Guide to Future-Present Archetypes
By Adam Rothstein
Copyright/left 2013 Adam Rothstein
The six essays forming the core of the book
were originally published on Rhizome.org in 2012.
For more writing by and information about
Adam Rothstein, please visit POSZU.
Guide to Future Present Archetypes
by Adam Rothstein
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #1: The Spark
Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #2: Strange Attractors
Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #3: The Cyborg-Historical
Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #4: The Commodity Swarm
Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #5: Schematic Maps
Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #6: Critical Vulnerability
Coda
Introduction
To Table of Contents
It is common for a person asked seriously to predict what will happen in the future to first deride the question, claiming that no one, least of all themselves, could never do such a thing. Then, more often than not, they proceed to do just that. We all do this, every day. As we attempt to plan for a future a few days from day, we make firm plans, while at the same time admitting freely that no one really knows for sure if we’ll live to make that engagement.
I’d like to ask people to predict the present day. I don’t mean asking them to guess about things that have happened elsewhere without their knowledge. I would like to ask knowledgeable people to predict what it is about today that we’ll remember later. It’s really the same question, in my opinion. It involves a continuum of history, a valuation of particular patterns by minting them into epochal events, and a loose cause-and-effect framework that we use to make sense of the complicated networks of society and culture that we have built for ourselves. The question is: what is history? Not in a meta, historiological way. What will be the literal substance of history? Who will record it, who will read it, and what will it mean to them?
When I set out to talk to a group of smart people about the evolving pace of technology and our cultural fascination with this evolution, they probably didn’t know that I was asking a question about history. I sure as hell didn’t know that I was asking them this. But after reading through their responses to my questions about technology, progress, human nature, cultural valuation, excitement, entertainment, creativity, power, fashion, cognitive bias, belief, and many other subjects, I realized that the real question was about what elements of the present we think will play a part in our future history. I started calling this domain the “Future-Present”--for all the ways in which it signified what our history might look like, and for all the ways this vision was wholly about our present state of existence. I was very excited by the material I had collected from these folks, but I wasn’t sure how to synthesize it into a useable form.
Luckily, Joanne McNeil, the editor I worked with at Rhizome.org, was as excited by the material as I was. She gave me the venue in which I could tease out this material, and find what was so powerful about it. I found six main themes, each of which I represented by a particular archetype, corresponding to a facet of our technological development and of the constitution of the “Future-Present”. With Joanne sage editorial assistance, I was able to craft these participants’ collected responses into six essays, one for each theme and archetype. They are:
The Spark: LEDs, and what fascinates us about new technology.
Strange Attractors: Neodymium magnets, and the relationship between technology and magic.
The Cyborg-Historical: Cyborgs, and how our existence folds into a homeostatic relationship with our history.
The Commodity Swarm: Drones, and their emblematic position on the cutting edge of our commodity cosmology.
Schematic Maps: Mapping glitches, and how they map our abilities and inabilities schematize terrains.
Critical Vulnerability: Zero-Day vulnerabilities, and how their development and trade relates to our ability to critically analyze our omnipresent technology.
I am pleased to assemble these six essays together here, as they were originally published on Rhizome.org. I have only undertaken minor edits of the original text, and added this introduction, and a brief coda at the end.
My thanks goes out to my five informants, without whom this series would not exist. They are:
Eleanor Saitta
Deb Chachra
Geoff Manaugh
Chris Arkenberg
Bruce Sterling
Also, special, immense thanks to Joanne McNeil for helping this series take place, and for her amazing patience and invaluable editing guidance throughout the writing process.
Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #1: The Spark
To Table of Contents
It is the 21st Century, and history has delivered us into a time when aerial swarms of hypertextual futurist essays sling bombshell proclamations down upon us, guided down the invisible path of a laser beam. With each new detonation our grounding worldview shakes with tectonic intensity, as what we have always known as “the future” is driven to critical fission when hitting the present. Behold, this new technology: the “Future-Present”: where our dreams collide with reality. There is no fantastical World of Tomorrow, and there is no reality in which we know the real from the imagined. There is only the waking dream of the categories’ simultaneous coexistence. In this world, cities explode, the network sings like razor wire, a caustic, aerosolized powder rises up from pavement beneath our feet, people wearing masks shout instructions over our heads. The dream is still going on, a double exposure of ideas over impact weapons. It is difficult to say whether we are excited, or terrified, or bored, or confused. But we understand this, don’t we? We must say we understand this. There is no one else that could understand this, other than us. What would it mean, if no one understood the future?
As a writer working in this domain of the Future-Present, I try to understand and provide some tools to help others understand. What I end up with often seems to be more speculative-fiction travel-writing of the onrushing future than any specific theory. It may be that there is no specific theory of the future, or the present, or the Future-Present. Would this be so bad? The world and the people who live in it will no doubt get along okay without a theory. And as for myself, there are worse things I could do with my time than selling a bit of tourist pageantry.
It is an ethnographic obsession that causes me to continue trying to push my writing about the Future-Present to crack open that fantasy and expose its inner functions, rather than just collecting gigs of digital images to be slowly leaked to a photo stream, if not archived forever, their pixelated light unviewed. “Understanding” is a 20th Century political goal — the stuff of party platforms and the unidimensional databases of ideology. This desire for the categorical, I reject as futile and debilitating. But there is other work to be done. I see the pieces, and my hands reach out to them upon the table, unable to resist the urge to experiment. The pieces are like divination cards, or other lateral thinking aids. A divination card is cheap, easy to grasp, and recyclable. They can be put down on any surface, flipped, picked back up, and shuffled around. The Future-Present is a series of weak signals, gut reactions, and uncanny fascinations, laid out into sketches and short blurbs, printed on an esoteric deck of cards. Understanding is not what one does with such objects. But the mind wants to make connections, to shuffle, and draw. The reality of not understandi
ng is the necessity of continuing to think.
I don’t have any sibylline proclivities. Hell, I don’t even believe in that sort of thing. But this is not the sort of thing that one needs to believe in to make it functional. One needs networks, words, and a willingness to take notes. I don’t have the skills to channel the Future-Present. But I type fairly fast. And I have access to a network, through which I’ve reached some acquaintances from the nodes, asking their assistance. Not just any acquaintances either, but to my mind, some of the top minds working with the material of the Future-Present today. Their credentials are impressive, but what really drew me to them is their ability to use words. Through their expressed ideas, they provide the raw material of the Future-Present, insofar as we can identify it at all. We conversed, over email and telephony, and I asked them leading questions that I thought might stimulate them to produce the good stuff.
What they gave me was larger than any one particular vision of the Future-Present, or any scenario of human interaction with technology. Through these conversations for which I was the unlikely routing point, a sense of the question itself emerged. The question could be asked in any number of insufficient phrasings, and I stumbled through a great number of them during the process. What is the future? Why are we so interested in the future? How do we plan for what is unpredictable? What is so much more intriguing about particular future