Phony Futurological Foresight

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot in response to this comment:

What I think you're saying is that you don't put stock in predictions that have no underlying causal model. That might be a self-consistent viewpoint, though with social processes -- global warming depends on the social process of carbon emission -- I'm not sure how much we really know. I would agree that we're farther from predicting technological change than predicting global warming. But unfortunately, technology has been essential to most changes in the human condition. So I think your view reduces to saying we can't know anything, except this little part that, maybe, we can actually model. Or as the story goes, looking under a lamp post for a wallet you dropped on the other side of the street because the light is there. I wonder then how much it makes sense to care about the long-term future, under this view.

Far from saying we can't know anything, I am insisting that there are real standards on the basis of which to distinguish the contributions real disciplines make from those of pseudo-science as well as faith-based initiatives and subcultural enthusiasms from real policy-making. Part of what it means to be reasonable is to accept as the best on offer those candidates for belief which satisfy criteria of warrant -- but another part of what it means to be reasonable to judge which domain of belief applies to the effort at hand and to know what the relevant criteria of warrant actually are. That's why I keep harping on the fact that futurological scenario spinning is a literary genre or marketing phenomenon or fandom rather than a social science -- so that your expectations and judgments of futurology are based on the proper criteria. My pluralism is neither nihilist nor relativist (though I get that complaint a lot from the priestlier precincts of science-qua-scientism triumphalists), but rather pragmatic and situated.

So, to your broader points, let me begin with something I say all the time: All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture and so there is not even a monolithic thing called "technology" to develop or not in the first place in my view, to characterize in single way, to treat as the protagonist of a single narrative: there are disparate processes of research, funding, publication, regulation, distribution, marketing, application concerning different artifacts and techniques, proceeding at different paces, in respect to different stakeholders. In the most general sense, what is produced as "natural" or as "artifactual" is a contingent and rather more normative discursive phenomenon than appears in utterly mystified futurological and tech-talk -- de-naturalizing technologization is a function of familiarity and unfamiliarity, attention and inattention, fears and fantasies of agency, the mobilization of a host of mythical tropes and so on. So I probably don't accept the terms on which you are constituting objects as inside of and outside of historical struggle and sociocultural positioning at a pretty fundamental level when it comes to it.

Now, politics is the reconciliation of ineradicably diverse ends and the most equitable solution of shared problems in the shared world. Politics and plurality are indissolubly connected and I prefer to think of "futurity" as the openness in the present arising from this ineradicable diversity while "the future" tends on my view to be a disavowal of that openness in the service of a particular stakeholder vantage on the present foreclosing possible presents/presences. "Predicting technological change" is a phrase that is nearly equal parts meaningless and evil in my view. "Technological change" is better described in this view as "technodevelopmental social struggle" in which one seeks to engage to facilitate better outcomes from specified positions but hardly to "predict" in some alienated way above the fray. "It" IS Us. Technoreductive ideology tends to reframe freedom as the amplification of incumbent powers as futurology tends to reframe history as extrapolated parochial currencies -- this is worse than wrong.

Politically, freedom is the ongoing openness and essential unpredictability of futurity present(ed) peer-to-peer, there is no progress, merely the circumscription or ramification of ends arising out of the openness. It is ethical definitions of the political field that make it possible to tell progressive and aspirations stories. I would define freedom ethically myself as the struggle for ever more sustainable democratic equity-in-diversity, for example, but part of what I know about the political futurity in which my ethical vantage is embedded is that there are other tales to tell with which I must contend.

To conclude, I would say that the best way to care about the long-term future is to care about sustainable equity-in-diversity in the present, because I think in caring about those with whom we share the world, young and old, and in developing the techniques and knowledges for solving our shared problems we make a present to the collective character and common archive and legacy of reason to which generations to come will gratefully make recourse in their own presents. Phony futurological foresight is an exercise in disavowal and distraction and denial that no one will thank us for -- even as our delusive and frankly disgusting futurologists endlessly congratulate themselves about how they are truly fighting battles and solving problems centuries ahead of time.