A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future

Readers respond to "Futurism Is NOT Dead"

Nice comeback!!
I love it! The article in WIRED was so dodgy.
GO WFS!!
Jaxon Hsu
jaxonhsu@gmail.com

Thanks for the thoughtful piece. The title reminds me of a quote from the late, great Frank Zappa: "Jazz isn't dead, is just smells funny."
Cheers,
Bob
Robert H. Brown
Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Congratulations to your systematic refutation. ... Adding to the messages you have already received from your supporters please read my recent "adventures":

For decades I have been supplied with "Futurist" smoothly up till the end of 2002. Now things have changed. I am badly missing the February-March and November-December number and that of January-February from this year. All have disappeared at my Post Office. My postwoman told me in all confidence that there are "orders" with the post-employees to select "foreign periodicals of interest" and hand them over to their instigators.

A sure sign of dramatically increasing interest here toward futurism.
Dr. Géza Szathmáry
Budapest, Hungary

The years following 9-11 have been dark for futures studies. Anxiety has overwhelmed perspective, leading many to falsely believe that we haven't got time or resources to consider the future in these "uncertain times." Otherwise why would an otherwise forward-thinking magazine choose to print such a hateful screed against a way of thinking. WIRED is insecure about whether it too was guilty of "irrational exuberance."

But we are turning the corner as the anxiety subsides, turning back to foresight. Reactionary military policies are being exposed for short-sightedness, economies still changing and permutating, the march of human endeavor going ever onward. And futurists will be needed to light the way.

The foresight we encourage is morally right, and the WFS will be the best center of gravity for promoting it in the future.

Congratulations on ignoring the media and forging forth as futurists.
Eric Garland
egarland@agosdynamics.com

Classic and succinct debunking of a poor argument. A pleasure to read. Well done.
Andre Mostert
andre@cogitodev.com

I read the article in my subscription to Wired Magazine and was taken aback. Usually, Wired contributors look beyond today for the next tech breakthrough.

However, I do not think the author of this article is capable of knowing what she will be doing tomorrow without her PDA which is the future in her circle of friends.
Tim Skinner
msgt@hawaiian.net

Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it's mistakes. 

Contemplating the future prepares us for alternative courses of action given varying events or cycles.

If you rely on a plan of action without a "Plan B", you're ignoring changes (the future) and the thought process required to respond present conditions.
David L. Hein
dhein@chilcotecompany.com

Thank you for making your comments available, context is so important. Futurism is having a telescopic and panoramic vision of diverse world events.
Sue Petula
sunic@epix.net

It matters little what is said about the Wired article on this site. The readership of Wired has been given a view of the world. Some will question it, which is good, others will accept it as truth, bad. The only way to correct this is to give the readership of Wired a different view. Are these people important enough for the effort?
Martin Balchin

As a "hausfrau with gumption" myself I take exception to both the editorial's comments and yours. You might be surprised to know that many of us hausfraus make up the WFS ranks and do the important job of raising our children (and other people's, too) to be open minded, curious, future thinkers. Yes, we are largely self taught and driven by our passion to know. We are sometimes called hobby futurists. Hey,its been a great hobby for me for the past forty years, and I am working to pass it on to the next generation. Actually sometimes I have a bit of a problem with the snobbery of professional futurists myself. At least for us hobbyists its not about making a buck. I volunteer my time and resources to WFS.
Christy Dugger
Dugger1893@yahoo.com

You're complaining about nothing and getting yourself nowhere. The way that your response to this article is formatted makes you sound like a thirteen year old defending the flavor of ice cream they chose. The article lacks structure and maturity.
Whitney
Andwhitneysays@comcast.net

Thank you for your excellent response and other thoughtful notes.
Here are a few notes from me: http://www.ghandchi.com/305-FuturistsEng.htm
Best Regards
Sam Ghandchi
iranscope@hotmail.com

In response to the claim that "Futurism is Obsolete," because now we have all these experts with their metrics and formulas, I will simply point out that:

1. To the extent that they help predict future conditions such metrics and formulas are presumably tools of the professional Futurist.
2. The fact is that right now a lot of people out there are trying to turn the clock back in time - to some supposedly long-lost "glory days" when life was simpler, easier for some, and a lot harder for most. This is a perversion being perpetrated by a minority for its own political and economic benefit - not the death of Futurism. At least, I certainly hope it's not the latter, as it seems to me that it could be disastrous to our society.
3. As for the failed predictions claim, consider this: one of the whole points to forecasting is to try and identify possible results of trends, in some cases so that intervention becomes possible. Sometimes the very making of a forecast will affect people's behavior and thereby otherwise shape future events.
   Diane Bodenstein
   dbodenstein@nyc.rr.com

The attitude I got from that Wired article was one of derision and arrogance. It worries me that some people think the answer is to burrow into one limited area of knowledge and ignore all others. That is a very shortsighted way of looking at things. I felt that editorial was very irresponsible and dishonest in its ideas. I am a person with a history degree, working on a journalism degree who is studying physics, chemistry and calculus on my own in my free time to expand my area of knowledge. I take what the author said personally. The wider my knowledge, the better my understanding of how that knowledge fits together and the better I can navigate the future in my personal and professional life. I will continue to encourage people to support the World Future Society. Please keep up the good work!
David Wood
dwwood76@hotmail.com

One of my main concerns is with the term "futurism," which I find highly objectionable to those of us involved in futures education and consulting. I regret that you used it positively in what you wrote.

To the extent any "ism" designates an ideology or closed belief system, as I think it does, I believe "futurism" should be reserved for closed and certain beliefs about the future, rather than for the open, alternative futures perspective the field itself has, and WFS itself clearly manifests.

So my rejoinder is that "futurism" is dead because it never was alive.

But futures studies, futures research, foresight, future generations studies etc., are very well and alive.
Jim Dator

Excellent remonstration. Only quibble I have, is that I miss a comment on the notion that specialization led to a weaker demand for the generalism that is inherent in most intelligent musings about the future. What is the rationale here? That society somehow no longer needs to fuse ever more highly specialized predictions into more general and comprehendible notions of where we seem to be headed? I think not!

At first I wondered why in the world a magazine like Wired would ever take a stand against futurism?

I came to the following explanation: One must admit that the Wired editorial voices a more general sentiment in world society, that these are meager times for voicing visions of the future, most importantly because we - in this age of information overload - have our hands and heads full of the present and the past.

So to me it seems that the renaissance of futurism is intimately connected to the maturing of the information age, right now we simply can't seem to overcome the background noise.
Markus Hornum-Stenz

It appears to me that if you study the trends you can see possible futures and point out the ones which may be unacceptable for the betterment of mankind in the upcoming future. Thus work to prevent such future scenarios. And this would mean that the more negative future scenarios you can enlighten people to, to work in cooperation to prevent, then you have proved the worth of the concept of futurism. If all the negative predictions were prevented and never occurred, then the futurists alerting others to these things have thus done a great thing for the next period by studying the trends in the present period. This is of value and hardly a dead idea. If no one looked ahead where would we be now? So this is a good thing. Hopefully the more negative scenarios which do not come true thanks to the enlightening of those in our realm poised as decision makers is a gift and worthy of positive mention.

Of course putting the futurists in a bad light build controversy and therefore magazine sales doesn't it? Hopefully we can point out all mankind's follies and prevent them from happening and maybe the more often we are wrong due to our alarm bells ringing the better our species will do. I think that perhaps this article may be a little politically motivated, but there are many conservatives amongst us also, I doubt I have a liberal thought in my mind. And I would like to point out without pointing fingers Wired Magazine also predicted many things and we all know what happened to the big Dot Com Bubble. Check out some of the old magazines at the hay day of the Silicon Valley Boom. I am a magazine article clipper and some of the stuff I have saved really are quite hilarious now. For instance those articles on WebVan's rise come to mind.
Thanks, Lance-The Car Wash Guy
Lance Winslow
Lance@carwashguys.com

I applaud the WFS for its reasoned response to the histrionics of a former employee. I fully concur that we stand to grow by not summarily dismissing these attacks against a way of viewing the world.

Some might argue that things are meant to be and therefore, the study of the future is meaningless or futile. I would argue vigorously that if "things are meant to be" as I believe they are, we can only discern that future if we ask the right questions (Deepak Chopra).
Great job WFS.
Christopher La Londe
christopher_lalonde@hotmail.com

I have been a professional technology and product forecaster for about 20 years with IBM. It is indeed true that forecasting has become far more complex in the past ten years. But should that stop professionals of that field to try to bring some rationality to this extremely difficult task of predicting trends in the future?

The main criticisms that are made on false forecasts are that at one or more points in time the predictions proved to be wrong.

I admit to having been wronged in my usual five years forecasts about one or two years, the overall total estimate for the five years quantification being, however, well within the confidence limits of a long term forecasting exercise.

In a few cases I felt sorry to be right about some of my forecasts, that was when I didn't manage to convince my management that a business was either excellent or on the contrary very bad. The fact that my prediction was good didn't satisfy me, it just reflected on my inability at convincing my management of the validity of my estimates.

There are also some more profound reasons why some forecasts can be wrong; one is the fact that as forecasters we have to assume some level of rationality in business decisions, rationality that is required by the harsh market rules... However many business decisions are taken for reasons quite foreign to rationalism or market realities. Internal politics can play a role in corporate decision making that bear little if no relation to the market. In that case the forecaster's results have little weight on decision making... And hence their forecasts can be "made wrong" by a decision rather than by market reactions.

I would have many more elements to bring to that discussion but I think that I have been already too long here... Yours sincerely,
Paul Trehin
trehinp@aol.com

Futurism Is Dead. Yes, for those who can't dream or don't believe in the beauty of their dreams. For a futurist, the future lies in the present. They visualize things, which don't exist but ultimately becomes the reality. Futurists don't predict, they invent the future.
DR. L. P. RAI
lp_rai@yahoo.com

Good reply. As for me being a "recovering" futurist, that's simply silly. As you rightly point out, I've been doing Future Survey for 25 years. Being a so-called "outspoken critic" does NOT mean that I'm anti-futurism, but that, in my mind, futurism can--and must--do much better. After I've prepared nearly 19,000 abstracts for Future Survey since 1979, one might hope that I would have a few ideas of what ought to be done--and that I would take the responsibility to voice them.

I am, in fact, a staunch defender of futurism--not as it is, but as it ought to be. Isn't that a proper futurist position?
Michael Marien
LaFayette, New York
mmarien@twcny.rr.com

Well done for countering the opinionated inaccuracies in the Cristol article. We should not let any of these things go unchallenged in the internet age. They will perpetuate and become mythologised. Perhaps her Critol ball was murky?
Charles
stirton@tiscali.co.uk

Very nicely done. The piece was not at all reasoned nor, obviously, reported well. Thanks for rebutting it so well.
John Mahaffie
jbmahaffie@starpower.net

What possesses someone to attack the World Future Society?
Ms. Cristol writes, "And a WFS member hasn't been invited to the White House since the Reagan administration." Excuse me?

Al Gore, vice president of the United States 1992-2000, was a member of WFS and contributed many articles to the WFS magazine. How more involved could the Clinton White House have been? or are you saying that the VP did not invite other members of the WFS or futurist researchers to participate in any capacity in his vice-presidency?

Ms. Cristol, I hardly find the information presented by WFS to be the work of Fools? Forty years of failed predictions?

I study naneotechnology. Naneotechnology is one of the most important "horizons of paradigm-breaking technology." As a member of WFS, you have had access to an entire legacy of study -- ground-breaking -- that was initially only predictions, some thought fiction -- now fact. I offer, along with this WFS jewel, the concept of hydrogen power, friendly bacteria to clean water, artificial reefs to save our beaches from erosion, bioterriosm, think tanks as a policy force, and so many other cutting-edge concepts... Visit the archives www.http://www.wfs.org/.

What did you bring to the table as a fledgling futurist? Cynicism obviously. In cynical times, cynical people are a dime a dozen... I remind you that most who go on record citing the foolishness of others frequently are dismissed -- history triumphs the "histrionics."

Remember Tesla and Edison? AC vs. DC? Edison was the victor (not the inventor) -- sold out, bought out). Tesla invented AC.

You state, "It's not just that the futurist has no clothes, it's that the futurist has no shame." No clothes, no shame? What does the anti-futurist have? I have noticed that since you've left the ranks of the aspiring futurist, you are riveting the world with accounts of "Horseback Trekking in Iceland: Experiencing Europe's Westernmost Country Viking Style," I'll sleep a little better knowing you're back in the saddle again.
Amanda Lang
Email: innovator@comcast.net

Futurism is alive; *Wired* is asleep
Leave it to a cutting edge magazine like *Wired* to cut too much. The main point of envisioning the future is not prediction, but hope. Futures Studies offers hope for a better future for humanity, and some concrete ways of achieving that hope. Nihilism and Armageddon be damned; the world is better off for having a World Future Society. If Reagan was the last president to invite a WFS member to the White House, it is no wonder that he is revered so much. The writer speaks of membership rolls. The society has spawned and inspired thousands of forward-looking thinkers, and like a great mother, has let them go their own routes. The membership is not about loss, it is about birth--birth into a world of ideas and a brighter tomorrow. And while we are on the subject of new ideas, why not change that magazine title to *Wireless*? The name is dated.
Mitchell Gordon
Philadelphia

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