Essay commissioned by Parco and published in three parts in the Hotpot newsletter.
Il futuro desertifica / La vita ipotetica / Qui la vista era magnifica / Da oggi significa / Che ciò che siamo stati non saremo più – Baustelle (The future desertifies / The hypothetical life / Here the view was magnificent / From today it means / That what we have been will be no more)
Design Hustler
For some time now I’ve plunged, against my better judgment, into the abyss of LinkedIn, and I’m not even sure why. The first time I had ventured there, several years ago, the reason was clear: I wanted to understand the workings of the platform in relation to the behavior of its users. The investigation resulted in a chapter in my book Entreprecariat, where I argued that LinkedIn was the social network par excellence because it embodied, in the most blunt and ruthless manner, the competitive logic existing, albeit concealed, in all other social networks. At the time, however, I believed that designers did not take “your parents’ network” too seriously and preferred other channels for finding work and sharing ideas.
I was wrong. There is a type of designer with one foot in the world of user experience and service design, and the other in academia (between systems thinking and speculative design) who is very active on the platform via posts of the length and quality of Instagram motivational quotes. People who have worked for Google or IDEO, or who have launched some very expensive summer school dedicated to more-than-human design and now propose drab rehashes of already worn-out ideas, ideas whose vitality has been sucked out by countless artistic-academic manifestos. One among many: friction as a positive quality of interactions, as a mindful moment of awareness—only to indulge in a unearthly rage when Gmail doesn’t load for half a minute. This is how we go from Luna Maurer’s performance Emoticons Don’t Have Wrinkles, powerful in that it embodies the idea of friction literally (throughout the show we see a tremendous enlargement of Maurer’s yellow-painted face), to some banal motto rendered through some lazy Canva template.
But the key concept that seems to bind together this people of design hustlers—hustlers because their exceedingly obvious self-branding activity confirms the previously stated thesis about the importance of LinkedIn—is that of future, or rather futures, strictly in the plural and strictly preferable. Corollary to this notion is the category of imagination, often endowed with the radical attribute: a faculty to be unleashed against our tomorrow. Indeed, many design hustlers call themselves futurists or futurologists, but I prefer to call them late futurists. To elucidate why I will have to go on at great length, and for this I apologize already.
Requiem for a Dream
First, a confession: I have a hard time taking seriously the whole conceptual scaffolding that supports preferable futures and the radical imagination. Of course, just as there are, within this system of ideas, naïve and simplistic variants, there are also more subtle and elaborate ones; but my skepticism invests its fundamental assumption: the belief that the future, whether conceived as singular or multiple, lies further along the timeline; that the future is what, in a more or less predictable, more or less surprising, more or less controlled way, has yet to happen. Sadly, the future is not that, or rather it is no longer that. From my point of view—and not only mine, as I shall show—today the future is nothing more than a mode of existence of the present, a style; it is, to put it more bluntly, a senescent idea that drags on to us.
It has not always been so: in the 1950s the future possessed a spatial concreteness that stood as a guarantee of the temporal one. It was within sight: all one had to do was to look up to the sky and observe the moon. That natural satellite was the future, and our distance from it, measurable in miles, also represented a temporal distance. Once we set foot on the Moon, however, the future as the “world to come” came to a halt. As a matter of fact, it was already staggering. According to J. G. Ballard, “[s]cience fiction has always departed from the principle that the environment is dynamic, that changes were taking place in it, until the recent period. Now, the idea of the future is almost dead. No one plans 1995 the way people planned the future during the 1930s. The past like the future have been annexed to the present.” Ballard places the breaking point at the end of World War II: “Probably the first casualty of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the concept of the future. I think the future died sometime in the 1950s. Maybe with the explosion of the hydrogen bomb.” The point, however, is not so much to identify the precise decease date as to make up one’s mind once and for all to hold a funeral.
Ballard was perhaps the first to dress in mourning but certainly not the only one. In 2013, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi described the “slow cancellation of the future,” a concept later taken up by Mark Fisher to chronicle the corrosion of the artistic infrastructure in post-Thatcherian Britain. In 2015, David Graeber gave voice to his generation’s deep albeit unexpressed disappointment over the unfulfilled dream of flying machines, symbol of a bright future (a future that, according to the author, has not been realized because, from a certain point onward, there has been more investment in disciplining technologies than in imaginative ones). In his New Dark Age (2018), James Bridle spoke of the end of the future in an even narrower sense, namely, as an erosion of the human species’ memory and ability to think. In the same year, Peter Lamborn Wilson (better known as Hakim Bey) argued that: “we have at last reached the Future, and […] the truly horrible truth of the End of the World is that it doesn’t end. One big J.G. Ballard/Philip K. Dick shopping mall from now till eternity, basically.This IS the future—how do you like it so far? Life in the Ruins: not so bad for the bourgeoisie, the loyal servants of the One Percent. Air-conditioned ruins!” And to conclude this somber review, in 2020 McKenzie Wark wrote a letter addressed to the future, understood, however, as the actual recipient:
Dear Future, I don’t believe in you anymore. Nobody does, but nobody will admit it. You were the last of the Gods to die. Or maybe: you will be the last God to die. It’s hard to get the tense right. Did you ever exist, or did you cease to exist? Did we kill you or did you die? […] No sacrifice will bring you into existence. That’s not how history ends. We won’t be reconciled. The absolute never comes. We’ll fuck and laugh and live our little lives as best as we can.
However, if the future is no longer what, like the dreaded Baffone, “has to come”, (“A da venì Baffone” is an Italian expression referring to the either hopeful or fearful arrival of Stalin, the man with the big mustache, baffone) but rather a mode of the present, this does not mean that the pendulum of History has halted. It is therefore useful to make a distinction between the future as an old idea looming in the present, and the new, that seething magma that presses upon the present, shaping it, until it redraws its features, making it unrecognizable. Thus, the new is what produces a new figure, but to do so it must disfigure the present. If the future is different, the new is other. While the future speaks, the new acts. To better understand this distinction, it is worth examining how futures studies conceptualize the future and comparing this with some interpretations of the concept of the new.
Of Cones and Cradles
One of the most popular conceptual tools among futurologists, and therefore among late futurists as well, is Joseph Voros’s Futures Cone from 2003. However, as Voros himself explains, the idea of representing the future in the form of cones of various diameters based on higher or lower probability dates back to at least 1994. There are countless variations of this diagram (there are even workshops dedicated to producing new versions), but they all fit into the same probabilistic logic. Here, time is represented as a bundle of possibilities, ranging from the probable to the preposterous. Generally, this spectrum also encompasses the designer’s own value system, that is, what they considers preferable. However, since it is not easy to produce consensus on what is desired, the center and breadth of this area of possibility are not entirely clear. A revolutionary, for example, is well aware that what is desirable to them lies much closer to the zone of the preposterous (if not beyond) than to the zone of the probable.
But we must not give in to the temptation to improve the diagram by adding further subdivisions, modifications or nuances ad infinitum. On the contrary, we need to question the legitimacy of the conic figure as a means of framing the future in the traditional sense, that is, as what could or will happen. The fundamental problem with this tool is that it suggests a linear development of History (a category, moreover, nonexistent in the vocabulary of late futurists), as if it were an unrolling carpet. In fact, the projection of the cone necessarily develops from a single point, from which what comes after, in spite of greater or lesser probability, is still predetermined. In this sense, Voros’s cone is analogous to ideal cities such as the one painted by Piero della Francesca, which unsurprisingly is supremely static: the various buildings are imbricated in the same grid produced by the central perspective. This deterministic conceptualization prevents the new from being recognized and thus from emerging, because the different contains no actual alterity, as a line, straight or curved as it may be, is made up of points that are different but still similar to each other, inasmuch as they are produced by a predetermined formula.
The late futurist is themselves static, firm in a position of observation, and contemplates the unfolding of events as one looks through a spyglass. They know (sometimes without knowing it) that the after, in one way or another, will respond to the logic of the before. Not only that: since the late futurist exists outside historical development, they cannot imagine their own demise. In other words, can the foresight officer of some company imagine a scenario in which said company fails, and perhaps even argue that this is a preferable scenario? In this respect, the now well-known New Yorker cartoon by Tom Toro does more and better than late futurism: a post-apocalyptic landscape is illuminated by a makeshift fire in front of which a broker explains to those around him that: “Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholder.” With frugal means the vignette surpasses in imagination and effectiveness most of the high-resolution scenarios produced by the professionals of anticipation, who, thanks to Midjourney and the like, can finally generate in the blink of an eye terabytes upon terabytes of pseudo-Hollywood images only good for illustrating sentimental statements about the necessity to “imagine otherwise”.
Once we have tossed out the Voros cone (except for very basic or pedagogical uses) as a surreptitiously deterministic tool that, through the different, limits the emergence of the other, we are left with the task of proposing a model, or at least an image, that allows us to frame the dynamic of the new, that is, of radical change. Where to start? Already some years ago, Ballard registered the impression that “change has slowed down its pace, or, perhaps, that it has gone underground.” It is precisely the hypothesis of clandestinity that we must consider—taking it to its extreme.
The philosopher and economist Cornelius Castoriadis devoted The Imaginary Institution of Society (his chef-d’œuvre from which I drew the distinction between difference and alterity) to the problem of radical change. Somewhat enigmatically, Castoriadis defines the new as the emergence of figures. I must admit that I struggled quite a bit to construct a mental image of this idea until I came across, through the work of Donna Haraway, a perfect analogy: the game of cat’s cradle. It consists of the interweaving of threads pulled by two or more hands, with each finger pulling a different thread in a constant transformation of the web produced. At first what we see is just the combination of an indistinct texture, but all of a sudden something unexpected happens: the formless web takes on the appearance of an animal, a plant, a star. A figure has emerged.
In the cat’s cradle, there is no linear development, or rather there is, but only if we get fixated on an atomized view of history as a swarming domino of micro-events in succession, thereby, however, losing the deeper meaning of the analogy. The new is produced by the interaction between different actors who, while related to each other, act more or less autonomously without knowing to the full what figure they are helping to create. Once that figure is recognized, a decision can be made to stabilize it. At that point one “institutes” the new, which, at that very moment, ceases to be so. There is no extrapolation here, except that of individual actors acting within their individual cone of possibility. In this context, preferability loses value, as it is just an attribute of the individual actor. On the contrary, there is much more preposterousness than expected, because the new, so understood, is always strange, if not absurd.
According to Bifo, the transition from the possible to the real consists in”[e]xtracting and realizing one of the many immanent futurabilities.” This idea still proves to be yet too deterministic, for if the futurabilities were “inscribed in the present institution of the world,” then they would already be deducible, extrapolable, and thus would represent a mere development of the present, that is, nothing new. Bifo knows it, in fact he states that “the relation between now and tomorrow, between the present state and the future state of things, is neither necessary nor necessitated. The present does not contain the future as if it were its own linear development.” However, what we are saying is something else: the new is not even non-linear or complex: it is other. It can be brought back to the more or less complex dimension of the cause-and-effect relationship only a posteriori, because, as Emmanuel Carrère explains, “in history there are no laws that can explain revolutions as one explains the boiling of water brought to a certain temperature.” Even if the new existed somewhere, that place is inaccessible to us. And here we are reconciled with Bifo, firmly convinced that “in life as in history the inevitable in general does not occur, because what happens is the unpredictable.”
The Professional-visionary Class
For the late futurist, the future is not something that is built, implemented or prevented, but something that is imagined. The imagination of the late futurist, however, does not want to be that of the economist who anticipates GDP growth in the first quarter, but that of the little boy who experiences something like the Neverending Story adventure: their imagination is radical. According to one of countless definitions, radical imagination is about the “courage to imagine a future completely different from the current world.” Daydreaming, yes, but with the ambition of social engagement. Indeed, the late futurist starts from the assumption that the imaginative activity is currently depotentiated and needs a boost.
To better frame this concept it is worth going back to an book from ten years ago, entitled precisely The Radical Imagination. Anticipating the current use of the term, authors Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish argue that “[t]he radical imagination is term employed by many and explored by few” because, as they admit, it eludes any definition. In short, it is an “[a]spirational term, largely hollow of any concrete content or meaning.” Thus, we add, suitable for accommodating the aspirations of anyone, including a professional-visionary class. While the authors seem to agree that imagination is weakened today, they insist that it is an activity closely if not necessarily linked to social movements, concluding that “[w]ithout the radical imagination, we are left only with the residual dreams of the powerful.” But then the question arises: what happens when these same residual dreams present themselves as radical?
The reason why the word ‘imagination’ became a breeding ground for late futurists is to be found, of course, in the past. In 2007, journalist Bruce Nussbaum wrote:
Business men and women don’t like the term “design.” I think they think it implies drapes or dresses. Even top CEOs who embrace design don’t want to call it that. They want to call it “Innovation.” That has a manly right to it. It’s strong, techie. These folks are perfectly willing to use the word “vision,” whatever the heck “vision” is. They like “Imagination,” whatever the heck that is. But they don’t like “design.” Go figure.
Generic enough to intrigue the unicorn-hunting angel investor as much as the fund-granting bureaucrat, poetic enough to soften the hearts during a public speech, who could be against imagination, especially when cloaked in the political commitment of “courageous activists, visionary artists, and fierce organizers” (and it matters little how fierce, visionary, and brave they really are)? So, on the one hand there is the simplistic and conservative imagination of Star Wars and its fans, and on the other the heroic and progressive imagination of a group of fearless experts who would not reap the same benefit by simply calling their work design or perhaps facilitation.
What for Haiven and Khasnabish is a humbling, complex and exhausting mediation activity becomes for a design-star “literally, imagination pushed to the maximum.” Meanwhile, someone else argues that “even when we don’t have all the answers, we believe wholeheartedly that the future is extraordinary and we continue to manifest that irresistible vision.” Words, these, that would not be out of place in some reel on the Law of Attraction: radical imagination turns out to be equivalent to self-help optimism, to what even the least skeptical now call “toxic positivity,” the same positivity that obfuscates the clear perception of the end of the future. Put another way, while the emphasis on the power of imagining otherwise may make sense in contexts of everyday activism, where the weight of reality can be overwhelming, it makes less sense in the context of design, management and consulting where it should be taken for granted that imagination produces change. In this context, the radical imagination becomes instead a huge pat on the back that the late futurist gives to themselves, instilling confidence in their professionalized residual dreams. For their part, designers, who should be exercise the art of compromise at the margins of the real, suddenly become courageous the very moment they ignores such margins, leaping into dreams. This is how, over the course of a decade, radical imagination has gone from being a tool in the service of social justice movements to a resource for the professional-visionary class of late futurists. From the temporary autonomous zone to the conference room: a textbook case of elite capture.
Max Haiven, who is not a designer but a political scientist, shows in a recent project of his (developed together with Xenia Benivolski, Sarah Olutola, and Graeme Webb) how the radical imagination can escape the fluffy paws of late futurists. The World after Amazon is a collection of speculative stories written by some of the workers of the retail giant. In this volume, the editors have not positioned themselves as professionals of vision (it is no coincidence that the original workshop was entitled “Worker as Futurist”), but rather as facilitators at the service of the imagination already present in the workers’ point of view— although occasionally slipping into academicism and romanticization. The World after Amazon is an organizational rather than authorial work, involving meetings, writing workshops and more generally concrete solidarity.
The End of the World
Speaking of militant imagination, Jameson’s refrain, later popularized by Mark Fisher, according to which “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is supposed to mean that capitalism is so ponderous, ubiquitous and asphyxiating that it leaves no practical or poetic way out. Again Fisher: “Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” Here, however, I would like to dare an alternative interpretation: the end of the world is easy to imagine because it is about the future as a mode of the present, that is, what is more or less linearly extrapolable from a non-estranged present. The end of capitalism, difficult or perhaps impossible to imagine, is instead the new, the other, that which is perhaps even already here but has not yet emerged as a recognizable figure. And it is not necessarily a beautiful figure: McKenzie Wark, for example, wonders if something worse awaits us.
The “end of the world” is an all-too-simple exercise since it does not unsettle the present: it can be traced back to all the utopias and dystopias we have seen first in the movies and then on Netflix. To put it succinctly, the future is inflated. Instead, the factory of the new is almost completely unbeknown to us. But if that is the case, what good is imagination to us? Imagination is not so much useful to envision the future, possible or not, but to estrange the present. We need not to imagine, but to see beyond, as in an autostereogram where to be able to see the shark’s silhouette we have to squint our eyes. More than imagination, then, we need something like far-sightedness: we need to gaze beyond the veil of the present into the present. To do so, we need a place to exercise this vision, namely, the past, but we need to structure it so that it gives us the right momentum in our time – we need to reinvent it. After all, that is what science fiction always tries to do, even when it talks about 4272 AD. This is very evident in those stories that, while involving aliens and flying cars, seem so blatantly 1950s to us. In Ballard’s words:
Consciousness is nothing more than a passage between a dying order, the past, and an impending order, the future, in a world in which even the people who are closest to us are in many ways foreign to us – even the beings we love are strangers.
Hatred
A case of estrangement from the present that is dear to me is that of William Morris, among the protagonists of the Arts and Crafts movement. Together with his mentor John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Morris cast an alienating gaze on his own time, observing the ugly, dirty and inhuman London of Dickens, his contemporary, as if he were a man catapulted, by some unknown curse, from the Middle Ages into the Victorian Age. “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization”, Morris reflected in 1894. He was, in short, a romantic; in fact, he gained notoriety first and foremost through endless epic poems that few remember today; establishing himself only later as the proto-designer craftsman everyone knows.
Up to this point one might think of a typical story of escapism, of a late nineteenth-century nerd who takes refuge in a fantasy world made of armets and broadswords. And indeed, realizing as much himself, that is, the melancholy impotence of his work, Morris falls into depression. What is the use of all the care embodied by a piece of furniture or a fabric if the wealthy class that can afford them continues to plague the world with their ignorance and hypocrisy, spreading squalor and brutality everywhere except within their own circles—and sometimes even there? Morris found the answer to this dilemma in Socialism, a political current that was minoritarian and marginal at the time, with very few adherents in the United Kingdom (Marx’s Capital had not yet been translated into English). The British proto-designer foresaw in Socialism the new, the other figure. But it is precisely through his foreign gaze, deeply anchored in a made-up Middle Ages, that Morris finds the footing to throw himself into the future. The lie of the past allows him to bring into focus the new that emerges.
The Good Death
“You have a great future behind you.” This bizarre admonishment opens Prophetic Culture, an essay in which Federico Campagna (who hits the nail on the head when he calls prediction “a kind of interior design of the future”) finds in the mythic lie the way out of an idiotic and now moribund modernity; a way out—it’s unfortunate to say—of ourselves. We are the past, and therefore it is not our task to imagine the future, but to offer the last testimony of our time, which, however, need not be literal or truthful; it need not be the chronicle of a failure, but—if it is to survive—must be marvelous and stunning, like William Morris’s Middle Ages. Campagna writes:
Whatever they might produce and however perfect their art might be, their only chance [a civilization has] of transmitting their story to a living ear is by being misinterpreted, misunderstood, taken apart, pillaged and recomposed. Even then, though, something shall remain faithful to the original voice that sung out a world and its time-segment – a genetic echo, still resounding in their distant offspring.
There can be no fertile use of imagination today that does not take into account the sad premise that the future is dead. This means that with it died our hopes and thus, in a sense, ourselves; that the new will not belong to us, that we will be alien to it. Indeed, we already are, because the new is already simmering below ground, and when the magma will submerge us it will be too late. Therefore, the most we can ask for is, as Campagna explains, another chance, hoping that someone will take it, not through the empty promise of a better future, but with “the concrete offer of a better past.” Only those who will be there to receive this offer will be able to say whether we have at least managed to achieve a good death.
Il futuro cementifica / La vita possibile / Qui la vista era incredibile / Da oggi è probabile / Che ciò che siamo stati non saremo più – Baustelle (The future cements / The possible life / Here the view was incredible / From today it is probable / That what we have been will be no more)