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The future holds immense power. As such, it’s always been something capable of being hijacked and wielded for particular ends, to be shaped by those with authority or the desire to possess it. Throughout history there’s been a tension between future-tellers and those who look on, waiting for their visions to come true. As Hannah Arendt put it in On Violence (1970), there’s a skepticism that calcifies: “Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens.” In other words, you cannot trust a futurist.
Futurology, as it is sometimes known, is the practice of making predictions about the future according to one’s claim to it. A futurist, then, not only imagines what the future might look or be like, as a philosopher or science-fiction writer may, but imbues their predictions with a paternalistic authority over the future that they envision, an assurance of its inevitability, and, in some cases, access to the means and the resources to make it happen. As such, there’s an expectation, often eagerly taken up by governments and corporations, that their predictions influence policy decisions and economic development.
It’s instructive to look to history’s future-tellers for insight into who has been able, or allowed, to shape what is to come.
This idea of futurism holds a strong presence in our lives today, just as it has through different periods of history and in various contexts. By taking a closer look at these moments of futurist influence, from the proto-utopian socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the Italian Fascist Futurists of the early twentieth to our current-day tech overlords, we can see that this conception of the future and how to make use of it has been key to understanding particular dynamics of power in the world for centuries. As we find ourselves under the futurist thumb of tech evangelists seizing the means of prediction, it’s instructive to look to history’s future-tellers for insight into who has been able, or allowed, to shape what is to come.
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Let’s first make a distinction between political, social, and economic futurism and the longer, larger history of prophecy. From the astrological practices of Babylonians in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago to the divination of oracles in Egypt or China centuries later, prophecy was a sacred practice across geographic regions and religious beliefs, and only the most trusted readers of the stars or tea leaves were able to advise emperors, rulers, and tyrants. Of course, elements of this kind of prophecy live on today around the world.
The futurists under consideration here, though, are best understood as being intertwined with the Industrial Revolution and the political, economic, and social consequences it heralded. For instance, born in 1760 (arguably also the birth year of the Revolution), Henri de Saint-Simon was a French theorist best known for, early on, identifying the industrial class as the group that must be protected to bring about a properly functioning economy and society. This was a philosophy that sought to learn from the Enlightenment era but applied to the industrial age amid the rise of productivity, individualism, and other forces spurred by capitalist production. This idealized vision of “the industrial society” not only condemned idleness of any kind, but also lacked any materialist basis, and so while Saint-Simon’s ideas influenced Karl Marx and others, this version of utopian socialism was one that ignored class struggle in favor of an industrialized vision of meritocracy.
Saint-Simon also learned from the French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, a key Enlightenment figure who, alongside championing the power of ideas and not people to lead the charge of the future, solidified for Saint-Simon the value of a rationalist determinism about human progress. He predicted that only this form of meritocratic industrialism would provide Western society with a viable future and that a proper hierarchy would be required to make it happen, with the decision-making industrial class at the top. As Walter M. Simon’s translation of Oeuvres de Saint-Simon & D’Enfantin (1865) shows, this belief in a deterministic causality lent his predictions their power.
“[T]he future consists of the last terms of a series whose first terms constitute the past,” Saint-Simon wrote. “When one has carefully studied the first terms of a series, it is easy to supply the following ones; thus one may easily deduce the future from a proper observation of the past.”
Saint-Simon had an authoritarian streak, too, believing so fully in his proposals for a better society that he felt they ought to be enacted by force: the attitude of a true philosopher-king that’s not unlike the style of tech evangelists in the twenty-first century, who likewise attach a sense of pure inevitability to their predictive abilities.
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For many philosophers, theorists, and thinkers, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution signaled the dominance of scientific knowledge as humanity’s greatest achievement. They applied its tenets to every subject, discipline, and area, as Harold J. Cook and many other historians have demonstrated, as everything from economic bureaucracy to advancements in medicine to modes of communication became beholden to the framework of this form of knowledge. It was applied, of course, to the future, as well. At the same time, throughout the nineteenth century, artistic movements and innovations coalesced around similar themes, including Mary Shelley’s far-future tale of The Last Man (1826), which depicts a late-twenty-first century Europe ravaged by plague, leading to humanity’s near-extinction. Shelley’s tale questions Enlightenment suppositions about the inevitability of both scientific and political progress. One of the first-ever dystopian novels, it was poorly reviewed at the time but nevertheless reflected a cultural feeling of the promise, and threat, of science.
For John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), learning from this recent history meant pursuing a utilitarian future—the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. He saw free markets and empirical knowledge production as the only viable way forward. This schema, and Mill’s consistent efforts at predicting its surefire success in reshaping the global economy, influenced economic and social thinking in ways that are still felt today. It resonates with the effective altruists who populate Silicon Valley and believe in philanthropically giving to the causes that will protect the most people in the future.
However, others we may not think of as “futurist,” like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were far clearer about what kind of future was necessary and what sort of action would need to be taken to get there: class-based revolution. Contra Mill and other proponents of moral liberalism, Marx and Engels envisioned communism in detail as an organizing principle that would answer industrialization with transformation, writing:
This revolution, they argued, was inevitable, as the working class will one day have no choice but to overthrow their masters.
While not futurists per se, Marx and Engels are a useful example for how Big Ideas of this stature spread during this period, showing how often claims of inevitability played a key role in the credibility of the prediction.
The American Edward Bellamy is the next obvious example. A journalist and utopian “dreamer,” Bellamy “wished to present to his fellow Americans a clear portrayal not only of a desirable future but also of their own day, with all its ugly shortcomings and potencies for good,” explained Elizabeth Sadler, writing in the context of World War II. Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888), was a utopian science fiction tale of a young Bostonian, Julian West, who falls into a deep sleep in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to a surging socialist utopia in the United States. It’s hard to overstate the influence of Looking Backward, as it not only inspired countless utopian “Bellamyite” communities but also a political movement of “Nationalists,” members of which subscribed to the book’s idea of nationalizing all private property to bring about this utopia. Similarly, stories by H. G. Wells (1866–1946), particularly A Modern Utopia (1905), which imagined a future on a parallel planet with scientific and technological progress coexisting with global political instability, caught on among regular readers but also economists and world leaders (John S. Partington provides an overview of this influence). This presages the obsession of many of our tech overlords today have with science fiction and its potential to be a roadmap for the sort of future they want to bring about, even (or especially) when it contains shades of dystopia.
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The twentieth century, then, contained numerous fully futurist flashpoints. If previous eras were less about self-professed future-tellers than about thinkers who made predictions that were widely adopted (a distinction with a difference), then this is the moment when futurism as such—as a self-imposed deterministic phenomenon, as policy, as a business—takes hold.
This begins, appropriately enough, with the Italian Futurist avant-garde art movement, which was obsessed with technology and industrialization. Its adherents embraced science over nature, and, increasingly, nationalistic politics and fascism, eventually being absorbed by Benito Mussolini’s ideology and authoritarian violence.
Even more consequential on the scale of geopolitics, though, was the rise of the think-tank consultancy RAND Corporation and other futurist-styled think tanks, scientists, engineers, economists, and government agencies after the Second World War and into the 1960s. This was the new era of expertise. As philosopher Nicholas Rescher summarizes,
This diffusion of futurism was bound up with the ever-increasing prominence in all industrialized nations of what might be called the “Advice Establishment”: academics, working scientists, technical experts, and pundits of all sorts serving on advisory boards, policy study groups, and public commissions developing information, ideas, and speculations to provide guidance about the future as background for public policy formulation.
To wit, Jenny Andersson chronicles how much of this was initiated at RAND in the early 1960s to “find a systematic and scientific approach to the future.” RAND aimed to create a general theory of prediction, aided by technology and its computer models, according to the idea that the future “could now be liberated from the grip of Utopian fantasy and superstition and be welcomed into the halls of science.”
Buckminster Fuller: Captain of Spaceship Earth July 12, 2016
Even apostles of the future end up as historical figures: a critical view of R. Buckminster Fuller as the Captain of Spaceship Earth.
As Andersson points out, Alvin Toffler took great notice of this shift, along with his wife Adelaide Farrell, and together they wrote the famous 1970 book Future Shock, which argued that society was encountering “too much change in too short a period of time,” and only futurists had the answers of what to do about it. Meanwhile, RANDian futurists like Herman Kahn (noted for the cost-benefit thinking of nuclear war; the character of Dr. Strangelove is based on him) and Olaf Helmer (who would later become the first professor of futuristics, and co-found The Institute for the Future, another think tank) bristled at Toffler’s sensationalism and insisted, again, on, the wholly rational scientific basis of their predictions, which came to be known more formally as “forecasting.”
From here, futures studies emerged among the wider intelligentsia, encompassing these supposedly scientific quantitative methods—what Helmer and others called expert judgment—as well as more utopian imagineering. (It’s worth noting that something very similar was happening at the same time in the Soviet Union, as Eglė Rindzevičiūtė recounts, and in other parts of the world.)
According to Andersson, it’s at this moment that the future became “a sphere in need of intervention—foresight, organization, and rationalization,” particularly as it became “laden with connotations of looming disasters such as ecocide, atomic war, and the population bomb,”—which only seems to hold evermore truth today, and then some. This cultural and intellectual obsession was institutionalized around the globe, and scholarly journals such as Futures and Futures Research Quarterly were launched. However, just like that, by the late 1970s, as Rescher later put it, there occurred “a drastic change in the ethos regarding our capacity to control events either predictively or productively.” This was post-Vietnam and the economic turmoil of that decade, and it seemed “futurology was a dry well.”
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In retrospect, RAND and its ilk represented a general move, at least in the so-called West, to reduce uncertainty and project an image of control, whether applied to nuclear war scenarios or business decisions. This would develop into the field of trend analysis and forecasting, as Devon Powers shows in her book On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future (2019). In more recent years, scholars including Powers, Michael Godhe and Luke Goode, and others have insisted on a renewed critical future studies to better account for the power dynamics involved in contemporary forecasting from think tanks, governments, and, more than ever, giant technology companies.
If the RAND era was about “world-making, at a time when visions of world futures and world order were changing rapidly,” as Andersson puts it, then the tech titans of today are working according to similar logics. After all, technological change was central to that earlier era’s understanding of social and political power, so perhaps it’s no wonder that modern corporate technologists imagine themselves as the God-given ambassadors of a better future. They have all the data, all the capital, and all the expertise, so it follows, in the mind of a futurist, that they have everything they need to design the future. It’s their right. As a typical headline asked in 2013, “Can Silicon Valley Save the World?”
Andersson concludes her overview of this history with a clear-eyed notion that the future, and how it’s being wielded in the age of the digital economy, once again necessitates urgent action.
“Themes of apocalypse and utopia are thus part of a future history, and the history proposed here is one that takes such fears and hopes on board and considers the engagements that it gives rise to as an important form of social struggle,” she writes. As the future may seem more out of reach than ever before, that struggle is one we must take up.
