What is the Future?

Consultants McKinsey and Company and yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur championed 3D printing in a report on the potential of the ‘circular economy’ presented to the 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2012). David

the classic example of lock-in is the layout of the QWERTY keyboard).

In the case of super-wicked problems, there are extra issues: time is running out to find a ‘solution’, there is no central orchestrating authority, those seeking to solve the issue are also in part causing it, and there is what can be called ‘hyperbolic discounting’, which massively favours immediate rewards over rewards arriving much later.

the effort to solve one problem reveals or creates other problems; solutions depend on how each issue is framed, and vice versa; different stakeholders have radically different frames for understanding what actually is the problem and the solution; the constraints that the problem is subject to and the resources needed to solve it change over time;

Systems in which humans are ‘bearers’ of social relations possess features that make knowing and bringing about proposed futures exceptionally difficult.

Futurist Buckminster Fuller explained that it is very difficult to change and innovate what lies in the future: ‘You never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’ This

Social institutions, networks and groups construct, mould and orchestrate human actions. Marx famously argued that people make their own history, but they do so not under circumstances of their own choosing since the ‘tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living’

They are sociomaterial; power is as much material/technological as it is social.

This corporate world generates a kind of digital utopianism (Turner 2006). Lanier argues how this reflects the general corporate takeover of much of the world, especially since the growth of neo-liberal discourse and practice from around 1980, first within the US and Britain and then throughout much of the world (Klein 2007).