The Presentist Manifesto.
The secret to understanding things is not in the future. It is in different elements of the present.
Given the rising respect and reach of ‘futurism’ as an approach, and futurist as a title, I felt it was necessary to point out my general approach.
To paraphrase William Gibson: the future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed.
As such, my standard approach to predictive thinking and decision making is to look to elements of the present that are not yet widely distributed, and examine why. Is it cost? Culture? Infrastrucure? And more importantly, how much is this scarcity, usually either temporary or artificial, impacting our standard interpretation of what this element does, or means?
We aren’t ready to predict the future, except as a sloppy acceleration or extension of trends we can already measure. However, we do not yet spend enough time trying to understand the present, and see what we’ve missed about how it interacts, and what it means.
Don’t worry about what’s going to happen in ten or fifteen years, excepting the direct outcomes of your actions (like excessive CO2 emissions). Worry about what’s going to happen in the next 12 or 24 months. That’s where the magic is with most planning cycles - being able to predict the climate at which your product or project will see the light of day.
Live, and think, in today. It’ll reward you.
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