future captured
In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels write a passage called the ‘Critical Utopian Socialists’ which I think maybe every designer should read. They write that “to realise all these castles in the air, they [the utopian socialists] are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois” and only create these fantasmatic images of the future which have no material effect. For me that is the perfect indictment of Dunne & Raby’s work and others that uphold the speculative banner. They do interesting thought experiments that try to make us think differently, to invoke conversations around what the future will look like. Post-fossil fuels, etcetera. But what is the actual effect of that beyond conversations that are probably already happening elsewhere in less nicely designed contexts? That’s the future captured and constrained in a very capitalistic way. I don’t know. It’s very difficult to talk about the future and the present when we’re discussing things that are on the cutting edge of the present. What I find really frustrating is when people cast an idea out into the future and make potentially interesting work ineffective. Recently, a bot trading on a currency platform saw the headline “If Theresa May wants a hard Brexit she’ll get one”. The bot missed the nuance of that, started selling loads of sterling and tanked the price by six percent. That does have an effect on us. That happened a year ago. If we’re always in this context of technological breakthroughs looking to the future, and thinking about disasters that could happen in the future, we miss out on the ones that are already happening right now.
source: http://content-free.net/articles/distributed













