1
Introduction: The Future Has Arrived

Welcome to the future

In 1994, the magazine New Scientist devoted a special issue to the subject of Futures, observing how the future is a foreign country since they do things differently there (New Scientist 1947, 5 October 1994). The Editorial argued that the increasingly complex nature of the world made it even more important to know the future so as to understand the present better. Somewhat similarly, John F. Kennedy said, quite close to his assassination in 1963, that: ‘Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future’ (Kennedy Address 1963).

The future has most definitely arrived but what exactly it is remains a mystery, perhaps the greatest of mysteries. Futures are now everywhere. Thinking and anticipating the future are essential for almost all organizations and societies. Futures are on most contemporary agendas – many hold the future to be a better guide to what to do in the present than what happened in the past. States, corporations, universities, cities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future; that foreign country is now everywhere.

Yet at the same time futures are unpredictable, uncertain and often unknowable, the outcome of many known and especially ‘unknown unknowns’. Garrett Hardin once maintained ‘We can never do merely one thing’: the one thing that would produce a single clear set of future outcomes (1972: 38). We do, in effect, many ‘things’, even when we think we are doing just one, and these many things have varied and unpredictable consequences for the future.

Thus, the first reason for writing a book on futures is to demonstrate the many efforts made, in the past and now, to anticipate, visualize and elaborate the future(s) within various domains of human activity. Powerful social institutions and thinkers are developing various kinds of anticipatory discourses and techniques (see Szerszynski 2016, on anticipation). This futures orientation is big and significant business for companies like Google or Shell, environmental organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or Forum for the Future, government bodies like Foresight in the UK or the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS) in the EU, military organizations such as the Pentagon, academic bodies such as the Oxford Martin School or the Tyndall Centre, and very many others. Some of those futures anticipated by these organizations have performative consequences, certain of which will be documented and examined below.

Specific methods have been developed for envisaging, visualizing and assessing potential futures. Some of these originated from scenario planning exercises that Hermann Kahn initiated at the Rand Corporation during the 1950s (Son 2015: 124). He especially promoted the development of alternative scenarios, noting how they enabled the imagining of different future possibilities. Also, many imagined future worlds have been developed within literature, art, film, TV, computer games and so on. These often involved spectacular future technologies such as time-travel, personal flying machines, roads and trains in the sky, teleportation, robots, walking upon water, off-earth communities, vacuum powered propulsion, driverless trains, equal utopias, as well as many dark dystopic futures (see the amusing www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20913249). This book will document and assess some of these ways in which organizations, intellectuals, scientists, artists, policy makers and technologists have developed, or are developing, futures.

The future also seems to be appearing ever more quickly, something first analysed in depth in Toffler's Future Shock (1970). He described exponential rates of technological and social transformation. In recent decades, ‘Moore's Law’ meant that world computing power (the number of transistors in an integrated circuit) doubled every two years. Today's smartphones possess the computing power once found in large mainframe computers, as well as possessing ‘magical’ affordances housed within a ‘ready-to-hand’ small machine which no one knew they ‘needed’ only twenty years ago. Some indeed argue that the future has almost disappeared, being transformed into an ‘extended present’ with no long-term futures (Nowotny 1994). And many people feel that they themselves have no ‘future’, since opportunities, hopes and dreams seem endlessly dashed, especially during times of ‘austerity’.

A sense of a disappearing future is also found within new financial ‘products’ that are based upon computerized high-frequency trading occurring in millionths of a second (Gore 2013). Actions happening beyond the speed of thought involve movements of money and information that cannot be grasped by human minds, even by the ‘flash boys’ working in finance (Lewis 2015). In such an accelerating world, financial futures arrive before they have been understood by the relevant actors. This is a kind of nano-second ‘future shock’ in which efforts to slow down decision-making even to transactions taking a whole second are rejected by financial institutions (Gore 2013: 16–17).

Moreover, futures are incredibly contested, saturated with conflicting social interests. Over two centuries ago, Edmund Burke argued that a society should be seen as a: ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (Burke [1790] quoted in Beinhocker 2006: 454). Burke points to the interests of unborn members of a society and how they need a powerful ‘voice’ to counter societies and lives being based only upon the interests of the living.

The environmental movement has played a major role in developing this idea of an inter-generational global commons, as set out in the Brundtland Commission's iconic Report on Our Common Future (1987). Environmentalism deploys generational rhetoric to argue for the interests of children, grandchildren and those not yet born (see Hansen 2011; www.gaiafoundation.org/earth-law-network/alliance-future-generations). Interestingly Hungary initiated the position of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations (www.ajbh.hu/en/web/ajbh-en/dr.-marcel-szabo), while a Future Generations Commissioner for Wales was established by 2015 legislation to act as an advocate for future generations.

However, most societal processes mould futures to the interests of current generations. Those yet to be born generally possess no voice in what we can call the ‘parliament of generations’. Or, as Adam expresses it, future generations cannot charge the current generation for the use made of their present. Future generations have no voice or vote to register their interests and must accept most of what is handed down to them (Adam 2010: 369).

There are though moments when this power of the present generation is contested and efforts are made by governments and NGOs to form ‘imagined communities’ that do stretch across generations and seek a ‘common future’. Such moments of generational solidarity can transform social and political debate, laying down new institutions and structures of feeling. One moment when this happened in some societies was during 1970. On 22 April 1970, 20 million Americans demonstrated for a healthy, sustainable environment. This first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the passing of various environmental Acts, the founding of Greenpeace and the publication of many iconic texts. At such moments, the long-term or glacial future functioned as a powerful structure of feeling (see Lash, Urry 1994). The future became democratized. But these moments are unusual. Overall, the arguments in this book are oriented to democratizing futures.

Rejecting the future

However, even though there are many social conflicts over futures, social science was reluctant to enter this futures world and has made a limited contribution to its theorization and analysis (but see Bell, Wau 1971; Young 1968). This reluctance partly resulted from how Marx, the most significant nineteenth-century social scientist, was apparently mistaken in ‘predicting’ that capitalism would engender worldwide revolution led by the industrial working class. Marx argued: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx 1962[1845]: 405). He expected that steam-powered factories, large industrial cities, railways and worker immiseration would lead the industrial proletariat to develop into a ‘class-for-itself’ and thus revolutionize the capitalist world. The proletarian class and its transformative power would overthrow capitalism and realize ‘communism’ through the effects of global capitalist expansion.

But in fact worldwide social revolution did not start in societies with the most advanced capitalist political economies, such as Britain or Germany. It commenced in Tsarist Russia in 1917, it did not initially involve a large organized industrial working class and the Bolshevik revolution resulted not in communism or even socialism in one country but, according to many critics such as Karl Popper, a new barbarism.

However, Marx's earlier 1840s writings instead emphasized how capitalist societies in fact involved much uncertainty and unpredictability. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, written when he was just thirty, Marx (and Engels) described a modern world of transience and movement, arguing that all fixed, fast-frozen relationships were swept away in capitalist modernity: all that is solid melts into air (Berman 1983; Marx, Engels 1952[1848]). This vision of an uncertain capitalist modernity meant that, in terms of analysis from the 1840s it was impossible to develop a specified blueprint of the future, and indeed Marx and Engels generally argued against utopian future visions.

Nevertheless this apparent ‘failure’ of Marxist analysis to get the future right was used by many social analysts to reject the proposal that social science should make predictions or establish planned blueprints for the future. Utopian imagining and the fostering of alternative worlds were heavily critiqued especially during the Cold War period in western societies (Popper 1960; Kumar 1991). Social science turned its back on developing and analysing possible futures (but see Bell, Wau 1971). A few social scientists, such as Lefebvre, Bauman and Olin Wright, argued that utopias can hold a powerful mirror to existing societies as they demonstrate limitations of the present (Bauman 1976; Levitas 1990; Pinder 2015). This positing of a utopia has often been emancipatory, enabling people to break with the dominance of what seem to be unchanging forms of social life within the present. But, in general, utopian social science has been rare.

In fact, studies of alternative futures which emerged over the past seventy or so years were mainly developed outside ‘social science’ as such (see Son's periodization, 2015). Future studies was developed as a specialized and increasingly professionalized discipline, generating its own journals, key books, iconic figures, global bodies (http://foresightinternational.com.au), professional organizations (such as the Association of Professional Futurists) and founding texts (see www.wfsf.org/; Son 2015: 122). Futurist thinking immediately after 1945 often reflected Cold War debates and issues, with Kahn said to be the model for Dr Strangelove in the 1964 movie (see www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man). Much of this futurist thinking was tied to powerful military and corporate agendas in which computers in particular were viewed as instruments of the Cold War (Turner 2006: 1). This futures thinking was normally funded from outside the academy and subsequently mainly developed within private thinktanks such as those established by Alvin Toffler (1970), and later Jeremy Rifkin (2009), Al Gore (2013) and many others. By the late 1970s, there were an astonishing 178 futures-related journals (Son 2015: 125).

Futures work also developed partly because of the growing significance of the environmental movement and related sciences in the decades after 1970 (see Schumacher's prescient Small is Beautiful, 1973). The Limits to Growth debates as well as the 1973 oil crisis involved developing computer-models, some involving doomsday scenarios, others techno-optimistic futures (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, Behrens 1972; Son 2015: 126). Such increasing concern with the issue of climate change led to General Circulation Models. By the early 1990s, these computerized models simulated the consequences of increases in CO₂ upon mean global climate at various points in the future. These predictions were incorporated into the major reports of the increasingly influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that appeared every few years after the first was published in 1990. These reports warned that, if societies continued with the practices and policies of ‘business as usual’, then the likely global future was a continued and significant warming of the earth's climate and hence the very opposite of maintaining business as usual (see Chapter 9 below).

Social sciences and the future

This book argues that different social futures are fateful for people's lives in the present. It also argues that the terrain of future studies should be reclaimed for social science and, in a way, for people in their day-to-day lives. There is much theory and research in social science that is pertinent to anticipating futures, but this linking has not often been achieved. This book seeks to ‘mainstream’ the future, which is too important to be left to states, corporations or technologists. Future visions have powerful consequences and social science needs to be central in disentangling, debating and delivering those futures. Hence we should develop what will be termed here ‘social futures’ – this notion having some similarity with the idea of an ‘integral future’ (Bell, Wau 1971; Slaughter 2012). The book shows how analyses of ‘social institutions, practices and lives’ should be core to theories and methods of potential futures. The time of the future is now, and the social sciences and the social world should not miss it.

This is firstly because social science is significant in helping to deconstruct a single notion of ‘time’. Adam and colleagues show that there are varied forms of time as different societies and social institutions are built around contrasting time regimes (Abbott 2001; Adam 1990, 1995). Temporal regimes of calculation and disciplining, such as those within a monastery or contemporary finance, matter greatly to people's lives within different societies (see Canales 2009, on the historical significance of being able to measure a tenth of a second). Adam shows the importance of the historic shift from time as lived and experienced to time that is standardized and de-contextualized (Adam 2010).

Relatedly, social science elaborates how multiple futures are related to these different time regimes. According to Adam and Groves, futures are told, tamed, traded, transformed, traversed, thought, tended and transcended (2007). Especially significant is trading in futures, which involves a major break in the trajectory taken by societies. In many religions, it was considered a sin to charge interest on money lent into the future since the future belonged to God and not the people (Adam, Groves 2007: 9). However, within European societies, God's gift was transformed into a future made, intervened in and traded. Thus there was ‘a change in the ownership of the future from gods to people’, with many profound consequences for social life (Adam 2010: 365).

The future has often been viewed as empty and abstracted from context; as a result an ‘empty future is there for the taking, open to commodification, colonization and control…When the future is decontextualized and depersonalized we can use and abuse it without feeling guilt or remorse’ (Adam, Groves 2007: 13). The future has indeed been used and abused – seeing the future as empty makes it ready for exploitation since those in the future cannot get their own back for the future world that they will inherit.

Social science also examines the dangers of extrapolating the future from what is the present. Knowing the future necessitates examining various ‘pasts’ and developing ways of understanding how past, present and future are mutually intertwined. It is sometimes maintained that we can distinguish between planning, preparation, invention and co-producing the future, especially through what Riel Miller terms a ‘futures literacy’ (2011). He argues that developing this literacy as to potential futures enables the present to be better understood. The point he says is not to test present assumptions against some predictive future, but to use the future to question, unpack, invent what is going on and what can be done within the present. More generally, here people's anticipation of the future can have profound consequences for the present. In this book, we see many examples of the anticipatory character of contemporary society and its many consequences for the present (Szerszynski 2016).

Variations in time and possible anticipated futures also stem from how social systems can be characterized by discontinuity, change and unpredictability. Prigogine argues from the perspective of complexity science that futures are the effect of multiple unstable, complex adaptive systems and their often cascading interdependencies (1997). This ‘end of certainty’ has implications for future social worlds, as described in detail by Al Gore (2013).

Social studies of technology show that future economic and social innovations are rarely the outcome of linear processes but involve unpredictable combinations of elements, as elaborated by Arthur in the context of ‘new’ technologies (2013). Similarly, futurist Ray Kurzweil said: ‘most inventions fail not because the R&D department can't get them to work, but because the timing is wrong – not all of the enabling factors are at play where they are needed. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment’ (http://crnano.org/interview.kurzweil.htm). I examine below various moments when the specific future was unanticipated since the wave was not caught ‘at the right moment’.

Social studies of innovation show how futures are unpredictable because technologies are ‘moving’ around and exerting often unintended consequences, synchronizing with varied elements and occasionally forming a new system. Such systems are in ‘process’ and not pre-determined in their organization or effects. Many ‘old’ technologies do not simply disappear but survive through path-dependent relationships, combining with the ‘new’ in a reconfigured and unpredicted cluster. An interesting example of this has been the enduring importance of the ‘technology’ of paper even within ‘high-tech’ offices. The reference to ‘technologies’ indexes how the view of social science that is deployed here is based upon the contingent assembling of social and material elements (see Part 2).

Further, some futures are in a way built into contemporary societies, such as the idea of developing ‘smart cities’ which can help to bring such cities into being. Such a notion is performative (see http://smartcities.media.mit.edu). Powerful actors seeking to realize the future they envisaged often deploy complex rhetorical imaginaries and visions of a future ‘heaven’. These actors perform or produce that future, while characterizing those who oppose this heavenly future as ‘Luddite’ (Law, Urry 2004, on enacting the social).

One kind of example of ‘making the future’ is found in ‘predict and provide’ models extensively deployed in planning and financing major transport infrastructures. Such a model proceeds as follows. Analysts conduct research on levels of congestion in a road system and predict further increasing demand for roadspace in an area; it is argued that this new roadspace must be provided through building a new infrastructure, justified since it will save valuable time; but this in turn results in more traffic filling up the new roadspace; and this leads to the further predicted demand for more roadspace, which is then provided, and so on. The prediction is realized and appears ‘correct’, so leading to further future demand (see Lyons 2015).

There are also some very long-term futures now being envisioned. Kurzweil emphasizes the law of accelerating returns resulting from enhanced computing and technological power. These exponential rates of change will result in a ‘singularity’, a moment when human biology merges with genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (Kurzweil 2006; see the 2010 movie The Singularity is Near). Kurzweil describes how, after the singularity, there will be no distinction between humans and machines. At the predicted date of the singularity (2045), computer-based intelligence will significantly exceed the sum total of human brainpower – so, in effect, creating a new species. It should not be presumed that humans are the evolutionary end-point. As media futurist Marshal McLuhan once said, ‘First we build the tools, then they build us.’ Exponential change brings the future so much closer. Yet if we see change as only ‘linear’, then Kurzweil says we will miss what is already in process, and, through exponential rates of change, the future will arrive much sooner than predicted (see Gore 2013: 240; www.technologyreview.com/view/425733/paul-allen-the-singularity-isnt-near).

Kurzweil's view of the singularity is broadly benign (he is now working for Google!). But other futures are more dystopic. Often the pursuit of short-term interests in the present results in unintended and highly perverse effects in the future. Social science analysis shows how futures are often the opposite of what is planned and imagined. Once the genie has been let out of the bottle, it cannot be returned and the stage is set for ‘locked-in’, path-dependent patterns, developing into the future and often the opposite of what were intended.

Some social scientists explore whether there will be a ‘reversal’ of many gains achieved in the ‘rich North’ over previous decades. A significant trend of social science writing, policy interventions, and filmic and literary thinking is a ‘new catastrophism’. Some even talk of the future disappearance of western societies, drawing analogies between the fall of Roman and Mayan civilizations and the potential collapse of societies in the contemporary world, especially because of intersecting energy and environmental crises (Diamond 2005; see Chapter 3 below). One response to this fear for the future is that some of those working in Silicon Valley developed the Long Now Foundation to think about and plan very long-term futures (over the next 10,000 years; http://longnow.org).

Especially significant in this book is examining the power to make futures. A key question for social science is who or what owns the future – this capacity to own futures being central in how power works. I noted above that the future was once thought to be God's, with this belief powerfully constraining the growth of capitalism and the money economy (see Le Goff 1980). Making money from investing in the future through charging interest was forbidden in much of the world. But during the Middle Ages this restriction on trading in the future was relaxed within the Christian world, but not within Islam. In the ‘west’, trading the future rapidly became an activity from which much money could be made, and powerful interests were generated in and through trading the future.

Another important notion here is the sense of the future as a private matter that is cared about and nurtured by each individual person. So, although some aspects are similar to what others experience, each person hopes for, plans, plots and anticipates their own future. Much literature and many media representations presume the future is private and personal and no-one else's business. People in the ‘modern’ world are often exhorted to ‘dream the impossible dream’ especially to reinvent themselves (Elliott 2013). The implication then is that, if the impossible does not arrive, it is that person's own fault. Their dreams or their ambitions or their achievements were just not good enough.

In some recent formulations, it is presumed that the future is shared. It is often stated that the future is something owned together, and what ‘we’ want will somehow be realized. The future is public, held in common. All those in a society are said to participate in this common future. However, Jaron Lanier strongly disputes whether the future is such a commons, describing the power of large international computer companies, the ‘server sirens’ possessing ‘ultra-influential’ computers whereby information is turned into exceptional wealth. As Lanier writes: ‘You can't see as much of the server as it can see of you’ (2013: 63; Keen 2015).

The future is thus ‘corporatized’, especially by turning almost everything into a monetized commodity (Lewis 2015; Srnicek, Williams 2015). One kind of future is that imagined and laid out by thinktanks and corporate futurists, particularly those working for Silicon Valley companies. This corporate world generates a kind of digital utopianism (Turner 2006). Lanier argues how this reflects the general corporate takeover of much of the world, especially since the growth of neo-liberal discourse and practice from around 1980, first within the US and Britain and then throughout much of the world (Klein 2007). Interestingly the Occupy movement challenged this corporatizing of the future through their counter-slogan ‘Occupy the Future’; the malign power of large corporations is also a theme of much science fiction.

Future argument

Thus, thinking and planning futures is widespread, fateful and problematic. We have already seen that one problem lies in ignoring social science research and concepts, although almost all future visions concern ways in which social life and social institutions might or will be different. Such social characteristics are seen in much futures thinking as less significant than ‘technologies’ and their capacity to bend humans to their character. This book shows how it is necessary to avoid the Scylla of technological determinism of the future, but also the Charybdis of completely open futures. The future is neither fully determined, nor empty and open.

Moreover, thinking futures is a way of bringing back a way of planning, but under a new name. Issues are now so big and wicked that there has to be some planning of futures. But what is involved here cannot be termed ‘planning’ since that has become an ideologically contaminated term from the era of organized capitalism and social democracy. Such a notion was critiqued both from the communitarian/ecological left and from most of the right.

But thinking futures is necessary, given the many long-term processes involved in social futures. And once one is thinking futures, then public bodies and NGOs must be incorporated into the process. Indeed, they often have to be key coordinators within the processes of anticipating and making futures. It is hard to imagine developing policies to deal with, say, climate change without, in effect, ‘planning’ (as climate change sceptics are well aware). Thus within contemporary disorganized capitalism, futures thinking is a major way of bringing the state and civil society back in from the cold. Moreover, if we focus upon social futures, this forces a transcendence of both markets and technologies. ‘Social futures’ problematize both autonomous markets and the march of technology. They authorize the participation of a range of many relevant actors including states and civil society in making futures. Thinking and democratizing futures involves what we might call ‘post-modern planning’ in the contemporary era of civil society, global change, wicked problems, the limits of markets, multiple ‘unknown unknowns’ and so on.

We will also see below that it is necessary to distinguish between three kinds of futures: the probable, the possible, and the preferable – distinctions drawn from Wendell Bell (Bell, Wau 1971; see Kicker 2009). What is preferable may turn out to be the least probable. At the very least, that a particular future is preferable is no guarantee that it is the most probable. It is often presumed that, because a particular future is preferable to the present, then it will be realized, since the members of that society will see it has to be brought about. But there is no guarantee that what is best is what actually develops, even if there is widespread agreement in a given society that it is the most desirable of possible futures.

Part 1 of this book thus identifies and charts numerous ways in which organizations, writers, futurists, technologists and thinkers have anticipated, described, imagined and produced futures, including various utopias as well as dystopias. These various future visions and models of society, various ‘past futures’, are described and assessed in the next chapter. Some social futures are identified that have much contemporary resonance. Then Chapter 2 documents a striking change within the rich North from around the turn of the century, following the optimism for the future of the ‘roaring’ 1990s. This change in the structure of feeling, the ‘new catastrophism’ within contemporary social thought, is carefully documented. Central to deliberation about the future ‘collapse of societies’ was complexity thinking, especially in characterizing the cascading interplay between systems.

The second part turns directly to such complexity thinking in order to steer the tricky course between determinism and openness. Complexity analyses involve notions of path-dependence, lock-in, thresholds, positive feedback loops, tipping points and phase transitions. Systems are seen as dynamic, processual, unpredictable and interdependent. Particular emphasis is placed on shifts that recalibrate the balance, nature and functioning of economies and cultures in, and between, societies. They make the world different although no one necessarily planned or envisaged such a shift or even really noticed it at the time. This illustrates the wickedness of problems in the world of futures. These chapters explore the complex conditions for innovating new sociomaterial systems as well as assessing some of the main methods that have been developed to grasp different social futures.

In Part 3, some of these various methods and theories are deployed to examine what futures might develop within case-studies of uncertain, contested and socially powerful futures. In each, scenarios are developed. These case-studies concern the potential formation of global manufacturing and transportation in the light of the growth of 3D printing; changing forms of mobilities within cities in a potential post-carbon world; and the many futures implicated in global climate change. In these chapters, various scenarios are developed, and through backcasting the relative probabilities of different futures are assessed. Central to these chapters is the importance of complex systems thinking, multiple futures, and system lock-ins. They draw upon much social science and related domains of research.

In the concluding chapter, attention is directed to the future analyses of futures. It is shown that plausible futures must be analytically embedded within multiple social institutions, practices and movements. Complexity thinking should be deployed to examine futures made up of unstable, complex and interdependent adaptive systems. There are powerful physical and social systems, and yet they are also fragile and often characterized by innovation, unpredictability and possible reversal. And thinking futures makes one understand that things could be otherwise, that outcomes are not necessarily determined and hence there is the need to develop capacities for future-forming interdisciplinary research (see www.lancaster.ac.uk/social-futures). The chapter details the many unintended, perverse and wicked problems that arise in examining, making and assessing multiple futures, as this book documents.

Copyright page

Preface

1
Introduction: The Future Has Arrived

Welcome to the future

Rejecting the future

Social sciences and the future

Future argument

Part 1
A Brief History of the Future