Social institutions, networks and groups construct, mould and orchestrate human actions. Marx famously argued that people make their own history, but they do so not under circumstances of their own choosing since the ‘tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living’

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.

Martin Luther King, for example, argued: ‘Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable …Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals’

This may be true, for example, of driverless cars, around which there is currently enormous excitement being generated by their developers but no clear sense of just what social practices they will enable.

Such specialists included prophets, diviners, seers, oracles, witches, technologists, sages, astrologers, clairvoyants, novelists, wizards, futurologists, fortune tellers and so on. These specialists often drew upon specific bodies of ‘expert’ knowledge, often a mix of the spiritual and secular.

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

Moreover, time is not viewed as a dimension along which systems move. Rather, systems are constituted through their becoming, through process, through what the philosopher A. N. Whitehead and others termed the ‘arrow of time’ (1929).

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

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 th