Both science fiction and futurism seem to miss an important piece of how the future actually turns into the present. They fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives.

Sure, we can all see the small clues all around us: cellphones, laptops, Facebook, Prius cars on the street. Yet, somehow, the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening; future perfect rather than present-continuous. Even the nearest of near-term science fiction seems to evolve at some fixed receding-horizon distance from the present.

There is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing-reality-as-experienced and change as imagined, and I don’t mean specifics of failed and successful predictions.

My new explanation is this: we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field.

Venkatesh Rao, Welcome to the Future Nauseous

Source: ribbonfarm.com

10 September 2012 44
venkatesh raomanufactured normalcyfuturesfuturism

Notes

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  15. wildcat2030 said: See: HOW TO SEE THE FUTURE Warren Ellis for a response to Venkatesh Rao: warrenellis.com/?p=1431…
  16. stoweboyd posted this

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About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

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Socialogy

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  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

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  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

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  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

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