the opposite:
assuming the cultural future somehow won't follow the present. The age of
technological advancement will inevitably be good, because it will also
miraculously be missing all our current bugbears like prejudice and
inequality, which technology might otherwise worsen, rather than eliminate.

If we like to think that we're far more advanced than our predecessors, the
conclusion is that our descendants will leave us in the dust. Maybe misplaced
faith in the former encourages our hope for the latter over a dystopia where
everything is as bad as it already is, only worse.

~~~
philwelch
There are a few things that give me pause about progressive visions of the
future, but the biggest one is just the sheer terrifying demographics of it.

The predominant culture of the developed world is catastrophically infertile.
The more progressive parts of these cultures are often the least fertile,
while the more conservative and traditional parts are more fertile. But the
offspring of these traditional subcultures often convert into the progressive
culture, at least where that culture is more prosperous and holds higher
perceived status.

Part of what makes religions so persistent is their evolutionary fitness from
a memetic perspective. “Tell everyone you know to worship $DEITY, have lots of
babies, and also kill/shun anyone who tries to stop worshipping $DEITY” is a
great algorithm for maximizing the number of $DEITY-worshippers. “Never have
sex or try to convert anyone” is a shitty algorithm, which is why the Shakers
are practically extinct while Islam is on course to become the world’s largest
religion (and may already be, if you subtract the plurality of western
Christians who are behaviorally secular anyway).

I suspect some memetic program that survives contact with science, prosperity,
and progressivism without turning infertile, if it ever evolves, will be the
foundation of the future of human culture.

~~~
barberousse
It would have to be the end of the nuclear family, the entire foundation of
the traditional perspective in the developed world, replaced by some form of
collective inter-gender polyamory whose main benefit is to reemploy the
ancient notion of child rearing by "a village", permitting multiple members to
rotate between wage earning, child rearing, and personal time, so that the
lifestyle is compatible with trending standards in progressive living. If
you've seen The Expanse, this would be familiar to you one of the lead
characters grow up under these precise conditions in a possible future Earth.

We are already seeing a growing appreciation for practices like ethical
polyamory, open marriage, etc today, coupled with the growing depreciation for
things like real estate while the divorce rate tells us traditional marriage
is becoming untenable.

The polyamorous communes of our progressive descendants may be more robust
emotionally and economically, as they assume those functions of the nuclear
family without the constraints of "traditional" two-adult family units
(cheating, disinterest, work/life balance, max 2 earners, etc). The
traditional perspective believes it has a monopoly on social harmony and
fertility because it adheres to strict, heteronormative, and patriarchal rules
that appear to have "always worked"; the wager our this collective polyamorous
future is to recreate those "village" conditions, even more primordial than
the nuclear family

~~~
philwelch
I am polyamorous, and I happen to know a lot of polyamorous people.
“Reproducing above replacement level” is not, in my experience, a good
description of the polyamorous community.

While you’re right in that nuclear families aren’t ideal, the more fertile
subcultures are those where _extended_ families are valued. And these cultures
are, by and large, religious and culturally conservative. The only issue there
is the tendency for the children of those cultures to assimilate into the
progressive mainstream; after all, that’s what happened to _us_.

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danidiaz
I'm reminded of Gerard O'Neill's seventies vision of space habitats
[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-
lagrange/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/) The
artistic depictions tend to have a "suburb in a bottle" feel.

------
mncharity
> Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes.

A Radcliffe outreach symposium about genetics research included a sketch of
the history of the field. Someone asked where the dramatic innovation was
coming from. It was clear they _really_ wanted an answer of Kuhn-revolution
changes in perspective leading to better questions. They were notably unhappy
with the answer that, no, it was mostly technological economics. Advancing
tech (sequencing, PCR), dropping costs by orders of magnitude, changed the
questions we could afford to pursue.

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rayiner
> And yet zeppelins were flying in 1900; a year before, in New York City, the
> first pedestrian had already been killed by an automobile. Was the notion of
> air travel, or the thought that the car was going to change life on the
> street, really so beyond envisioning—or is it merely the chauvinism of the
> present, peering with faint condescension at our hopelessly primitive
> predecessors?

I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World. It’s
a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150 years.

~~~
wolfgke
> I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World.
> It’s a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150
> years.

I just say: "Internet".

~~~
rayiner
For the most part, people use the internet to do things they were doing
anyway. Netflix is better than cable, but not fundamentally different. (You
can tell, because people don’t even use a lot of the advances enabled by the
internet. Business people still use phone calls more than video conferencing
for example.) Refrigerators or industrial farming had a bigger impact on
fundamentally restructuring peoples’ lives than the internet.

You could still run most of the modern world without the internet, replacing
it with fax and telephone (century old technology at this point). It would be
painful but doable. Without refrigerators society as currently structured
would collapse.

~~~
arkh
> For the most part, people use the internet to do things they were doing
> anyway.

More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in
Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a
button. People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a
pound item.

The fact we can easily have a calculator, GPS system, access to most
information in the world, have an audio and video conference with people from
all around the world thanks to some small item we carry in our pockets is now
taken for granted but it was missed by most scifi writers until the 90s.

~~~
coldtea
> _More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in
> Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a
> button_

Not like they can afford that advice. Or that it would do them much without
treatment. Outside of special upper class cases this just doesn't happen.

> _People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a
> pound item_

Which they mainly use to settle BS quarrels about who did what, and to serve
as a replacement from actually studying something...

------
wisty
It seems like the article is just beating up a straw man. It doesn't define
futurism, name any major futurologists, and seems to just rely on the
stereotype that it's "flying cars" and "the Jetsons". It does mention The Net,
and notes that ordering a pizza online is not so different to ordering a pizza
on the phone. It conveniently misses the main story - that the main character
has essentially no IRL social connections at all (as she telecommutes to work,
only socialises online, and doesn't even know her neighbors) which is what
allows her to be made a complete unperson when her online records are
attacked. Maybe it's not Utopia (another futurist work) but it hardly ignores
the cultural impact of technology.

Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or comedy
with fantastical sets and props. But even something as soft as Doctor Who (let
alone the likes of Asimov, AC Clarke) often looks at culture (either how
radically different it is, or how age-old problems remain). Then there's works
like 1984 and Brave New World which were almost entirely about culture.

And it's not like The Jetsons ignored culture. It was deliberately a 1950s
sit-com set in the far future, and was a follow-up to The Flintstones which
was a 1950s sit-com set in the distant past. The fact that the original was a
little conservative in its portrayal of culture might have had something to do
with political environment (the Cuban missile crisis was just before it was
written). I don't think it entirely ignored the possibility of social change,
but was possibly trying to make some kind of statement about which economic
system was really on the right side of history.

~~~
posterboy
> Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or
> comedy with fantastical sets and props.

Or even modeled after age old stories. Like most writing recycles and
reinterprets old material. I started to wonder what historic metaphors the
Expanse relies on, what with ship travel taking months, pirates, colonies, the
plague - but the opposite of slavery, with unconditional basic income. The
gang "the Golden Bough" is a hint at Virgil's Aeneid, I learned today by
coincident. It's not hard sci-fi at all. The sci-fi is kept to a minimum as
much as the fantasy. That is, the fantastic elements should be kept to a
minimum. Now I wonder what _that thing_ (not to spoiler) represents. Just a
deus ex machina for sake of the story or a ring of ancient overlords?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Depends on what you focus. What makes it an intelligent story may be the
consequences of ships traveling months, or consequences of UBI. What makes it
both intelligent and sci-fi is why ships travel months, how do they travel,
what particular technologies are imagined and how they solve the problems of
space travel, why UBI is needed, that UBI is UBI and not slavery, etc.

Interpreting sci-fi stories as just normal stories with fantasy props robs
them of half of their value.

~~~
posterboy
as I said, ship travel on earth makes the same difference. The ship's
propulsion is in the realm of fantasy, even.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Except everything about that travel is different. Distances, mode of travel
(continuous thrust, flip&burn), time-lag for communication, range and length
of combat - all different.

If you don't consider object-level descriptions as valuable in itself, then I
don't think you'll find much enjoyment in science fiction (especially of works
on the harder end of the scale).

------
chewz
Ain't futurism dead? Unfortunately?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_\(disambiguation\))

~~~
leoc
Futurism isn't dead, it just smells retro.

------
mncharity
> Was [...] the thought that the car was going to change life on the street,
> really so beyond envisioning

"Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers
will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and
hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a
pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter.
Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known.
There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police
patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in
harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox
is today." Dec 1900 [1]

I enjoy reading commentary about this set of predictions... to see how people
misunderstand _the past_. Or _why_ something didn't happen.

Take horses. One commentary says, 'no, wrong, horses were cheaper than cars
are today'... and compares only purchase price, being unfamiliar with
stabling. Another claims horses were more environmentally friendly than
cars... forgetting that horse fodder was once a primary import of cities,
their waste a primary export, and that it and carcasses once decorated
streets. A major use of horses was... shipping fodder for horses. And I
fuzzily recall an SV person giving a talk at Stanford, arguing you can't
predict the future (sigh), and dissing the article in general, and the horse
prediction as 'they thought horses will become _extinct_ \- silly them'. When
they didn't say extinct; and some commercial breeds are; and given the change
of urban horse populations (from like cars, to like giraffes), a non-technical
"extinct" wouldn't have been wrong.

Unfamiliar with the past; inattentive to the present; and lackadaisical in
thought; we watch the future arrive, and find it unexpected. There's a
surprise.

Perhaps VR ("so this is what it was like... oh, _that 's_ weird"), and AR
("overlay the past on the present"[2]) will help.

[1] "What may happen in the next hundred years" (Watkins; 1900; _The Ladies
Home Journal_ ) as jpeg:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elf...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elfreth_Watkins_Ladies_Home_Journal_Predictions_1900.jpg)
; as text: [http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-
content/archives/homepages/190...](http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-
content/archives/homepages/1900_predictions.htm) [2] Old photos overlaid on
new: Zoltán
[https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra](https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra)
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/7215762614911821...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/72157626149118210/)
; assorted
[https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=isch)

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Animats
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