The Future of the World : Futurology, Futurists and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination === > [!tldr] Tags > #discipline/histoire #cat/prospective #discipline/sciencespolitiques #cat/future #cat/futurologie #cat/guerre-froide #cat/capitaslime #cat/litterature #type/interview > [!info] Meta Data >**FirstInterviewer**:: [[Swedish Collegium Scas, ]] ~**FirstInterviewee**:: [[Andersson, Jenny]] ~ > **Title**:: The Future of the World : Futurology, Futurists and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination > **Year**:: 2020 > **Citekey**:: [[2020_anderssona]] > **itemType**:: interview > **ISSN**:: > > [!Cite] > Andersson, J. (2020, January 22). _The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination_ (Swedish Collegium Scas, Interviewer) [Interview]. [https://youtube.com/watch?v=npHGfwxfpn4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=npHGfwxfpn4) > > %%[@2020_anderssona]%% > **URL**:: https://youtube.com/watch?v=npHGfwxfpn4 . > > **Related**:: %%[@2012_andersson]%% ([[2012_andersson_]]) , %%[@2019_leberre]%% ([[2019_leberre_Jenny Andersson, The Future of the World. Futurology, Futurists and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, 288 p.]]) , %%[@2020_andersson]%% ([[2020_andersson_Ghost in a Shell]]) , %%[@2015_andersson.rindzeviciute]%% ([[2015_andersson.rindzeviciute_The struggle for the long-term in transnational science and politics]]) . > > **Attachment**::. --- > [!important] Synthesis > **Contribution**:: > > [!Abstract] > > The Future of the World is devoted to the intriguing field of study which emerged after World War Two, futurism or futurology. Jenny Andersson explains how futurist scholars and researchers imagined the Cold War and post Cold War world and the tools and methods they would use to influence and change that world. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Some argued it should be a closed sphere of science defined by delimited probabilities. They were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. These different forms of prediction laid very different claims to how accurately futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over what was yet to come. The Future of the World carefully examines these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post war period. Using unexplored archival collections, The Future of the World reconstructs the Cold War networks of futurologists and futurists. >> --- # Note ## Introduction And now I have the great pleasure of welcoming you all to today's seminar, and most warmly welcome to Jenny Anderson, who will give the talk, The Future of the World-- Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination. Jenny Anderson is research professor at the Siena Resse and co-director of the Max Planck Science Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies, the Max Poé at Science Po in Paris. And she's here as the guest of the principal at SCAS for this semester. She was awarded her PhD in economic history from Uppsala University in 2003. And before joining the Siena Resse and Science Po in October 2009, she was postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at the European University Institute in Florence and at the Minda de Gonsberg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. She was also a research fellow of the Swedish National Scientific Council, Vietnscop Srodet, and an associate professor with the Swedish Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm from 2007 until 2009. Jenny has published several very interesting works on the transformations of social democracy in the post-war period. And in this context, I can mention the books Between Growth and Security, Swedish Social Democracy from a Strong Society to a Third Way. And this book was published in 2006 by Manchester University Press. I'd also like to mention the library and the workshop, Social Democracy and Capitalism in an Age of Knowledge, published by Stanford University Press in 2009. Now, her current research is focused on investigating future studies. On the one hand, this has involved tracing the futurists, as it were, the scientists and intellectuals who developed forecasting and future studies in the first place and who were deeply involved not only in producing images of the world futures, but also in producing the technologies and methods with which they thought that these futures could be shaped. And furthermore, her work has focused on forms of future governance. In other words, a comparative history of the institutions that were developed in the period from the early 1970s to deal with the future. And her most recent book on this topic is entitled The Future of the World-- Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. And I'd also like to mention that in 2015, Yenni Anderson was awarded the Ciena Rés Bronze Medal for her highly interesting and qualitative research. And with this, I'm very eager to leave the floor to Yenni to tell us more about the future of the world and the people who think they run it. ## Intervention of Jenny Andersson Thank you. So my editor was very happy about the title of this book. Some readers think it's a very disappointing title because you don't learn much about the actual future of the world, which we can all agree is a highly relevant topic. So I recognize some people in the room who know me for my previous research. So I should probably say that I have been working on this future business for the last eight or nine years or so, so quite a long time. And as I'm finishing that, I'm also sort of entertaining. I hope that I will return to questions of social democracy and welfare status over the coming years. But in any case, I'm here to talk to you today about futures and futurists and futurology. So I want to introduce you, first of all, to this thing, the board game, the future. So those of you who have good eyesight, you see the future, a game of strategy, influence, and chance. And this is actually a packed up board game, which was produced in 1966 and which could be opened up and played as you would a sort of normal society game or app. An amusement device like this. So the game looks like this when it's unpacked. And this game is going to give me the red thread for this talk. So I'm going to keep coming back to this game. The board game, the future, was actually called Apparatus for playing a game concerned with the forecasting of simulated happening or non-happening future events. And so just to explain the game a little bit, it comprised a set of event cards. Those are the cards that are stacked in the middle. It had something called the probability scale, which was engaged on the probability of given future events happening or not happening. It had a non-symmetrical many-sided die. So those of you who are familiar with Cold War design history, you know about Buckminster Fuller and his many-sided asymmetrical dies, which he used to depict chaotic open and random futures. Is this OK? In the game, there was a marker for each possible imaginable event that could be moved along a probability axis according to probability values that were obtained by throwing this many-sided die. There were red and green arrows on a board which determined whether the probabilities of events were decreasing or increasing. And there were various other factors that then governed the movements up and down this probability scale. These factors are quite interesting. The first involved something called the opinion of experts as to the probability of an event occurring or not occurring. The second factor was something called ordinary chance, reflected in the numbers randomly allotted through the die. The third factor was thrown up by drawing event cards from the pile of cards at the center of the game. These included something called ordinary event cards, which reflected what the American nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, a familiar person from US history, had famously called business as usual, or the standard future world. But there was also something called wild cards. And wild cards is a phrase that then came back in US history significantly later. And I think this is one of the first instances of that term. Wild cards were cards that were world-altering. They changed the course of the universe because if you drew a wild card, the wild card affected all the occurrences or non-occurrences of all the other future events in the overall series of events played within this game. So how was this game played? Well, in one version of the game, the winning player was simply the person who correctly forecasted the most events or non-events that were thrown up by the event cards, as in any game of chance. In another version of the game, which I find particularly interesting, play money could be used in order to turn the game from an amusement device into a game of strategy, where players competed over the wisest investment of their money in relation to the kind of occurrences that the game turned out. By using money, players could also compete with each other over what was referred to in the game as the most desirable world. So they could use play money as representations of fictitious investments into a desirable capitalist world. And the player who won was then the player who had attracted the most investments from the other players. In other words, he had succeeded in creating a desirable, fictitious, capitalist future world, with which he could convince the other players and get their money. The future board game is an example of what I want to call a future artifact. So it illustrates the fact that the history of the future of the 20th and 21st century is not merely a history of visions or images or even ideas of the future, which is essentially how historians have dealt with the future as a matter of cultural history. But it's also a highly material history of objects, devices, and technologies that carry forms of futurity and predictive ambition. So artifacts such as this board game were not neutral objects. They embodied various claims to know and shape the future. And importantly, they were a kind of concentrated forms of futuristic expertise. And as such, I think that they are vital to the contemporary history of the future, and perhaps more precisely to an understanding of the very particular activity of prediction. So prediction is a very special form of knowledge production. And I will come back to this in this talk. And in this talk, one of the things that I want to propose to you in one of the central claims of the book is that we can understand modern forms of prediction, such as this game, or the scenarios that Christina has observed in the World Economic Forum, or foresight processes, or forecasts and simulation exercises, as what the French philosopher Michel Foucault would have called social technologies. So technologies that have the ambitions to shape the social and economic world, manage fundamental forms of social conflict, and create forms of order, or at least illusions of order, to a general messiness of social and global time. So when we look at these artifacts, I think we need to raise the question of what kind of desirable future is proposed, who has the authority to invent and create this future, and with what pretensions to scope and influence in the contemporary capitalist world. Now, this is an interdisciplinary environment. So before I go further, I want to make a very brief remark just to situate this talk in a wider historiographic context. We have some historians in the room. So SCAS is well known in the field of global history, adults have a big ambition in global history, and was very early doing global history, which is what a lot of historians today are currently doing. And so global history tends to have to do with ideas of transnational circulation. And so in economic history, historians have paid attention to the circulation of commodities, like cotton, or slaves, or coffee, or we have a profiteur fellow on mice, over global space. In the history of science, historians have taken an interest in the global circulation of not only ideas, but also forms of knowledge and expertise, and in the movement of artifacts such as books or instruments, or why not this future board game. In intellectual and political history, historians have increasingly become interested in what they call the production of globalities. So in other words, in the visions and visions of systems that seem to produce ideas of planetary order and world connections, or even forms of world governance. And this is where I want to situate my work in this book. And also in a new, or at least relatively new, global intellectual history, which has been highly concerned not with the world as such, but with the history of the idea of the world as a social and economic system. Particularly in the decades after 1973, which contemporary historians tend to see as a major breaking point because of the oil crisis. And so the book, The Future of the World, is a history of ideas of the world future in the post-war period, and more precisely, of specific forms of world future expertise, and the forms of knowledge creation and expertise that had the world future as their particular object. So what I will refer to in this talk as futurology was an immensely complex activity which began after 1945, and which sort of peaked around the first oil crisis in 1973. And so I suggest in the book that futurology was a carrier of a new kind of global or globalistic expertise, which emerged in the '60s and '70s in reaction to perceptions of so-called common or global problems. So common or global problems were problems that somehow defied the old political technologies of the nation state. In other words, conventional and linear forms of planning that usually had, as their sort of time category, a period of maybe five or 10 years, but not longer than that. Common problems or global problems also betrayed understandings increasingly common from the mid-1960s on of a somehow chaotic and troublesome world situation. And so they were concerned with the problem of world order, how to maintain and control a world situation that at this particular moment in time seemed volatile and potentially unpredictable. And so one of the paradoxes of futurology that I have now given to you is related to what the American historian Daniel Rogers has referred to as the end of predictability. And so I'm making an argument here that is a little different from that of many contemporary historians, because contemporary historians have tended to see OPEC as a breaking point in contemporary history. And as the marking the end of a long post-war era marked by the ideal of progress and by a sort of high modernistic spirit, and after that, we get representations of crisis and decline. So my argument is that futurology is a direct reaction to the end of predictability. It was when linear trends seemed to end that futurology was a necessary kind of knowledge activity. And so the crisis of planning by the late 1960s and early '70s did not, I propose, lead to a demise of concerns of control or an end to high modernistic attempts to rationalize time and order, rather futuristic tools such as the future board game or the many other predictive technologies that circulated across a global space in the period from the mid '60s on, were reactions to this new understanding of world uncertainty and unpredictability. And they were an attempt to find new levers of control on an emerging world situation. And so as such, I think that we can see them in a long line of continuity from the early 20th century or even the late 19th century in terms of notions of technocracy and rationalistic planning. And they somehow seem to translate ambitions of rational management and social engineering from the nation space to the global space, because they think that this global space is absolutely key to modern forms of prediction. And just in passing, we can remember that in fact the concept of the long term, which is what most of the futurists refer to, is a product of nuclear reasoning that refers, in fact, both to time and space. So both to a new time category, which is not five or 10 years, but 25 or 30 years. But also to a new spatial dimension, which is the global levels of beyond the nation state. I found the future board game in a New England garage. As I was trying to find the documents and archives of futurists for my project-- so usually historians have the convenience of working on things that have already been collected and stored in archives and libraries. And with futurology, it just wasn't like that. So the first part of my research project was about doing many, many interviews and finding documents across a very large part of the Western world. And that's how I came across this game. So the game was developed by three strategists and futurists who you see on this picture. So on the left, you have a guy called Theodore Gordon. In the middle, you have a man called Olaf Helmer. And on the right is a guy called Hans Goldschmidt. And he's not important, so we're now going to leave him out of this story. Theodore Gordon, who's standing on the left, was a ballistic engineer who had worked on the Apollo project. So you know the Apollo project for the moon landing. And then come to work for RAND, the so-called Research and Development Think Tank of the US Air Force. Olaf Helmer in the middle was an Austrian-born mathematician who had studied with Karl Hempel in Vienna, and then come to the US as a refugee intellectual and began working on applied mathematics. So if we situate this in the RAND environment-- RAND is very famous in American Cold War history. But it's noted for being the cradle of what is also referred to as Cold War science. And there were other mathematicians and economists at RAND, who in fact became much more important and well-known than these people. For instance, Herman Kahn, but also the fathers of game theories, who John Follnoyman and Oscar Morgenstern. But actually, this guy, Olaf Helmer, was, I think, a key architect of Cold War science, a key epistemological influence on a particular understanding of social science as something that could be actively harnessed for military purposes and defense. And he worked on key epistemological approaches at RAND, which then became very important, for instance, in the development of neoclassical economics, so game theory and rational choice theory. But he also worked on what he called decision-making technologies, or social technologies, which were devices like the game that had prediction, and in particular, the prediction of social affairs and human behavior as their key objective or purpose. And what is kind of important here, and just to give you the atmosphere of what was going on at RAND at this particular point in time, immediately after 1945, is the understanding which was dominant in American social science and in what is known as behavioralism, that social science could be moved toward what these people also referred to as a general theory of prediction. So then, in fact, all forms of behavior, ranging from individual human behavior to the behavior nation states or even entire world systems, could be explained as if they were driven by some natural social law. So this was really one of the pre-understandings to the approach to social science here. And so, of course, if the social law underlying behavior could be understood, then it could also be understood in advance, hence preemptively controlled. And this is the idea that underlies predictive experimentation at RAND. Rational choice theory is a particularly important example here, because if you have the presumption of a rational agent, then you also have an eminently foreseeable actor, because you can't predict what this rational agent will do. So game theory was one of the social experiments in prediction. It's going to keep going on like this in the history of science and prediction for a while, and then I'm going to go back to global issues. So bear with me. When Helmer and Gordon developed this game in 1966-- and you can see them here standing in front of a big blow up of the game-- it was an application of something that they had been working on at RAND, which was the so-called Delphi method. So Delphi experiments began as an outcrop of game theory experimentation, because a very important story, in fact, or element in the story about the history of gaming and rational choice at RAND is that presumptions of predictability departing in ideas of agents as rational actors very early on, in fact, came into trouble, because it sort of appeared from the early games that the rational actor did not appear to exist, or at least not, in perfect universal and transferable conditions. So one of the things that came out of experiments with gaming at RAND was actually the idea of limited rationality. So particularly when agents seemed to face something that they refer to as uncertainty. And so this opened the door to a whole set of very complicated epistemological issues about uncertainty, what uncertainty was, and also about what, in fact, constituted objective explanation. Indeed, what was the difference between objectivity, subjectivity, and intuition in the field of human affairs? So what appeared to be very important for how the games played out in the gaming room at RAND were, in fact, the scripts. In other words, the storylines that informed the games and that most of the intellectuals who were working on gaming admitted were to a more or lesser extent based on some form of human creativity and subjectivity. So someone was actually writing the input for these games. One of the key things that then happened at RAND and is really important to my story here, because it's important to the history of the social sciences in this era, is a move from understandings of prediction as an activity that mirrored attempts in the natural sciences with objective explanation to understandings of prediction as a subjective craft or social technology. So it's very important, I think, to the story here that the scientists at RAND referred to this board game to prediction and to this Delphi tool that I will explain in a minute as craft or social technology. In other words, it was designed to have an effect on the observation, which would be a violation of conventional understandings of explanation. So the purpose of these crafts was not to correctly display external developments or uncover these laws driving the future, but rather it was to find levers of influence on ongoing development so that these could be shaped. Prediction then became understood as a kind of social learning by which behavior and action could be altered if agents were made to reflect on the future outcomes of their actions. So the self-fulfilling prophecy became part of the problem that they were trying to deal with. We came in fact part of the benefits of the activity of prediction. So to put a long story short here, this was of course based on the idea that also the social world could be rationally engineered because these were engineers who had engineered much of the technical world, and that the futures of the social world could therefore also through this kind of engineering be contained. So in the Delphi method, which Helmer and Gordon began working on in 1945, rationality was presumed to be a socially-constituted phenomenon which could be created by the collective engagement of a group of people known as the experts. So here is sort of how Delphi worked. This is from a report published in 1964, which was called an experiment in social forecasting. And Delphi consisted of a number of expert panels who were given a number of questions pertaining to future events. So for instance, the likelihood of a Soviet nuclear attack on the US in the next 25-year period. Now one of the really important things with Delphi is that it was a reiterated exercise. So the experts were then invited to give their responses, then they were invited to consult each other's responses, and then the exercise was done again, and it could be done up to six times. And so those of you who are conspiracy-minded, you can see here what happened over the six reiterations of this exercise. So Delphi was invented as a tool for consensus creation with the idea that expert responses would cluster around a consensual view during these reiterated exercises. So I don't know if you can see them, but the little numbers one are kind of scattered because in the initial round, experts in fact give fairly divergent answers, and then in the sixth round, they're sort of clustering because they have come to assimilate each other's views. Okay. So Delphi is still used as a technology for consensus creation in things like, for instance, the World Bank or the ratings agencies in financial markets. So it's used to bring experts together around a consensual view. Was there anything else that I needed to say about Delphi? Okay, so the purpose of Delphi was then to ask these expert panels a number of questions pertaining to the future and eventually obtain quantitative probabilistic values out of these panels. And so one of the things that fascinated me in the archives, not only at run, but in a number of different places where I've been in the OECD archives, in the UN archives, in the French Planning Commission, in the Japanese Planning Commission, was then how Delphi led to the creation of these extremely complex lists with probabilistic values over all sorts of future developments. So in economy, in military affairs, in social affairs. So the future could become incredibly complex with very complex quantitative reasonings. But what is also kind of interesting is how breathtakingly simplistic the future could become. So really just across correlation of variables. So incidentally, I think this is the beginnings of artificial intelligence reasoning because Olaf Helmer also went on to become one of the first professors in artificial intelligence at UCLA in California. So the point of Delphi was to substitute the laboratory experience in the natural sciences with a formalized exercise where expert opinion, also called subjective judgment, could replace direct observation with the argument that since future matches could not be directly observed, they could be indirectly observed through the extraction of the subjective opinions of experts. So subjectivity, Olaf Helmer thought, could be dealt with scientifically by formalizing the process in which consensus was created. And just a very interesting parenthesis here. Eventually they also discovered that they could manipulate Delphi. So for instance, by giving different graphic illustration of where the responses clustered, they could give different impressions of where the consensual view was. And that affected the consensual creation process. So if subjectivity was tamed in a form of objectivity achieved, to Helmer this translated into accuracy of prediction. In other words, to a verdict on the most probable future. Then something very interesting happened in predictive experimentation at RAND because Helmer did not stop at the most probable future. Since his interest was in social technology, was in the efficiency of engineering. He wanted to engineer a level of societal efficiency and good decisions. And so Helmer was not just interested in the accuracy of prediction, but he was interested in a different problem which was desirability. So the question of which futures were desirable and non-desirable. In his logical terms, because he had studied with Hempel in Vietnam, the question of desirability was a matter of how to find an order of preference between optimal futures and sub-optimal futures. Now in normal language between good futures and bad futures. The good things that might happen to us and the bad futures that might happen to us. We would recognize desirability as a normative problem and not merely as a logical problem. But to the scientists at RAND, desirability was a logical problem of ordering preferences. And so it's important here to think about the political context. So this was done in the period between 1964 and 1967 in the US, which are the years of a lot of political and social and economic turmoil not least in the field of race relations. So the summers in 1964 and '65 and '66 were marked by race riots and also by a new presidential power in the US which had promised to transform American society over the next generation. So actually having now finished all of these really detailed aspects of prediction, this is where the really interesting story to me begins. Because my interest is not really in these complex discussions on epistemology, but it's in how these tools of prediction such as Delphi and the board game became social technologies charged with political and economic content and understood as tools of power and tools of world ordering. And so when I interviewed this guy here on the left, Theodore Gordon, he said, "Well, you know, we realized that we could make a buck on this. So they realized that Delphi could be sold as a consultancy tool, as a decision device to a range of public and private clients in the late 1960s." So what these guys actually did, and this is why they're standing very proudly in front of this board game, was to create a consultancy or a think tank, called the Institute for the Future, which marketed Delphi as a decision tool to public and private clients. One of the first uses of Delphi in the Institute for the Future was to work in race relations in the US with the idea that Delphi could be used to identify on the basis of the opinion of experts the best possible decision and the optimal future preference for race relations in the US, hence avoiding what they called passionate politics and creating an efficiency mechanism to social life. It was also at the Institute for the Future that they developed the board game. And I don't know if you can see it, but in fact, the board game is really the concrete application of Delphi. It's really the same mechanism in the form of a strategy game for corporate managers. So the client of the board game, the board game was in fact produced and then distributed to all the clients, sorry, all the managers of a major American multinational corporation called Kaiser Aluminum, which is a big Cold War player and the world's biggest buyer of aluminum bauxite. In the Christmas of 1967, so it was, at first I thought this was kind of a commercial gimmick or a ploy and then I realized that in fact many of the other Cold War corporations started at this similar point in time to experiment with strategy games as a kind of learning mechanisms for their managers. And so this is where in fact the even more interesting story to me begins because it's through the implication of corporations like Kaiser or Royal Dutch Shell, which I spoke to some of you about when we met in January. And through the networks of circulation between futurists and consultants like the people from the Institute for the Future that we see the spread to the global level of these tools as really a kind of world ordering market device for social technology for the world. And so this brings me to yet another problem of prediction that I will now introduce, which is not the problem of probability or desirability that I spoke of, but a totally different problem which was the problem of whether the future was one or many, whether it was predetermined or open-ended. And what happened to these technologies of prediction once they became reflections on global time and more importantly on the temporalities of world capitalism. So both scenarios in Delphi were developed in what was a military context and this military context was concerned with the future of warfare and the strategy of the Cold War which was expected to be a nuclear war. So the nuclear future was just one future. It was not a plurality of future, it was one future. And so it's important that the first generation of predictive experiments that ran were about identifying one most likely and most probable set of events, for instance which factories would be the targets of a USSR nuclear attack. This emphasis on the one most probable event changed through the discovery of the problem of desirability. So from the mid-1960s we see people like Helmer experimenting with possible multiple future probabilities, at which point the key problem was no longer actual prediction of one future but to identify a range of possible futures so that an optimal future, that is a strategy for the optimal future, could be chosen. So if we return one more time now to the board game, let me see, I think it's most clear on this image. We can have a look at the different futures that in fact it depicted because it came with different boards and these boards were in fact really a kind of microcosm of the economic imaginaries of the late 60s and 1970s. And of the possible strategic issues that might conceivably present themselves to a global corporation active on a major commodity market such as that of aluminum. And so what I think it's too small for you to see, but what you actually see on these different lists that you have on all the sides of the game, are things that were really important to the 1970s economic thinking. So for instance, the risk, because this is a risk from an American perspective, of a more effective UN system which might distribute more of the profits of capitalism to the third world. The rate of private investment abroad, the doubling of private per capita, which would be a good thing because it would increase consumer power. The invention of ultra-light metal substitutes, the development of ocean mining, the invention of anti-gravity machines, but also the exploitation of oceanic continental shelves for mineral ores. On one of the lists in the game figures the risk of a revolution in a major commodity producing country like Iran or Algeria, and also the risk of a strike in a major American car manufacturing plant. And so really we see how this game is intended to train the managers of the multinational corporations in a new kind of strategic thinking where these kind of risk factors are supposed to lead to a future reflection on what the optimal strategy, if this happens, would be. And then they could literally shift these little dices along, these little discs in the game, and then find the optimal response to that kind of world situation. And so, Kaiser aluminum, like many other corporations, and I think the most famous example is Shell, really started using these kinds of strategic management just around the oil crisis in the years before OPEC won and then after. And I want to return now to this problem of singular or plural future matters, so that the way that this game also contains a reflection on whether the world future is one or whether the world future is, in fact, several different ones. So the origins of futurality that I've just explained to you was directly linked to what American historians have referred to as Cold War science and to something that is referred to in the history of the social sciences as modernization theory. So modernization theory dominated American and actually also European social science, particularly in its applied orientation in the '50s and early 1960s. And the important element of it was that it portrayed the world as going through a one future-like sequence of universal developments in an essentially stage-driven theory. So there was one future because it was presumed that the world would, that all parts of the world would imitate basically Western liberal capitalism. One of the most important examples of this is modern growth theory with Walt Rostov's The Stages of Economic Growth. But what is very important here, which brings me back to this idea of the end of predictability that futurology has a very kind of paradoxical relationship with, is that futurological experimentation in the US and in other places, such as the UK and France too, takes off at the very point in time that modernization theory comes into profound crisis. In other words, at the very point in history in which the world does no longer appear to be foreseeable and where the question suddenly is whether the world really has only one future or maybe several and maybe even radically different world futures. This has to do with, and more than anything to do with the decolonization process and with the emergence of a new set of world actors who did not seem to share neither the Western nor in fact the communist future because the Marxism-Leninism was a futurology on its own, but who seemed rather intent on finding their own future. And so it was interesting to me that I rediscovered the term the third world, which is a French expression from the beginning. It was coined by the French demographer Alfred Sousville, "Germont," and in its original meaning, in fact, Sousville refers exactly to emerging nations and movements in the post-colonial world, rejecting the future image of the West. So he really refers to this exactly as a kind of future crisis. Sousville himself was part of a French milieu of futurists known as the prospectivists, the prospectivists. And while American futurology was quintessentially concerned with the one future of a possible nuclear war, French prospectivists were concerned with what they understood as the multiple unfolding futures of the previous colonies, their problem being that the world future might suddenly break down in a myriad of different parts, creating what they described with different terms as crowding, so too much people in the future, or chaos, that is, too many different futures and no singular direction to the world. We can see exactly how this concern translates, and when I see exactly it is because I work as an historian with transnational method and with genealogy, so I can see this idea transmitted between American and French futurists, including, for instance, the liberal sociologist Daniel Bell, but also the brother of Walt Rostow, who was a guy who you probably are not familiar with what he was, his name was Gene Rostow. From prospectivists in Paris to American international relations theory, where, in the late '60s and '70s, predictions of an essentially stable bipolar system, so A1 world, is replaced with predictions of an inherently unstable and multipolar world order, which does not have a given future, and which, therefore, is in a state of chaos. So, prediction from the 1970s on becomes a reflection on this possible plurality of world order, and on the possible multiple future worlds, which is not a positive notion for these people, but a deeply ominous and threatening notion, and prediction, therefore, develops as a tool in a kind of anticipatory evaluation of what these worlds might mean, and to whom, and how they might threaten a Western idea of capitalist world order. It is also at this point in time, in the late '60s and early 1970s, that we can, in fact, see a great rift in the world of futurism between what I describe in the book as futurology of the kind of Cold War, American kind, on the one hand, which is a world view within which the future is a problem of scientist reasoning. So, the future is essentially a preexisting object of which traces can be found. This is what I tried to explain to you with the rant stuff. And a completely different world, which begins to take place in the mid-1960s, and that calls itself futures studies, and futures with an S, signifying the plurality of future developments. And that is constituted by peace activists, and critical world systems theorists, like the Norwegian philosopher, Johan Galton, or economists, such as the American economist, Kenneth Boulding, or even post-colonial theorists, such as Ash Isnandi in India. For these people, the future does not exist, so there is no point in trying to trace given social laws. But the future is an object to be created through the use of the radical imagination, through love and creativity. And Kenneth Boulding, who is by far my favorite economist, is a very interesting person here, because he spends his life thinking about how to organize a completely different world, organized around the exchange of love and the creation of a good image of the future. And in fact, that is exactly even what he means with the economic term of good. For that story, you need to read the book. Do I have another couple of minutes? So I will bring you to the conclusion of this talk. And I will venture from this detailed matter to a kind of meta-historical reflection, which is that the principle that the future is open and that there can be multiple worlds is in history a dangerous, liminal, and exceptional idea. Most accounts of future history have emphasized the enlightenment of the period of economic and technological acceleration as the period when futures became understood as open because the church lost its influence and change became understood as a man-made horizon, while time became perceived as an historical construct. So this is Reinhard Koselick's famous work, Future's Past. Reinhard Koselick wrote, interestingly, of prediction that it produces the time within which and out of which it weaves. And so many historians have, when they have referred to Koselick, lost sight of a really key element in Koselick's thinking, which is that prediction was power over social and historical time. Scientific prediction, says Koselick, emanating from the modern social sciences and ending up in the hands of the absolutist state, replaced religious conceptions of telos and religious order with new and secular understandings of the order of events. So through processes of rational foresight, futures were once again made probable and knowable, and forms of temporal order were restored after the fall of religious ideas. So for Koselick, the scientific and rationalization of the future of which we can think the board game is an interesting example, was profoundly about replacing one form of power with another, and importantly, he describes this as the closing of the future. Another element in Koselick's argument is also important to us, namely the idea that it was through the modern notion of the future that the world became an ordered entity in which the Western world was identified as the locus of progress and other global parts were projected as falling behind on an axis of history. So the anthropologist Johannes Fabian in his book, Time and the Other, stressed that time is one of the essential principles of ordering in a global space that is structured not only around spatial conceptions, but also according to an imaginary axis of time. As time becomes the raster for seeing the world, forms of prediction became highly concrete forms of intervention into global time and space. The economic historian, Vanessa Ogle, has pointed out that time making had deeply imperial functions, and that time was both an object of colonization and the instrument for important forms of claims making into distant space and time. Timothy Mitchell and James Scott likewise see the charting of territory, which is not a mere spatial but also a deeply temporal function, as the foundation of government and governmental power and as the basis of control over future territory. Such charting takes place, for instance, through maps. But scenarios can be likened to such maps. Only they are maps of time. They are ways of setting out order into messy global time. As such, we can think of them as what Foucault referred to as sites of calculation and saw as concentrated embodiments of governmental rationality. And so if we return one more time to the game, 1960s and 1970s scenarios of the world future were concentrated images of the possible worlds that might follow onto a demise of a Western-dominated world order. And the rise in forms of future expertise, these future consultants like the ones in the Institute for the Future, expressed the hope that such forms of futuristic expertise could help govern a new and unforeseeable world, for instance, by shaping business strategy or by creating common and shared images of the future world market within the corporation, within the nation, or within the world system. And so this helps us understand that the future game, which was designed as perhaps an innocent gadget, was not such an innocent thing at all, but rather a kind of concentrated powered futures, the influence of which went well beyond the power of these people who had created it. And we should consider contemporary aspects of future creation and scenarios as highly powered geopolitical devices that are intimately involved in ordering our visions of global capitalism. Thank you.. --- # Annotations%% begin annotations %% %% end annotations %% %% Import Date: 2024-02-29T22:32:23.488+01:00 %%