The Tough Mudder
1 October, 2013Smart Investor: Getting Started, October 2013
1 October, 2013Discovery Channel Magazine, August 2013
The future’s just not what it used to be.
In the oldest times, people had grand ideas for the future. Plato, writing 2,400 years ago, wrote in The Republic of a perfect city-state and community, and how it might come in to being. In 1516 Sir Thomas More’s Utopia created a perfect fictional island society that solved all the moral and practical challenges of the day. Since then, literature seems to have depicted the future as being utterly miserable: ruled by authoritarian governments or consumed by soulless corporate societies, or struggling to make sense of a ruined post-Apocalyptic world.
But one thing’s for sure: over the last century, there has been no shortage of people trying to work out just what the future will look like, for better or worse. As Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding wrote in their book Histories of the Future: “We have been living through boom times for the future.”
They wrote: “Whether in modes of progress or apocalypse, the media flow over 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 manifestoes.”
Our views of the future have varied from the happily technological (“when will I get a hoverboard like they have in Back to the Future?”) to the deeply existential, about the nature of society and humanity itself. Looking at the future can mean silly ray-guns, or bleak worlds devastated by climate change or nuclear war. It has got to the point, Rosenberg and Harding say, where we get nostalgic for old views of the future that never actually got around to happening. “Our sense of the future is conditioned by a knowledge of, and even a nostalgia for, futures that we have already lost.’
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