Macrohistory and the Future (1998) – Metafuture: Futures Studies by Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojević

Macrohistory is the history of a non-reproducible system, one which has too many variables to easily be reset and replayed from the beginning. It is history that is not directly amenable to controlled experiment. At small scale, that’s the unpredictable flow of a turbulent fluid; at very large scale, it’s the history of humanity.

discuss several alternative theories of past and future in our section on Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, and Future Is Our Past. These theses don’t describe a clean progressive victory on every axis, but instead a set of cycles, hairpin turns, and mirror images, a set of historical trajectories far more complex than the narrative of linea

Microhistory thus has its limits, but it’s an incredibly powerful concept. If we have good enough measurements on the past, then we have a better prediction of the future in an extremely literal sense.

Paradoxically, the most reliable method to envision and plan for futures, isn’t just studying and extrapolating scientific facts, historical developments, psychology and demography, but by building stories beyond our wildest imagination.