Taking Back Tomorrow

I read James Gleick’s review of A Century of Tomorrows by Glenn Adamson, in the New York Review of Books. The book is a history of attempts to predict the future. Techno-optimism comes in for some criticism from both authors, but Gleick’s central point seems to be that, whether optimistic or not, efforts to predict the future tend to cause us harm by distracting our focus from the complexities of the present, whether we are talking about presidential polling or five-year economic plans. I think it’s a worthwhile critique, but it seems to me that the most notable aspect of any discussion about futurology is that the attitude toward the future of those who inhabit our particular present is almost unremittingly pessimistic. 

To concede that the future is unknowable is, of course, better than insisting it cannot be anything other than bleak. But how can we make sense of the complexities of the present—how can we organize ourselves to take any action together in the present, how can we, in that sense, be human—if we cannot drive stakes into the future, if only for inspiration or direction? The review, like the book, gives special attention to the technologically-focused futurism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and dwells on examples of its failures. But can we blame the inhabitants of that time for trying to look ahead? They lived in an era of bewildering technological change, a time when time itself seemed quite literally to be accelerating. How could they have made sense of the complexities of their present without some effort at understanding where all the changes might be leading?

From the review:

Adamson, having exposed various strains of failed futurology, suggests nonetheless that we will and should continue to make our best guesses, competing with one another, always remembering that every prediction is a statement about the present: “They can’t be constructed so as to cancel one another out, but must be mutually legible and compatible. This, it seems to me, is the work that futurology still has before it.”

Here is a concession to the value of futurology, but I wonder about the argument that predictions must be “mutually legible and compatible.” How can they be? How much value would be shaved off of our predictions if we had to ensure they all fit together? Even the present is made of mutually illegible and incompatible parts. In the examples I have seen from past futurologists, it has often been the case that the most accurate predictions are bundled together with errors. An author might predict a future technology with startling accuracy—the smart phone, the kitchen of tomorrow—while bungling the elements of the picture surrounding it: at the center of the kitchen of tomorrow, for example, we see the housewife of yesterday, laboring away at her machines while her husband relaxes with a newspaper and a pipe.

I don’t think any coherent picture of the future is possible at all; I think we’d be better served by sifting through the mutually incompatible predictions for sources of inspiration and warning, imagining how the elements of one prediction might be mixed and matched with the elements of another, and doing our best as we go to name the elements we’d like to realize and those we ought to avoid. One thing we have learned from futurologists past is that the relationships between technological developments and social structures are far more mutable and contingent than they might seem, and that alone seems like a reason for optimism, or at least an argument for action. 

Of course this is a conversation about the present, because anything we can imagine already exists.