how to see the future

My generic career advice for young people is that if at all possible, you should aim to work on something that no one has a word for. Spend your energies where we don’t have a name for what you are doing, where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do. When you are ahead of language, that means you are in a spot where it is

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History ends not when the stream of apparently historic events ends,” writes Venkatesh Rao, “but when the world loses a sense of a continuing narrative, and arrives at what psychologists call narrative foreclosure” — a hollowing out of the collective imagination, a sense of the future being cancelled. The ghosts of yesteryear float around the... See more

We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of human expression re-constitutes the mythic type of consciousness, of once-upon-a-time-ness, which means all-time,... See more

Imagining the future is just another form of memory. It’s a kind of forward-looking nostalgia. “The history of utopias is the history of rear-view mirrors. Every utopia is a picture of the preceding age.”3 If your memory gets scrambled, your ability to envision a coherent future is severely hampered. When the past feels slippery or shifty, you lose... See more

The explosion of alternative histories hasn’t just eroded the influence of 20th century media institutions, it’s also damaged our ability to build collective futures

People who spend a lot of time exploring these subcultures feel like they can see into the future, and for good reason. What happens online often shows up in the headlines weeks, months, or even years later. The internet has become the petri dish of culture — the soil in which new movements and novel conversations find root