Thinking Futures, by Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding

The Future is not what it used to be.

–Theodor Nelson


We have been living through boom times for the future. Even before the escalating storms of the early 21st century, our cultures and industries collaborated in a remarkable proliferation of words and images about this impossible object. In recent years, the very thought “future” has been spectacularized in extraordinary ways. Whether in modes of progress or apocalypse, our media have overflowed with anticipations of things to come, with utopias, dystopias, stories of time travel and artificial intelligence, with accounts of acceleration and progress, of doom and imminent destruction, with scenarios, predictions, prophecies, and manifestos. Since the rise of the digital economy, even the benighted “science” of futurology has come back into style.¹
 
In the first years of the 21st century, representations of the future have cycled wildly through a historical repertoire, from the ray-gun gothic of the 1930s to the noir and the endism of the 1940s and 1950s to the plastic modularity of the 1960s and back again. As if following a kind of Moore’s Law scaling principle, futures today seem to be reproducing themselves faster and more cheaply than ever. At the same time, their shelf-lives appear to be getting shorter. Any child can historicize them for you, can tell you in a minute which future is up to date and which is already over, which doesn’t run fast enough on the current microprocessor and which doesn’t run at all. In the computer world, an entire sub-industry has sprung up in what is called legacy software, programs written on old platforms, modified and translated to run on new machines as if it were still 1979 and the first wave of chunky Galaxians were twirling madly toward the missile defense systems and video arcades of our Earth. 


More and more, our sense of the future is conditioned by a knowledge of futures that we have already lost. Indeed, nostalgia for the future has become so pervasive today that it has even developed a distinctive set of commercial uses. As Arjun Appadurai suggests, contemporary mass consumption “is not simply based on the functioning of simulacra in time, but also on the force of the simulacra of time.”² If different modes of production imply different forms and experiences of temporality, our current habits of consumption appear to imply a nostalgia for productivity in general and for all of the different experiences of temporality that it might be able to generate.³ Today, our futures feel increasingly citational—each is haunted by the “semiotic ghosts” of futures past.⁴ 

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