What is the Future?

Systems in which humans are ‘bearers’ of social relations possess features that make knowing and bringing about proposed futures exceptionally difficult.

He presents SF prototyping as an emergent tool within forecasting – a ‘prototype’ in this context is ‘a story or a fictional depiction of a product’ (Johnson 2011: 12). SF is not just a resource to draw upon for possible imaginings of future worlds, but also a technique for generating scenarios through developing characters, plots and narrative sto

Porritt sees crisis as the basis for innovation, especially as organized through the ‘global cooperative movement’ in relationship to finance and capital markets.

Systems are characterized by a lack of proportionality, or ‘non-linearity’, between apparent ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ (Nicolis 1995). Such small causes are mostly unpredictable, difficult to foresee, although in hindsight they may be explicable.

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’

Societies can collapse. These texts problematize the idea that conditions of life are inexorably improving; according to Greer, we are moving to a condition that is After Progress (2015). These texts point to the possibility of systemic reversal, some deploying the language of austerity, and show that this is directly affecting people's lives and l

And there is what is called ‘face-crime’ – this is the adoption of an improper expression on one's face when watching the tele-screen as ever more improbable facts get transmitted (Orwell 2008[1949]: 65).

Geels and Smit term such new technological niches as ‘hopeful monstrosities’ (2000: 879–80). Technology innovators often hype the possibilities of the new as representing unambiguous ‘progress’ in order to attract attention, and especially funding, for what is often a rather limited system in the initial stage. The

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.

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