I skimmed this just now, but one thing that strikes me is that I think she
might be almost exactly 180 degrees off on many points.
For example, she conflates 'professional futurism' with 'foresight
strategy', and seems to want to argue that this 'foresight strategy'
version of futurism can actually influence the shape of the future.
However, most of the "professional futurists" that I can think of are
really terrible at predicting the future. (It's possible that she means to
explicitly restrict 'professional futurism' to a very small domain that
would encompass, say, Basil Liddel-Hart [British military theorist who
invented blitzkrieg in the 1920s] but not Alvin Toffler [who made a career
out of spectacular but pretty off-base predictions that he and others
described as 'futurism' -- i.e., was a prominient and highly-visible
'professional futurist'.]. If that's what she wants to do, she needs to be
more explicit about explaining how "foresight strategy" differs from what
'Professional Wrong People' like Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson practice on
a daily and highly visible basis.)
The biggest problem I have with this article is that it cites essentially
no evidence -- it asks questions ('did Orwell influence the Stasi?') but
doesn't examine the questions or explain the reasons for asking them (IMO
the answer is 'probably not nearly as much as the Stasi thought he did').
Sure, predictions influence the future -- how is this controversial or even
open to question? It's not interesting until you start to examine it, and
taxonomies of futurism basically jump the gun: we're stuck with her
taxonomy as a way to organize our enterprise, instead of being open to
different ways of organizing the efforts.
For example, if we define "futurism" very broadly as 'trying to respond to
what's going to happen', we could separate futurists into reactive and
proactive thinkers. Liddel-Hart is a proactive thinker, inasmuch as he's
trying to think of a way around the wholesale slaughter evident during the
first world war -- trying to formulate an active response to advances in
military technology, through fundamental changes in tactics and strategy. I
would argue that Kevin Kelly is a reactive thinker, because he thinks he's
figured out how things are going to work going forward and he thinks people
should react to them in a certain way. I pick those examples because both
have been incredibly influential [both arguably in a negative way, but
that's almost beside the point]. Liddel-Hart changed the nature of warfare;
Kelly was at least as responsible as any other single person for the "magic
money portal" phase of the Internet's initial boom-cycle (the idea that
there was a "new economy"). Kelly's influence is particularly interesting
because there's a certain kind of moral passivity to it: we're not to
question the value of this new way of thinking, we're not to question the
changes it wreaks, we're just to accept them and deal with them. (Certainly
there's lip-service to the idea that people create their own value, but
read a bit of teh Cluetrain-era thought-leadership and it becomes very
clear that the first and most important thing we're to do is to Accept The
New Paradigm like the host on our tongue, and from that will flow the
wisdom to Exploit The New Pardigm.)
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 6:59 AM, Alicia Henn <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/04/are-we-creating-the-future-by-predicting-it/
>
> An interesting article about different types of futurist.
>
> Alicia
>
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