Futurological Brickbats (A Selection)

V. Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer. Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands.

VIII. Futurologists really have only four stories to tell with which they account for any real or imagined device, technique, or developmental moment: Genesis, Resurrection, Ascension, and Apocalypse. As any evangelist will tell you, that's more than enough to fleece a flock with.

XII. To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms.

XIII. All culture is prosthetic, all prostheses are culture.

XV. Iconoclasts should always smash their mirrors first.

XVI. To care most about things that are merely not impossible is simply not sensible.

XVIII. To be marketable is not the same thing as to be insightful.

XIX. Every priestly peddler of immortality has died. Every one. And this is most certainly true as well of the priests of faithly medicine and reductionist scientism. To deny death out of a fear of it is to court a death in life worse by far than the death that is surely coming for you, for while immortality is not possible for you, it is indeed possible, and good, to live.

XXI. To profess the dream of making an intelligent robot is always to confess the nightmare that one imagines oneself already merely a mineral.

XXII. The answer to the Fermi Paradox may simply be that we aren't invited to the party because so many humans are boring jerks. As one small evidence in this matter it is noteworthy that so many humans would appear to be so flabbergastingly immodest and immature as to think it a "paradoxical" result to discover the Universe is not an infinitely faceted mirror reflecting back at us on its every face our own incarnations and exhibitions of intelligence.

XXIII. Whenever a software coder fancies that his trade renders him a philosopher, an economist, a poet, or, bless his heart, a biologist you can expect no end of foolishness and mischief from him.

XXIV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.

XXVI. Those who dream of making themselves gods through technology are lying to themselves not least because god is already a dream we made ourselves through the technology of lying.

XXVIII. If I cannot dance I want no part in your reductive interpretations of evolution.

XXIX. We can use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, indeed we must do so, because in taking up the master's tools and turning them to unheard of tasks we make the tools our own.

XXXI. Computer science in its theological guise aims less at the ultimate creation of artificial intelligence than in the ubiquitous imposition of artificial imbecillence.

XXXIV. The prefix "bio," when appended to the word "ethics," tends to have the curious effect of draining all the life out of ethics.

XXXVII. The speculative fictions and scenarios and games of the futurologists are "speculative" less in the sense of critical thought than in the sense of financial speculation, just as their "futures" are far closer to the ones that get traded on stock exchanges as bundled-risk pseudo-commodities than to the substantial futurity that names the openness in every present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of its stakeholders, peer to peer.

XXXIX. Futurological "optimism" is always a crassly opportunistic affair. Whenever a pop technologist puts his "Can Do" face on, you can be sure he fancies he sees a mark. Futurological declarations that there are No Limits! always ultimately translate to the customary conviction of very pampered and irresponsible people that there will always be other folks on hand to clean up their messes for them.

L. To declare oneself a partisan in a politics that is defined by a terrain that is simply "for" or "against" Technology -- where "technology" is treated as a monolithic abstraction indifferent to the endlessly different ways techniques are historically and positionally deployed and understood -- is to engage in a politics that takes as its point of departure a de-politicizing evacuation of all the actual political substance at hand.

LVI. Futurologists keep confusing making bets with having thoughts.

LVII. Whenever I hear the word "trend," I reach for my brain.

LX. The future, as it arrives, always kicks you in the crystal ball.

LXII. Separating people from their money promising they can get rich investing in the Next Big Thing or reassuring tragic gizmo-fetishes they are truly on the Bleeding Edge doesn't make you any kind of intellectual. It almost certainly does make you a scam artist, whether you are actually in on the scam yourself or not.

LXVI. Far from endowing our artifacts with intelligence, we are mistaking for such endowment the process by which we are becoming ever more superficial and uncritical through our mediation and consumption of unintelligent artifacts.

LXVII. In coming to terms with the present, especially in grasping the meaning of what has taken us by surprise, we understand and, better still, become understanding. In predicting the future, especially in proposing coinages that would work as spells to dispel being taken by surprise, we become ever more susceptible to fraud and, worse still, become frauds. Where thinking is concerned, this is a variation on the difference between investment and speculation.

LXIX. I Predict That In Twenty Years Futurological Predictions Will Still Inevitably Begin "I Predict That In Twenty Years"

I culled these provocations from a much longer compendium you can read here, if you take a fancy to this selection. Critical and even acerbic as they are, I do think at least some futurists will sympathize with at least some of them, though of course I also think all futurists would benefit from taking all of them to heart.