The Future is a Verb and not a Noun The Anthropology of the Future Tom P.

Abeles, President Sagacity, Inc 3704 11th Ave South Minneapolis, MN 55407 [email protected] April 2012 Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable T. S. Elliot, Burnt Norton Many believe the cave paintings in France are scenarios of a successful hunt, past or to come. Similarly, many tribes have carried out events for a variety of activities from battles to hunts, again as celebration or victory anticipated. Primitive though these efforts might seem to be, in many ways one might see these as early forms of scenario building. Though none of these are predictions which todays futurists eschew, they are scenarios, positive or negative. And one might suggest that those who present these supposedly have searched their databases for weak signals that only they have the skills to find and interpret. As with the Oracles of Delphi and others through the ages, their scenarios, as history knows, span the range from positive to the negative; and only after the hand has been played is the interpretation clear. The three witches in Shakespeares Macbeth are a paradigmatic example of the enigmatic interpretation. The 17th century, with the rise of Newtonian science, new ways to explore and define the world in terms of reproducible experiments, put knowledge of a portion of the future on a different footing. The Enlightenment philosophers believed that, given such knowledge, the human social/cultural world would also yield to the same techniques and remove scholarly activities from the arcane world of the interpretive. Those whose interest was in studying the future from the late 17th century to today had hopes that science would lift their practice out of the realm of qualitative analysis. Many variances of thinking about the future were and continue to be derived and much that has been developed has been repackaged under rubrics such as planning and forecasting while attempting to shed prediction, at least, finely defined. As Roberto Poli points out in a recent article (1), Futures has dwelt in the arena of the pragmatic, focusing on the needs of clients. It has a strong element of schizophrenia in its personality. On the one hand it has struggled to legitimize itself

as a practice while at the other end, it has dreams of becoming an academic discipline. In the latter instance, part of the difficulty lies in the lack of a strong ontological and epistemological frame. This problematic goes all the way back to the events of the 17th and 18th centuries where those in the social arena believed that their studies could yield to the techniques proven so successful in the natural and physical sciences. This becomes evident in the efforts of Bertrand de Jouvenel in his The Art of Conjecture (2) where he defines the arenas of facta and futura where the former dealt with measurable facts and the latter more in the domain of conjecture, the domain of the Future, an arena lacking the epistemological foundation needed to be a science and questioning whether there was a firm foundation for Future as a discipline. Poli points out that Wendell Bell, in his Foundation of Future Studies (3), introduced the term dispositions as a bridge between facta and futura, and others are working on various epistemological frames. Yet, a firm ontological and epistemological foundation for Futures as a discipline rather than a practice remains elusive. Even as a practice, Futures remains more as an art. Shaping Tomorrow, a website for practioners and those with needs to understand what may lie in the road ahead, provides an armamentarium of tools for ascertaining how Future will be revealed, short or long term, http://www.shapingtomorrow.com/ . What one finds is: a) As with any tool, its effectiveness is dependent on its design and the skill of the practioner who chooses and uses that tool. b) Going back to the science/social break, application seems to be more effective in the domain of the former c) Long term Futures tends to smooth out the short-term deviances between near term possibilities and long-term scenarios. As the T.S. Elliot quote in the beginning suggests, the future is imbedded in the past. Take a single step forward and the former present is the past and the Future is different. The Future is dynamic. It acts and is acted upon. Elliot speaks to the difference between facta and futura in Little Gidding: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. While science and its handmaiden, technology, yield to an armamentarium of the practioners of Future, allowing measures of progress to be defined, futura writes a Sisyphusian Future. Or as Shelly might infer:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away" The rise of the dual phenomena of complexity science and the internet may have created a sufficient disruption with respect to the way science may be carried out and thus change the epistemological underpinnings of the disciplines in both the sciences and social studies arenas, changing, for example, the nature of Future and its practice. The postulated 4th Paradigm (4) suggests that with the massive databases that are being created along with universal cloud access makes it more practical to search for patterns in these large data sets and then make sense of these rather than approaching potentially new knowledge by standard processes of reasoning. Complexity science suggests that typical mathematical models may be unstable within the range being studied and thus either produce false results or different results each time the models are executed. The clich that one cannot step into the same river twice may hold here. For example, equations are composed of both variables and coefficients. The latter are relational constants. But complexity science suggests that the constants are only constant within a narrow time bandwidth. This is not the often cited butterfly effect which one sees after several iterations implying that rounding can lead to errors over time. Rather, unlike a basic equation, for example for a parabola, which can be well defined, the constants may not hold. More interestingly, the metaphor can be extended. Not only is there a possibility that the map, or defining equation, being drawn is changing but the fabric on which it is drawn may also be changing. With traditional maps, the surface is normally expected to be planar and continuous and that it is static. For the physical sciences in the majority of applications, both the surface and the constants defining the relationship between variables are expected to hold (for the most part). Grant McCrackens forthcoming book, Culturematic, is described on the Amazon.com website, http://tinyurl.com/72r6sso : A Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. Its an ingenuity engine. Once wound up and released, the Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemporary culture, to test the atmosphere, to see what life it can sustain, to see who responds and how. Culturematics start small but can scale up ferociously, bootstrapping themselves as they go.

Because they are so inexpensive, we can afford to fire off a multitude of Culturematics simultaneously. This is evolutionary strategy, iterative innovation, and rapid prototyping all at once. Culturematics are fast, cheap, and out of control. Perhaps as important, they fail early and often. They are the perfect antidote to a world where we cannot guess whats coming next. McCracken, a cultural anthropologist, has been consulting to industry for several decades. In his book he suggests that scenarios, strategy projections, planning are going dark. The more we think abut the future the more we realize that it is more besides. His suggestion is similar to those working on the 4th Paradigm and as suggested in the Amazon.com quote. It is easier to launch small, cheap, probes into the environment of choice and sense the results. In many ways this is similar to the idea in Wendell Bells dispositions which exist between facta and futura where conditions can condense theory into actuality, crossing the boundaries between science and the social arena. How science is being or will be done changes. At the present this opens up the possibility of Future becoming a recognized discipline. First, it, like the social arena, has to shed what has been termed science envy. In many instances, the entire future armamentarium needs to be selectively culled and those that are kept used more judiciously. One of the problems with the Future, whether practice or disciplinary is that few in the arena track the work being done in knowledge management, particularly the theories developed by Max Boisot in his seminal work, Knowledge Assets (5) and put into practice by a former knowledge manager at IBM, England, David Snowden, now heading a consulting firm, Cognitive Edge, http://cognitive-edge.com/ (note that the site offers free registration which gives access to a number of papers of relevance to the Future ) Snowden, using the familiar S-shaped curves, suggests that we are going through a third transformative change, science based, systems based and, now complexity based. What George Land (6) postulated for these S-curved transitions is that such shifts are stressful so that humans tend to want to repeat the previous curves rather than risk by leaping to a new paradigm. Snowden focuses on those who can make such a leap. Land suggests that those who hesitate may effectively die, while late adopters will form the proverbial tail into the present. Snowden suggests that the currently emerging paradigm points out that hindsight does not lead to foresight. Thus both practice and discipline of Future cannot look towards the historical. Studying the past to ferret out what has been defined as weak signals may produce a false future since both the signal and the context are dynamic, both with respect to when (time to the future) and what (emergent properties).

It has been suggested that Future is elusive and appears only in context and then in many guises. Many in the sciences seek a model or theory of everything where string theory is either an answer to the quest or a surrogate for the elusive. This raises the issue of whether western philosophy with its propensity for wanting to define or draw boxes provides a sufficient set of intellectual tools. With the rise in the western vernacular of complexity and massive databases, how does one intellectually bell the cat, if Future is a verb and not a noun (Ricardo Arjona composed a song, Jesus verbo no sustantivo) References: 1) Poli, Roberto, Steps Toward an Explicit Ontology of the Future, Journal of Future Studies, 16(1), 2011, pp 67-78 2) De Jouvenel Bertrand, The Art of Conjecture, London, Weidenfeld and Nichols, London, 1967 3) Bell, Wendell, Foundations of Futures Studies, Transaction Publishers, London, 2003 4) The Fourth Paradigm, http://research.microsoft.com/enus/collaboration/fourthparadigm/ 5) Boisot, Max, Knowledge Assets, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1998 6) Land, George, Grow or Die, Leadership 2000, Inc (note, Land has used several last names, Lock-Land or Ainsworth-Land and various versions of this book have had different publishers. A second, business oriented version has been issued, Breakpoint and Beyond with Beth Jarmon)