MDB writer William Gibson explains how we suddenly run out of the future precisely when technology is flying fast
By Andre Spicer, Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Cass Business School, City, University of London
The future is not what it used to be, at least according to Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson. In an interview with the BBC, Gibson said that people seem to be losing interest in the future. "Throughout the 20th century we envisioned what the 21st century would look like, why don't we now hear predictions about the 22nd century? How did it happen that we suddenly ran out of future?
Gibson says that throughout his life thinking about the future was a cult, if not a religion. His entire generation dealt with "postalgia" - a tendency to envision romantic and idealistic visions of the future. Instead of imagining the past as an ideal time (as nostalgia does), postology imagines a perfect future. For example, a study of young counselors found that many of them suffered from postalgia. They assumed their lives would be perfect once they were promoted to partner. "We also imagined the future in different forms - whether in the form of a city built of crystals on a hill or a radioactive wasteland after a nuclear war." Said Gibson in 2012. "Ahead of us, there are only... more things... events." The result is a strange postmodern disease. Gibson calls this "future fatigue". This is a situation where we are no longer dealing with visions of the future, both romantic and dystopian. We deal with the here and now.
Gibson's diagnosis is supported by international surveys. Among other things, one of the surveys found that most Americans rarely think about the future and only a few think about the distant future. When they are forced to think about it, they don't like what they see. Another survey by the Pew Research Center found that 44% of Americans were pessimistic about the future. But pessimism about the future is not limited to the US. One international survey that examined the responses of more than 400,000 people from 26 countries found that people in developed countries tended to think that the lives of today's children would be worse than their own. An international survey conducted in 2015 by YouGov found that people in developed countries were particularly pessimistic. For example, only 4% of people in the UK thought the situation was getting better, compared to 41% of Chinese who thought the situation was getting better.
Rational or irrational pessimism?
So why has the world seemingly given up on the future? One explanation could be that deep pessimism is the only rational response to the catastrophic consequences of global warming, decreased life expectancy and an increasing number of existential risks, but other studies show that this widespread pessimism is irrational. People who support this view point out that by many measures the world is actually getting better. And an Ipsos survey found that people who are more aware of technological development tend to be less pessimistic about the future. Although there may be some objective reasons for pessimism, it is likely that other factors may explain the fatigue about the future. Researchers claim that there are good reasons why we should avoid making predictions about the distant future. First, forecasting is always a highly uncertain activity. The more distant and complex the predictions, the more room for error there is. This means that while it may be rational to make a projection about something simple in the near future, it is probably pointless to make predictions about something complex in the very distant future.
Economists have known this for many years that people tend to discount the future. This means that we place greater value on something that we can get immediately versus something that we will have to wait for. Much attention is given to stressing short-term needs and less to long-term investors. Psychologists have also found that futures that are near and within reach seem concrete and detailed while those that are far away seem more abstract. Near futures are based more on personal experience, while the distant future is shaped by ideologies and theories.
When the future is closer and more concrete, people tend to think that it is likely to happen and also brings us to action, so the preference for a concrete, near future means that people tend to postpone thoughts of more abstract and distant possibilities. The human aversion to thinking about the future is partially understandable. But there are also certain social conditions that make us more likely to give up on the future. Sociologists have argued that for people living in fairly stable societies, it is possible to create stories about what the future might look like. But in moments of deep social disintegration and upheavals, these stories cease to make sense and we lose the sense of the future and how to prepare for it.
This is what happened in many Native American communities during colonialism. This is how Plenty Coups, the leader of the Crows, described it: "When the buffalo disappeared, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not pick them up again. After that nothing happened."
But instead of being thrown into a sense of despair about the future, Gibson thinks we should be a little more optimistic. "This new state of having no future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else's past, every present is someone else's future."
to the article on The Conversation website
More of the topic in Hayadan:
One response
Prof. Ilana Gomel said this before, you are welcome to listen to her in the first episode of my podcast: "How the MDB lost its future" https://absolutecarmel.com/ep1/