Posts tagged present

Postcards from the Futch

Joanne McNeil, The Future, The Futch, prediction, accountability, futurology, futures, present

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.

https://medium.com/message/postcards-from-the-futch–595796d8a45d

Welcome to the Future Nauseous

Venkatesh Rao, present, experience, futurism, future

There is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing-reality-as-experienced and change as imagined, and I don’t mean specifics of failed and successful predictions. My new explanation is this: we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak.  To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/