WHY FUTURISM NEEDS HISTORY
Introduction
In 1916 the Chicago Tribune quoted industrial visionary Henry Ford as saying “History is bunk.” A minor controversy followed and three years later during a libel suit against the Tribune, Ford attempted to clarify his statement: “I did not say [history] was bunk. It was bunk to me… I haven’t very much use for it.”
Over a century later Waymo founder and autonomous vehicle engineer Anthony Levandowski said this: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter.”
Ford and Levandowski are misguided. History matters. But they also have a point. Focusing our efforts to build a better future is extremely important. Perhaps now more than ever.
As inhabitants of the anthropocene — the geological epoch characterized by humanity as the dominant factor altering Earth’s climate and ecology — we bear a unique responsibility in creating more equitable and sustainable possibilities. This process starts with imagination, and we need thoughtful, courageous futurists to engage in this essential process.
But creating the future is a difficult thing to get right. People don’t live in the future. They live in the present and are largely guided by the past. Building a better world for all of us takes more than technical innovation, it takes historical perspective.
Ford and Levandowski both suffer from the assumption that moving forward means avoiding the past. But that’s a dangerous view. It would leave futurists less informed, less prepared, and less empathetic than they should be when plotting the next course for humanity.
This is why futurism needs history. History provides unique points of view, compelling examples, and authentic stories showing the complexity of the human experience. For the futurist, this means a more holistic, precise, and inclusive vision of what comes next.
History Provides Context
Imagining a future requires considering a vast array of social, economic, environmental, and cultural factors. According to Scott Steinberg, author of Think Like a Futurist, the goal of a futurist “is to determine which forces are at work at all times, how they impact the marketplace, and where there’s opportunity to shape the future for the positive.”
In other words, futurist thinking demands extensive contextual analysis. Examining the many factors weighing on a given situation is difficult work, but that is precisely the kind of work history prepares us to do.
To be fair, futurists are frequently concerned with the past as a useful data source. But history and context are more than data. Together they express the conditions that give data meaning.
An imagined future that doesn’t account for historical context is destined to fail. History includes hundreds of genuinely good ideas that were ultimately unsuccessful because they failed to mesh with the context surrounding them.
The early rise and subsequent fall of electric vehicles is a relevant example. Most people are surprised to learn that electric vehicles were developed as early as the 1830s — before internal combustion technology — and were patented in the United States by 1887. Electric vehicles quickly became popular in motorsports competitions and even Henry Ford himself dabbled in electric vehicle production in the early 20th century.
If electric vehicles had a technological head start on internal combustion engines and enjoyed public fascination for nearly a century, why did they fade so quickly after World War I?
The answer lies in the historical context. Electric vehicles ran on batteries that when depleted required either recharging or an expensive replacement. In the early 20th century, however, there were few places outside of large cities that had consistent electricity. This was a problem because the people who needed to travel the farthest distances and haul the most cargo weren’t those living in the city, but farmers living in the country. Plus extra gasoline was easier to carry than the massive, heavy batteries.
Mechanically inclined and used to tinkering, farmers eagerly purchased internal combustion cars like the Ford Model T. The noise, grime, and cranking required for a gasoline burning car put off some rich city-dwellers, but farmers were unbothered. By the early 1920s this combination of social preference, economic availability, and technological infrastructure caused electric vehicle manufacturers to precipitously decline.
It is easy to talk about the possibilities for tomorrow, but creating a viable future requires futurists to recognize the historical forces that will cause their imagined realities to either succeed or fail.
History Provides A Roadmap
Part of a futurist’s task is to envision solutions to our current problems, but surprisingly few challenges that we face are completely unique to our own time.
Marina Gorbis, executive director for the Institute for the Future, agrees, writing: “We need to look back to see forward. I’ve started to think of myself as a historian as much as a futurist. I’m trying to understand the larger story and to place what is happening today and what we see on the horizon into a larger context. We don’t repeat our history completely, but we do repeat patterns.”
Gorbis cites concerns about ‘fake news’ as a modern analog to fifteenth century worries about the validity of information after the adoption of moveable type printing technology in Europe.
For some of the world’s most well known brands, the need for creative strategizing about the future could not be more apparent. Companies like Nike, Boeing, Visa, and Lowes have even recently hired science fiction writers to engage in speculative world building and future prototyping in their efforts to gain a head start on the challenges of tomorrow.
The future need not be born completely from fiction or speculation, however. Human history provides us with a wealth of useful examples.
Take vaccines for instance. Any imagined future will have to include a prominent place for vaccination in its vision of public health. Inoculation is a familiar concept to most, but it requires constantly evolving technology that itself has a complex history. Futurists can draw upon that history when seeking inspiration for future systems to prevent the next pandemic. As exemplars for future vaccine deployment, for example, futurists might consider the past efforts of scientists who undermined Cold War politics to deliver the polio vaccine across borders despite great military tension.
Thankfully, vaccines have proven wildly successful and may not need radical reimagining to benefit society in the future. Policing in the United States, on the other hand, certainly does. For decades activists have chronicled the history of police violence against Black Americans. But they also look to history for inspiration on the future of public safety, including how policing as we know it may be reformed or even abolished. Community safety efforts of the 1970s, such as organized street patrols, neighborhood safe houses, and community-elected safety commissions — proposed by the Black Panther party — exemplify such historical inspirations gaining recognition today.
Cultures change drastically over time. People not so much. Put another way, though the particularities of our challenges change (e.g. the problems of industrial agriculture today aren’t the same as those that caused the Dust Bowl in the 1930s), the foundations of those challenges (e.g. sustainability) remain. By looking carefully at past challenges history informs our imagined futures.
History Provides Human-Centered Stories
Visions of the future are always abstractions, ideas yet unrealized. The human experiences calcified in the past, however, are never abstract. The stories of those before us are the results of very real people with real struggles. Futurists should use history to ensure a human-centered approach toward their imagined futures, and as a necessary check to the sparkling allure of technical primacy.
Futurist Alvin Toffler took human experience very seriously. In the introduction to Future Shock he wrote, “Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it.”
But not everyone operates from such a human-centered perspective. As the effects of climate change threaten millions of people across the world, Tesla CEO, Space-X founder, and industrial futurist Elon Musk continues to rally support for various cryptocurrencies despite their contribution to a growing carbon footprint now equivalent to the entire country of Argentina.
Fans of Musk compare his visionary scope to that of Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo, and Jules Verne. But Rose Eveleth more accurately equated him to Filippino Marinetti, the Italian author of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. Both seem to celebrate technical rationality over emotion and efficiency over empathy. This is a particularly troubling parallel as Marinetti and his philosophy were instrumental to the rise of fascism in the early 20th century.
Despite his resonance with investors and redditors, Musk’s future is not human-centered. When narratives of the future prioritize technical innovation over human stories, people get left behind. One historical example shows the very visceral consequences of this attitude.
The power and plenty of 19th century industrial modernity was once an imagined future, encouraged by similar desires to improve the world that we have today. Unfortunately that future was not built for everyone.
Those with the means to build industrial systems took a decidedly un-human-centered approach, prioritizing technology and productivity above all else. The result left thousands of craftspeople without a purpose in a rapidly mechanizing world. With their livelihoods threatened, many craftspeople responded by engaging in individual or group acts of machine breaking. The Luddite Riots of 1811 to 1816 are only the most famous instances of what historian Eric Hobsbawm has called “collective bargaining by riot.”
Despite a revival of support for craft practices, those breaking machines did so in vain. By the 1900s nearly all traditional manufacturing work — and the communities it supported — became either novelty or extinct.
In paying special attention to the human stories contained within the past, futurists can ensure their imagined futures provide opportunity for all, not just those who share their vision.
Conclusion
Today we use ‘luddite’ in a derogatory way, to describe someone opposed to technology. However, that wasn’t the case for the craftspeople breaking machines in the 19th century. They were not against technology. They were against a future that didn’t include them.
By carefully examining historical context, looking to the past for inspiration, and prioritizing human stories, futurists can help prevent others from suffering the same fate.
It is easy to forget that the past was once somebody’s future. And though history may be more dusty and tarnished than the shiny futures we are often shown, we have the tools to learn from it and a responsibility to do so.
