No More Shiny Tomorrows: Futurism Needs to Get Real

The futurists of the world struggle to convey positive and optimistic scenarios that encourage humane action.

We often assume that the world of today would stun a visitor from fifty years ago. In truth, for every miraculous iPad there are countless partly broken realities: WiFi passwords, connectivity, battery life, privacy and compatibility amongst others. The real skill of creating a compelling and engaging view of the future lies not in designing the gl... See more

To move past the dark shadows of existential threats such as COVID-19, climate crises, and economic inequality, futurists must embrace an obligation to insist that things can get better.

Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century “destroy it all and build something completely different” modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and ... See more

Here is the problem: The future visions that are put out there into the world are either commonplace, boring, meaningless, (corporate) agenda-driven, uninspiring, or all of the above together.

The reason for that, in my opinion, is that our minds are stuck in old ideologies, old systems, and old narratives, which prevents us from thinking outside th

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Being a cozy futurist is being aware that even when indubitably science & technology are cool, we can't forget about the lives of the users of said technology; the goal is a nice future, not just a technically advanced future.

Instead of living in fear and generating apocalyptic, dark futures can we begin to turn towards futures of living in beauty? Of seeing the beauty in humanity, in possibilities of creating new ways of knowing and imagining new social, economic, cultural, and human systems.