What is the future?

I imagined a very different future from the one we have.

As a kid, I imagined a future focused on the real problems facing humanity. Things like hunger, poverty, premature death, violence, and environmental collapse. Technology would make people’s lives easier and more fun. Liberated from life’s hardships, people would turn to community and family rather than personal accumulation. This is a utopian ideal, I admit, but at the time it seemed like this is where we were headed. It’s how we talked, at least. It’s clear now that when we spoke about “the future”, it meant very different things to different people. So what is the future, really?

The best definition I’ve found comes from Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s After the Future. Berardi gives us two characteristics that explain how the temporal definition of the future (future-time, or the time that comes after now) becomes the modern concept of the future.

First, [the future] could be known, as the trends of human history could be traced in linear directions, and science could discover the laws of human evolution, which resembled the motion of the planets.

Second, the future could be transformed by human will, by industry, economic, technique, and political action.

The future is evoked when future-time is made knowable and controllable.

I like this definition because it’s more durable than other characteristics of the future like speed, automation, or youth. Those ideas were part of the Manifesto of Futurism, but are less descriptive of a post-WWII future that includes transistors, software, and a global network of communication.

However, this definition has a big loophole. The future is only a story, a narrative. We don’t actually need to be able to predict and control future-time. It’s just as evocative to believe that we can.

A classic example of how knowability and control form a futuristic narrative is in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Originally published as a series of short stories starting in 1942, Foundation tells the story of the invention of a new kind of mathematics called “psychohistory”, which is some combination of history, psychology, sociology, macroeconomics, and statistics. Psychohistory can predict major events and shifts in human civilization. Using this knowledge, Hari Seldon, the inventor of psychohistory, architects a master plan to keep civilization on track towards peace and prosperity.

Hari Seldon predicts the decline of the Galactic Empire, so he creates a distant planetary settlement called the Foundation. Their purpose is to compile all of human knowledge into the Encylopedia Galactica, with the idea that the preserved knowledge would jump-start human civilization after a dark age.

But things are not what they seem (that’s very Asimov). The Encyclopedia Galactica was merely a ploy to get the Galactic Emperor to allow for the creation of the Foundation. The real purpose of the Foundation is to become a new empire that re-asserts order throughout the galaxy.

The Foundation series is the raw stuff of futurism. All the tension comes from uncertainty over whether or not the Foundation is on track or deviated from Hari Seldon’s plan. The main characters struggle to ensure that the plan stays on course. This true antagonist of the series is the potential loss of knowability and control over future-time.

Foundation is compelling and believable (in parts) because we already believe that the world can be decomposed into processes, and that those processes can be understood, predicted, and directed.

Still, a lot has to go right to maintain the knowability and control over an uncertain future-time. Luck too. We can’t know or control everything. We can’t prepare for all possibilities. That’s the dissonance at the heart of the future. The future requires constant re-affirmations and renewals of faith.

What happens if we lose knowability and control over the future? What happens if our faith should waiver? That’s a story for next time.