*Joanne McNeil is having a tough time with the atemporality here.
*"Old people in big cities afraid of the sky," Joanne. The various profit schemes and do-gooder goals are all period notions. Time will continue to pass.
https://medium.com/message/postcards-from-the-futch-595796d8a45d
"In the future what will the future mean for the future of the future? In the future will futures create new futures for futures? What future might the future bring?" (((That sounds funny, but those are excellent questions. If you take a critical step back, you can see that there's a "metafuture" in which people stash various methods of thinking about the passage of time. It's a cultural attic where symbols, aspirations and intentions go in and out of futuristic style. "Robots," for instance. Super-hip right now, totally corny 20 years ago. The future's always renewing itself, but it's quite rare to have a genuinely new way of thinking about the future. Saying it's "the Internet" is your uncle's idea now. The Internet is old-fashioned in 2015 and its apostles are mostly jaded and disillusioned, but so what? It's hardware and software, there's gonna be plenty more.)))
"We have reached a point where titling something “The Future of” looks antiquated, a blast from the internet culture near past. And, by the way, this isn’t a new idea. I could paraphrase something J. G Ballard said in the forward to the 1995 reprinting of Crash: “Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. The future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.” Ballard could be complaining about the future today. And it wasn’t a new point then, either.
(((It's hard to say that JG Ballard is old-fashioned, but he is. We're in a Depression, people aren't getting instantly satisfied in Vermilion Sands leisure societies. Go quiz some Syrians or Ukrainians about their instant gratified lifestyles. Even the ultra-rich, push-button guys in Dubai are trembling as the drones rumble by.)))
"As a way of thinking about the internet, “the future of” is a particular form of procrastination.
"Recently, Kanye West said in an interview that he talks about “the futch” with his pal, Elon Musk.
"I suggest we borrow West’s coinage the “futch” to describe the “futurism” of snake oil internet gurus. The Shingys. The idea-ators. Everyone who instructed us to keep looking toward the horizon and never look down is guilty now. The “futch” is the recognition that we cannot begin to categorize let alone solve any problems in this moment now.
"Tech conferences incubate the futch. It is hard to fact-check someone with a headset mic on stage. You can subtweet a talk, you can troll it in the YouTube comments once the documentation is up, but someone alone on stage is not there for debate. Tech culture gravitated around these spaces, first at SXSW Interactive, then TED added a stylized sheen. Speakers play reverend to a church of consultants. Or maybe the speakers are consultants to the consultants. It’s the future of futures all the way down.
"The futch ignores complexity. The futch denies how the internet amplifies existing hierarchies and upholds structural inequality. The futch is every broken promise of every new app or internet service. There’s always demand for more legible future. Futch-peddling is about as noble a profession as astrologer, and one with about as little accountability…."
(((I used to know some futurists with accountability. The US Congress "Office of Technology Assessment." Great bunch of people; they were the polar opposite of everything that Joanne decries here. Newt Gingrich, who's very keen on Reaganite bible-thumper futurism, swiftly got rid of them, and the voting population never said a word about that coup. The Congress could re-install the OTA in a minute if they wanted, but then, well, accountable futurists would probably need an actual Congress to work in, in order to get anything accountable done. Where would they ever get such a Congress?)))
(((So, this assessment of the shallowness of contemporary futurism is, well, kinda shallow in itself. It's a bit much for an art curator to beat up on the harmless and colorful Shingy when the US Congress, and the population that elects them, are both paralytic. What is an "accountable" Shingy supposed to do, exactly? Have some pity on him; he never asked anybody for votes. If you need an oracle you like better, you've already got Kanye West.)))
