Sublime

The future may present a promissory note that helps to transform the present in the direction of progress

Futures are multiple, contested and complex. In

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.

Such forecasting involves seeing some feature of the present as the key mechanism in how people's lives will predictably unfold in the future.

This can be distinguished from the A-series, which involves the relationships of ‘past-to-present-to-future’.

Gregory Bateson once argued that ‘the unit of survival is organism plus environment…the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself’ (cited

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

States, corporations, universities, cities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future; that foreign country is now everywhere.