Future by Design

This chapter critiques the anticipatory practices of contemporary organizations, such as think tanks and management consultancies, which offer methods and forecasts about possible and desirable futures. These organizations, the chapter argues, contribute to creating a sense of urgency with respect to the future, capitalizing on the perceived need among decision makers to grasp contemporary events, and provide tools and content by which the future can be designed. It argues that future forecast scenarios assist in the creation of a particular type of authority: one geared to the contemporary global situation and to an increasingly complex system of global governance. The chapter interrogates this particular type of authority to argue it is not singular and dominant, but instead comprises the varying interests of many different actors and is underscored by rational process, which offers the possibility of a wider shared understanding

Future Weather

This chapter draws on empirical research from an AHRC-funded project entitled Spaces of Experience and Horizons of Expectation: Extreme Weather in the UK, Past, Present and Future, to illustrate the complex historical geographies and politics of ‘weather wising’ and different forms of weather prognostications. Endfield considers the different ways in which particular historical subjects imagined and articulated knowledge about weather futures and examines the different temporalities implicated within such practices: from anxieties over immediate weather futures expressed in daily agricultural diaries to longer-term annual forecasting associated with annual almanacs. Uncovering a range of tools and technologies involved in weather forecasting—including both human and non-human methods of forecasting, phenological observations, and prognostications associated with animal behaviours—Endfield explores questions of credibility, authority, and status in terms of knowing and articulating understanding of future weather.

Italian Futurism and the Explosive ‘Now’

This chapter examines the development and changing artistic and socio-political implications of a particular temporal modality—‘the present as history’—within a variety of Futurist texts. It draws on the work of Frederic Jameson to argue that the Italian Futurists sought to radically disrupt a particular representation of the present in their calls to destroy the past and attempts to endow futurity with the urgency of fully embodied agency. Wittman argues that the Futurists reject a specific, historicist, bourgeois understanding of history and seek to inaugurate a new sense of time, an explosive ‘now’. Comparing early and later texts by Marinetti and other Futurists, and identifying their debts to anarchist thought, the chapter demonstrates that their strategy of breaking into the present can only counter totalitarian appropriations if it remains anchored in embodied practices.

Futures Honed

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.

From Boundless Expansion to Existential Threat

This essay examines visions of the future of human life in transhumanist imaginaries of the posthuman, ranging from utopian figurations to catastrophist warnings. Focusing on libertarian, liberal, and conservative posthuman imaginaries, it argues that the posthuman condition is defined by changing scientific, moral, and political narratives, including ideas of revolutionary change, progressive evolution through the ethical use of human enhancement technologies, and the mitigation of existential risk for the preservation of intelligence and civilization in the long term. Changing posthuman imaginaries, it shows, reshape spaces of present and future political imagination.

Post-Human Design

This essay considers the notion of the ‘exoself’ as a vision of the extended human in the future. Sandberg reconsiders the advancements in technology which allow us to modify bodies and outsource cognition and examines the profound ways in which they change ways we relate to the world: from exoself components, like watches and smartphones which are now experienced as everyday parts of life, to rarer, more exotic visions of futurity such as prosthetics, spacesuits, and exoskeletons. The chapter considers other mediums of the exoself vision such as art, fiction, and demonstrations. Sandberg maintains that while radically enhanced posthumans are too abstract to visualize, exoselves provide a ready-made image of a transhuman that is concrete.

The Scarcity of Social Futures in the Digital Era

This essay explores the paradox that collective, socially imagined visions of the future seem both abundant and scarce. Their abundance is based on the variety of images of possibility, hope, and the good life that emerge from the social and cultural diversity of our world. Yet, imagining the collective future is highly constrained by the limitations imposed by fear, censorship, and commercial and political propaganda. The chapter explores the conditions of possibility of this paradox. It argues that the scarcity of social futures in the digital era is a result of a process of Schumpeterian destruction, in which what is at stake is human creativity, curiosity, and the social relations of the non-virtual world.

Discounting the Future

This chapter analyses the political, environmental, and human implications of acts of discounting. Discounting is an economic instrument used by companies and policymakers to make the future commensurate with the present. This chapter argues that discounting is a political technology: it embeds debatable assumptions about value and the future, and it produces tangible effects in an expanding range of empirical domains. Drawing on examples from the history of discounting (capital budgeting, forest management, environmental regulation, and pharmaceutical research and development), the chapter discusses four of its political qualities. First, discounting equips collective decisions about the allocation of resources; second, it shapes the characteristics of future entities; third, it is an instrument for governing behaviour that guides decision-making in a myriad of places and instances; and fourth, it problematizes the very separation of the present and the future.

A Space for Time

This essay analyses the role of museums in the creation of futures imaginaries and the ways in which these are embedded in socio-political narratives over time (narratives of nation, empire, power, consumption, and home). The essay tests its hypotheses through charting the evolution of the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the soirée—exhibitions and events showcasing technological, scientific, and cultural innovations of the future—from their heyday in the mid nineteenth century to their demise in the early twentieth century. In particular, the essay explores the social, spatial, and temporal organization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century soirée display spaces as carriers of future worlds. It argues that the creation of futures imaginaries depends on interrelationships between people and objects across space and time, and that the complex web of relations established between words, objects, spaces, and people in exhibitions provides catalysts for ideas, ideologies, and narratives of the future.

Future as a Horizon of Expectations

This chapter adopts a sociological approach to conceptualize futurity as a horizon of expectations. It provides a practical application of sociological theory—future present and present future, horizon of expectations, futurization and defuturization—to contemporary discourse. It observes that hegemonic discourses emphasize ‘defuturization’—decreasing the openness of people’s present futures—and explores the problems this poses for the self-expression of younger generations. As well as exploring the impact of futurity/defuturization upon the development of processual research methods, the chapter reflects upon ways in which sociology may intervene in communicative practices and foster the capacity of individuals to work through their own horizons of expectations and open up the present future.