#futurequote

I have two great loves.  History and the future.  And I use them both as tools to try and see where I am right now, and to try and describe what I think it looks like.  Which is also the work of journalism.  Reportage and narrative.  See how I connect everything together and make it look like I’m smart, while also clearly making shit up.  I’ve been doing this a long time.  One day you too will be able to bullshit like me. But the future is where we’re all living tomorrow, and it’s down to us both to summon it and to look ahead to see what shape it may arrive in. Speculative fiction and new forms of art and storytelling and innovations in technology and computing are engaged in the work of mad scientists: testing future ways of living and seeing before they actually arrive.  We are the early warning system for the culture.  We see the future as a weatherfront, a vast mass of possibilities across the horizon, and since we’re not idiots and therefore will not claim to be able to predict exactly where lightning will strike – we take one or more of those possibilities and play them out in our work, to see what might happen.  Imagining them as real things and testing them in the laboratory of our practice – informed by our careful cross-contamination by many and various fields other than our own -- to see what these things do. To work with the nature of the future, in media and in tech and in language, is to embrace being mad scientists, and we might as well get good at it.