What if our imagination of the future mostly rehearses the present?

Although Futures Thinking may seem vague and speculative, I have found it to be a useful, creative way to explore novel ideas, moving beyond the predictable and, at times, questioning our belief systems and common sense. If Design Thinking is mostly a tactical tool for solving tangible problems, then Futures Thinking is its strategic, creative sibling. Its scale and scope are larger: we scan for weak signals, imagine distant futures, and explore multiple, conflicting scenarios. We experiment with storytelling formats and genres to stretch imagination.

But lately, doubt has crept in.

Despite all the talk of “futures literacy” and “radical imagination,” Futures Thinking often gets used to reduce complexity to a semblance of clarity and, ultimately, to suggest a more linear path from the present to a “preferred” future. In other words, it recruits creativity to navigate more safely into the future. It is reducing complexity to one-dimensional, operational certainty.

Design theorist Silvio Lorusso makes a related claim in “Late Futurism: The Future as a Mode of the Present.” He argues that what we call “the future” is too often just a mode already contained in the present. “Why does the future roll out like a carpet from the present?” he asked at a Copenhagen talk last month. And: “Is it possible for futurists to imagine a preferable future without the futurist who imagines it – or one in which the company employing the futurist actually fails?”

We are so deeply sedimented in the modes of the present – our worldviews and capitalistic structures – that even when we believe we are imagining beyond them, we often reinforce the very walls that surround us. Consider the futures we’re constantly sold by our techno‑feudal overlords like Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk, Thiel, etc. Whether AI dystopias/utopias, self‑driving vehicles, space colonization, or something else there is something naïve and childish about these visions, as if they were frozen in the 1980s imaginations that shaped their youth. Our futures have lost their alterity.

Here Lorusso’s distinction helps: the future is extrapolative, while the new is unforeseeable alterity, the emerging, uncontrollable other.

If we follow this line, the task is not to speculate about “the future,” but to explore the cracks and crevices of the present, and the histories that led to our moment in time, estranging them so that alterity can emerge.

This sends me in two directions.

First, to Critical Theory and Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, and how the historian’s task should be to explore what history hides in its shadow:

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. 
(Walter Benjamin “On the Concept of History,” VII)

If we want futures literacy that moves beyond the tropes of dystopia and utopia, we must destabilize and reimagine the present and the histories that deliver us here. To preserve the possibility of utopia, as Theodor W. Adorno once suggested, we must walk toward it with our backs turned away from the future, instead critically exploring and engaging with our present.

Second, to a long artistic tradition of indeterminacy and ambiguity. These practices do not map the future or turn complexity into clarity. Instead, they teach us how to stay with complexity as potential rather than threat.

Hans Christian Andersen shows how. He constantly strives for ambiguity, breaking the formulaic fairytale. At the end of “The Story of a Mother,” he first writes, “…and Death took her child and walked into the ever‑blossoming garden,” then scratches it out and replaces it with, “and Death took her child to the unknown land.” Through method and revision, he obscures false clarity – leaving us instead with the necessity and obligation to think for ourselves.

I believe there is a methodology to distill from great artists such as Andersen. Perhaps we should reject neat scenarios, simple storytelling, and structured “co‑creation” in favor of exploring how we could employ

– The defamiliarization in the plays of Brecht as a tool to question assumptions
– The sabotage of meaning in Dada as a way to explore chance and coincidence
– The practices of post-dramatic theatre as another way to practice co-creation
– The non-human agency through object dramaturgy as a way to change lens and perspective

The options are plentiful.

But they do imply a different futures literacy – one that doesn’t treat storytelling genres as a bridge from present to future, but as techniques for estranging the present. It also implies a different role for the futurist: less prophet or light‑bringer, more steward of uncertainty.

The truest vision of the future may be to leave it uncertain, turning us instead toward unearthing the complexity and potential of the present.

Now, what do you want? The false promise of the ever-blossoming garden or the obligation to stay with the trouble and the complexity of the here-and-now?