Both Failure and Fairness Are Indispensable to Foresight

Friend of Blog Jamais Cascio quotes from a talk on futurism by Paul Saffo which culminates in the following aphorism: Cherish failure -- we fail our way into the future.

The sentiment is a familiar one, of course. Oscar Wilde famously quipped that "Experience is the name we give to our mistakes," and Karl Popper just as famously glommed onto Wilde's quip when he was casting about for a zinger to capture falsificationism in a nutshell.

I worry about the rather asocial character of futurological aphorisms like these. For all I know, Saffo raised precisely these sorts of caveats in his actual talk, but it is striking how often the take-home slogans of futurism foreground very arid cognitivist abstractions without much in the way of a human face or sense of lived history in them.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems to me important to emphasize that the only failures we can cherish in good conscience are not only the ones with a useful lesson in them but the ones whose costs are fairly shared. The same, of course, should be true of successes.

This dimension falls out of futurological sloganeering all too often, and typically to make way for awful technocratic genuflections to "risk-taking" and "innovation" designed as far as I can see to console the "Investor Class" for their heroic exertions on the behalf of humanity by way of short term personal profit-taking.

Unless we are clear about just who is "succeeding" and who is "failing," exactly, whenever risks are taken and mistakes are made, unless these are not drained of their consequences in lived lives to become uncontextualized abstractions, then there is good reason to be suspicious as well about the uncontextualized abstract "we" who are presumably failing into futurity in this aphorism.

My point isn't only a sanctimonious demand for charity before cherishing, by the way (though I am quite sure many will read it that way), since it is also true and enormously important that with more fairness also comes more foresight.

It is most true that failures drive insight and build shared knowledges when people are not insulated by privilege from the costs of failure and when the participation of many is elicited by the fact that people are not excluded by the lack of privilege from the benefits of success.

Grasping the indispensability to foresight not only of experimentalism in the abstract but also of fairness in the worldly distribution of experimental costs, risks, and benefits is the insight that takes us from elite technocratic models of technodevelopmental deliberation to peer-to-peer models of technodevelopmental deliberation.