Where do visions of the future come from?

Where do visions of the future come from?

When you think of the future, what do you see? What do you hear? What do you imagine?

What do you dream?

Have you ever thought about where those dreams come from?

Really? Have you?

Do you have a TED Talk kind of futures dream? (‘Imagine a world..’)

Or maybe it’s the CES trade show kind of futures dream? (‘Imagine a world..’)

Is it the earnest Kickstarter kind of futures dream?

"Wouldn’t it be cool if this could just be better/happier/quicker/simpler/more-more?"

Is it the Futurist/Visionary/Keynote/Madonna Headset prognosticator’s kind of future meant to ignite a conference and-or corporate offsite junket in the way a stage magician or speaker’s bureau star of stage-and-screen is meant to do?

"The world is changing fast..and you need me to tell you stuff with a particular confident tone in order to allay your deepest fears of failure.."

Is it the MBA type person’s kind of future?

"Our financial model projects that we will obtain 4.5% CAGR so long as my Excel spreadsheet holds true.."

Is it the science-fiction kind of future?

"It was 2067..marking the 12th year after The Great Surge, when the network went rogue. The off-world mining colonies were in in a constant state of rebellion, forcing the regional precincts to ration everyone who couldn’t pay the bribes to 1 tin of vat harvested Algorithium a week. It was rare that these rusted, leaking tins weren’t a cycle or more beyond their expiry and so provided little or no protection against the toxic effects of the ruined atmosphere. The masses drooled and stumbled about from the noxious gases in the air, nearly zombified, staring transfixed at their media nozzles, ignorant to the exploitation of their thoughts by Augie Bot and his sock puppet bot army."

Or is it some scenario narrative, appropriately situated in a specific year and a specific technocultural context?

"The year is 2032 and the rollout of 6G sparked disinformation protests and counter-protests. Urban perimeter airways and driveways were clogged by AmazonFleet delivery drones hacked by black hat mercenaries from rogue stateless NGOs. These hacker flash mobs ground the networks of commerce to a near stand-still. No one had been able to get their baby formula nor blocks of vat grown protein delivered in days. Tensions were high. TrumpBot fueled the misinformation while negotiating with the 6G corps for a cash concession to align the GroupThink back towards the social norm analytic level of merely unsettled, rather than Cat 4 agitated."

Or maybe it’s the Silicon Valley kind of future, where what’s better is directly tied to instrumenting every aspect of life — from accounting and art through to sleep, reading, dog walking, golf swings, vacation itineraries, door locks, driving routes, music genres, coffee bean grinding, intelligence, and on and on.

That is to say that the Silicon Valley kind of futures dream is that one that can algorithmically impose itself in order to capture data from, and financialize anything — from the consciousness of people, pets and plants to any data that can be extracted from objects, surfaces, flows, etc.

(This may be the more resonant kind of future, and maybe even the kind of future that is most difficult to see beyond, or imagine that there could be another kind of future, such is its hold on our imagination that we have exceptional difficulty seeing beyond this archetype. It is also undoubtedly the kind of future that is most heavily capitalized and thereby most likely to become the one we inhabit, for better or almost surely for worse.)

This is a dream that has taken hold of some of the brightest, most earnestly creative people I know. It’s a powerful dream. Evocative. A hit that propagates through our collective consciousness in such a way that it’s hard to dream otherwise.

It’s a dream that is also heavily capitalized. And lots of excess capital is something people seem to dream about quite often — or maybe even, only.

It’s crazy how whipped up people can become about someone else’s dream, without wondering — wait..is this really my dream? Or is it that influencer influencing me to dream?

Is it my dream or the dream of that media feed from that billionaire/salesman/authoritarian/libertarian/AI/newscaster?

Over the last decade, I’ve watched this particular dream inspire these exceptional creatives to expend their precious time and creativity doing the dullest sorts of things in the service of the Silicon Valley future — many of whom recognize as much quite transparently, even to the point of saying they haven’t done a single creative thing of purpose outside of the powerful dream of Silicon Valley.

Yeah. I get it. Self-intelligent-connected-things-robot-y-autonomous. Amazing.

(Not all dreams are well-suited to making the world a more habitable place, btw.)

Well..

A humble observation, this after walking the periphery of this particular futures dream for awhile: It seems to me that these bright, creative, earnest friends are living within something else’s exceptionally powerful dream. It is most certainly not their dream.

It may be the case that living in this other thing’s powerful dream is a unique opportunity to do something ’at scale’ — something that will touch zillions of people.

That’s a common refrain, isn’t it?

Survival tip for the creative consciousness: You can’t change this things dream from inside itself. It’s got all kinds of protections against that, including the opportunity to taste the juicy rarity of excess.

You know about all of these protections. And you for sure saw Inception, but maybe didn’t consider the implications that you were the subject being ‘incepted’. When you’re inside, you work for that thing’s dream. Read the work product and conditions of employment paperwork.

And this particular dream? That Silicon Valley dream? It’s got super powers. It’s got some mad crazy super powers that have changed entire swathes of human and non-human consciousness to where it’s hard to even see how it could not be the righteous dream. It convinced us that it is the dream that will save us.

You are largely living in something else’s dream. As happy and content as it may seem to luxuriate within it - it’s not yours.

Do you really want to do something ‘at scale’ that will touch the consciousness of zillions of people?

Help us save ourselves and our humanity and our planet from that thing’s dream.

Start by imagining different kinds of futures - more habitable futures. One that’s are less obviously extractive. One’s that are not just about obtaining more — data, money, influence, interactions, clicks. One’s that are less obviously undergirded by the same principles of extracting ‘efficiencies’. Or automating everything. Or kinking our behaviors. Or revolutionizing/disrupting/evading norms that are there because they undergird a functional social .

Imagining starts with the story we are told, or tell ourselves. It is entirely possible to craft futures stories that start to look and feel different, particularly with all of that exceptional creative talent, insight, vision, dreams.

Let’s tell stories that are undergirded by a different set of values. We can simply start with stories that look different — that is to say, not your typical future vision video.

Our purpose here at the Near Future Laboratory has always been to imagine more habitable near future worlds. And we mean that. Even future visions that show the world a little bit mundane, or a little bit bent, or a little bit normal, ordinary, everyday we find exceptionally helpful in opening up a sense of what we might accept and expect.

We’ve spent lots of time and a tank full of creative energy not just imagining possible near futures but educating ourselves and others as to how to imagine possible near futures. All this in an effort to get out of the rut our imaginations are caught in. To imagine better. To ‘imagine harder‘ as my pal Nick put it to me recently.

Get in touch. We want to help — we want to help you tell those stories about adjacent and other possible futures. We want to help us all start imagining different kinds of futures.