Futurologists, Who Needs 'Em? A Twitterrant On Familiar Themes

A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to understand the technoscientific state of the art in research or engineering. A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to understand the stakeholders contesting a technodevelopmental outcome politically. A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to grasp critical or creative responses to technoscientific vicissitudes. A futurist is who you want to talk to if you want to go to a corporate pep rally (innovate!) or see an ad peddling consumerism (gizmos!).

There are already-constituted disciplines and experts doing every single legitimate thing one might foolishly turn to futurists for. Futurism is an anti-disciplinarity pretending to be an inter-disciplinarity.

In all this, futurism is of a piece with an anti-intellectual, anti-academic corporate-military think-tankification of public discourse as well as the suffusion of all public life with the deceptive, hyperbolic norms and forms of promotional and marketing discourses.