Expanding the Futures Cone’s Concept of the Futures and the Pasts ⊗ Reading as Counter-Practice ⊗ A Bot that Watched 70,000 Hours of Minecraft Videos

Visions of futures, whether dystopic or utopic, may indeed engender futures, as they are part performative and not merely analytic or ‘representational’.

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

A few futures have been ‘good news’, a possible utopia.

As of 2023, the Futures Cone includes seven alternative futures: potential, preposterous, possible, plausible, probable, preferable, and projected (Voros, 2017).

All struggled with the constraints of state and corporate sponsorship and the limitations of presenting the future through the lens of objects and things rather than ideas and relationships. Even so, they were rare moments when possible futures were made tangible.