There are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct
- George Friedman -
- George Friedman -
“What is the Future” is a book which is published on 8 August 2016 by Polity Press, United Kingdom. In this book, John Urry seeks to capture the many efforts that have been made to anticipate, visualize and elaborate the future. This includes examining the methods used to model the future, from those of the RAND Corporation to imagined future worlds in philosophy, literature, art, film, TV and computer games. He shows that futures are often contested and saturated with different interests, especially in relation to future generations. He also shows how analyses of social institutions, practices and lives should be central to examining potential futures, and issues such as who owns the future.
The future seems to be characterized by wicked problems. There are multiple causes and solutions, long-term lock-ins and complex interdependencies, and different social groups have radically different frames for understanding what is at stake. Thinking about the future is essential for almost all organizations and societies. States, corporations, universities, cities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future. But what exactly is the future? It remains a mystery perhaps the greatest mystery, especially because futures are unpredictable and often unknowable, the outcome of many factors, known and unknown. Just as the quote of George Friedman mentioned above that “there are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct”.
So what can be done to anticipate the upcoming future for the sake of our selves, our groups, communities, societies, companies, industries, states, and so on? John Urry in his preface argued that the first reason for writing a book on futures is to demonstrate the many efforts made, in the past and now, to anticipate, visualize and elaborate the future(s) within various domains of human activities.
Powerful social institution and thinkers are developing various kinds of anticipatory discourses and techniques (see Szerszynski 2016, on Anticipation). This future orientation is big and significant business for companies like Google or Shell, environmental organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or Forum for the Future, government bodies like BAPPENAS in Indonesia or Foresight in the UK or European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS) in the EU, military organization such as Pentagon, academic bodies such as London School of Economics in the UK, Harvard University in the US or even SGPP – Indonesia.
Specific methods have been developed for envisaging, visualizing and assessing potential upcoming futures. Some of these originated from scenario planning exercise that Hermann Kahn initiated at the Rand Corporation during the 1950s (Son 2015: 124). He especially promoted the development of alternative scenario, noting how they enabled the imagining of different future possibilities. Also, many imagines future worlds have been developed within literature, art, film, TV, computer games and so on. These often involved spectacular future technologies such as time-travel, personal flying machines, roads and trains in the sky, teleportation, robots, walking upon water, off-earth communities, vacuum powered propulsion, driverless trains, equal utopias, as well as many dark dystrophic futures. In this book, John Urry documented and assessed some of these ways in which organizations, intellectuals, scientists, artists, policy makers and technologists, have developed, or are developing, futures.
In the section about the Past Futures, Urry explored that although it is impossible to ‘know’ what the future has in store for us, most recorded societies developed procedures and discourses through which they believed the future could be anticipated. And this is so whether that perceived future was in the hands of God or humans. People imagined, predicted, divined, prophesied and told many different futures, good and bad. According to Urry, how these assemblages of the future were achieved tells us much about a society’s working. The forms of future anticipation have many implications for the nature of each society and especially regarding how relations of power are structured and flow. A key element of power is the power to determine – to produce – the future, out of many ways it is imagined, organized, materialized and distributed.
John Urry emphasized that within social science there are three main approaches to anticipating social futures. First, and most powerful is the individualistic model of human action, in which theories and methods emphasizes the capacity of individuals to behave in some sense rationality, or at least independently of others, so as to determine what to determine what to do and why. Second, a set of theories emphasizes the importance of relatively fixed and enduring economic and social structures. And third is that od complexity theory, now present within many disciplines. A complex system approach brings out that the future cannot be reduced either to the actions of individual actors or to persisting social structures. In relation with the complex system, there are two factors that intertwine, they are time and networks.
Can we innovate the future? If it can, how the innovation should be done? It might be the main discourse of this book. He argued that the central of many future scenarios are novel and unexpected sociomaterial systems. But in developing anticipations of the future we should resist a technology-first analysis – technologies do not develop only for endogenous reasons. Nor do they then transform the economic and social landscape in their own image once they have been developed. Technology are embedded within many forms of economic, social and political life. Such systems are not autonomous, or free from the influence of non-technical factors.
According to Urry, the best innovation will not be the one that ultimately shapes the future. Innovation involves processes that are different from the linear notions often spoken about and promoted by policy makers. They typically describe innovation as a top-down process developed and implemented by hierarchical actors, resulting from the brilliance of an entrepreneur, or the chance ‘discovery’ of a new technology, or the system of knowledge-creation put in place by far-sighted policy makers. If only the conditions are right, then policy makers maintain that the innovation will materialize and the future will be successfully remade.
Innovation involves combining isolated elements into a new system, oftem over a lengthly period, such new systems being not technological or economic or social or political but all of these. System innovation involves the co-evolutrion of numerous interrelated elements; there are changes in both demand and supply sides; many agents are involved; long-term processes occur over decades. An example of the problematic character of policy development can be seen in the ‘need’ for people to reduce their carbon footprint.
Therefore, innovation likely to be important in the future must also confront the momentum of existing systems since the future is not at all empty. Societal changecan be glacially slow that stems from many limits in futures. Such limits include cognitive and non-cognitive human capacities, the embedded practices and traditions within each society, the power and conserving effect of national and international states, interlocking global processes operating on multiple scales, the relative fixity of the built environment, various economic, technological and social path-dependencies. And it is also almost impossible for social groups to anticipate what exactly will generate desired change.In other words, while many groups seek to realize change, it is enormously hard to ensure a preferred future.
Thus knowing what will produce desired future change is almost impossible. But if a new momentum does get established, then benefits flow throughout networks and result in extensive ‘increasing returns’ to scale, Urry cited Athur argument in economic terms in “Increasing returns and Path Dependece in the Economy” (1994).
Urry also showed that “small” technology can bring big consequences in society. A small technology such as ATM card and credit card, that facilitates new forms of movement away from home and work, since large amounts of money no longer need to be riskily carried upon each person who is on the move.
In this book, Urry explore some methods for making futures. First, learning from past visions of the future. Second, studying ‘failed’ futures. Third, developing dystopic thought. Fourth, utopia. It means utopia as method that the presence of a utopia, the ability to think alternative solutions to the festering problems of the present, may be seen therefore as a necessary condition of historical change. Fifth, extrapolating from elements of the present. And sixth, the final – and in a way the most significant – method is that of scenario building. Scenario development involves establishing characterization of the economy or society for a future year in the light of known trends, the main sources of change and the likely patterns of economic and social life.
In the end part of the book, John Urry explore about some explanation on how to manufacture future worlds, cities and climate.
To end this review, this book is actually a comprehensive sociology discourse on social change or social engineering to the future. How did the society change and how the change can be constructed for the future. To enclose this review, I would like to recite once more the George Friedman’s quote that there are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct.
