What is the Future?

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 unchang

So there are patterned, regular and rule-bound systems; these rule-bound workings can come to generate various unintended effects; and unpredictable events disrupt and abruptly transform what appear to be rule-bound and enduring patterns. This is a view which emphasizes networks of people, of systems, of societies as fundamentally historical, and w

This slowness of change stems from many limits on futures. Such limits include cognitive and non-cognitive human capacities, the embedded practices and traditions within each society, the

is only if a potential innovation comes to be successfully inserted within specific social practices that it will become core as people's lives get reorganized around it. Innovations thus presuppose transformations in underlying social practices. New practices can be difficult to engender by hierarchical policy imposition or by commercial advertisi

In Chapter 9, I examine other examples where people believe they know the future of global climate change but where this is widely ignored; this is sometimes seen as a contemporary example of the ‘Cassandra syndrome’.

A number of long-range random links, if combined with densely knit clumps, produce a low degree of separation of each person from everyone else on the planet. This patterning of networks and the low level of separation of people worldwide is one reason why future diseases, rumours, information and innovations can spread rapidly (Watts 1999, 2003).

the effort to solve one problem reveals or creates other problems; solutions depend on how each issue is framed, and vice versa; different stakeholders have radically different frames for understanding what actually is the problem and the solution; the constraints that the problem is subject to and the resources needed to solve it change over time;

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).

They are sociomaterial; power is as much material/technological as it is social.