Future Here Now: The case for a little optimism
Pushback
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I’m optimistic about the future, long-range, but most days’ news can make that optimism feel foolish. In the face of the very real threats of right wing extremism and tech oligarchies and climate change and a host of other enormous challenges, what grounds do I have to talk about transparency, inclusion and network power?
Given all that, how can I think it’s a good idea to assert an optmistic view?
The piece below is from a Short Shot publication I put out about a year ago called The Fusion Era will impact your community. Here's how to survive. It captures the element of our current situation that gives me the most optimism: the increasing amount of effort it takes for reactive forces to try to fight back. If you have to work that hard at trying to hold on to your status quo, one might assume that you’re fighting the tide.
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It’s easy to read all of this, and scoff. Today’s headlines are full of the opposite of everything I’ve written. I have a lot of days where I just ball up my fists in frustration.
But that’s exactly how you know this change is happening.
The time, energy and money it takes to defend old privileges and old systems climb higher and higher with every month. Pulpits have to get replaced with expensive disinformation campaigns, accustomed supremacy needs awkward reinforcement of laws that get overturned on appeal. Guardians of an ossifying status quo have to scream more and more impossible claims to maintain a dwindling base. It reminds me of what prehistoric animals caught in a tar pit must have looked like - terrifying and definitely dangerous in their thrashing and fury, but unable to reclaim their accustomed power.
Meanwhile, bubbles of the future break the present’s surface - through trivial bits like viral videos, and through world-changing events like mass civil rights protests and Anonymous doxxing of white supremacists.
Futurists call those easily-overlooked indicators Signals. And the most important Signals aren’t often the headline stories at the time.
Media at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution didn’t write about how new machines were re-making families and communities, reworking the very definitions of terms like work and neighbor and responsibility. The people of that era lived those changes over years, over generations, while news articles, then, like now, focused on momentary conflicts, often without any longer view or perspectives.
It wasn’t until historians started to write and talk about that time that we began to see the longer arcs of change. Then we saw how profoundly, completely, 1920s industrial cities, businesses, families, had changed from their 1820s counterparts.
Of course, 100 years is a long time. It’s easy for us, from here, to assume that, of course, a 1920s city will be profoundly different from one 100 years before.
But we forget: change has been accelerating. A time traveller moving from an 1820s city to one from the 1720s, or 1620s or 1420s, would have had a much easier time making sense of the world around her than her counterpart who travelled forward a measly 75 years. It took breathtakingly little time, in terms of how human experience has generally unfolded, to get from the steam engine to the computer.
This time, those profound shifts will unfold faster than ever. We’re already seeing more change in technology, and human culture, and everything else in 10 years than the Industrial Era saw in double that time.
So we’d better get busy.
The future isn’t waiting for us.