Futurism

The purpose is to scout the path and shift the discourse.

Cayce Pollard as the positive archetype for how to navigate volatility. So by intensely tuning oneself in to subjective responses to things, you can cut through huge amounts of noise and volatility. Even though I couldn’t admit that that’s what I was doing in a lot of trend forecasting settings, that is really what my experience of it was. People w

At the Institute for the Future we believe that the value of futures thinking is not in predicting the future (something no one can do), but in imagining possibilities of what the future could be. And if there was ever a time we needed such imagination, it is today.

As futurists we look for signals—small, often weird things. They are usually new technologies, new behaviors, new narratives that don’t fit into the mainstream, but that are often precursors of important transformations. We then try to discern the larger patterns that these signals herald to understand where they might lead ten or more years down t

“Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future,” Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie, told The New York Times in 1977.

Also above and beyond other “candidates” – and in line with futures studies - metamodernism promotes an anticipatory and proactive thinking about alternative futures (Baciu et al., 2015), and is interested to convey a newly born optimist metanarrative that would unite and reconstruct the broken identity pieces after postmodernism (Abramson, 2015b).

Erik Davis on The Ezra Klein Show recently spoke about “high weirdness,” saying that “‘weirdness’ isn’t just a quality of things that don’t make sense to us; it’s an interpretive framework that helps us better understand the cultures and technologies that will shape our wondrous, wild future.”