The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. -- William Gibson
1 That the future is here but not evenly distributed, in Gibson's famous phrase, seems to me both profoundly true but also misconstrued.— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
2 First, it reminds us that the substance of "the future" and of the futurity it disavows exists in the present, opening onto next-presents.— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
3 Second, it alerts us that an uneven distribution of potential, of risk, of enjoyment is not incidental but essential to "the future":— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
4 "The Future" is when the privileged have always enjoyed their privileges, such as they are, and for them it has always already arrived.— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
5 Paradoxically, "The Future" is a dwelling place for incumbent-elites, the summit from which they survey the accumulating ruin of the past,— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
6 and it is to be noted how often predictions and transformations declaimed from that summit amount to plans for status quo amplification,— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
7 offering up reassurance, consolation, and self-congratulation to elite-incumbency peddled as progress, change, disruption, novelty, risk.— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
8 Futurity is the quality of openness -- political power qua potentia -- inhering in the plurality of stakeholders who share the world,— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
9 Like "The Future," the substance of futurity exists in the present, in the lived presence of a diversity of world-sharers, each of us...— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
10 ...testifying to different hopes and histories, soliciting different constituencies to different ends.— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
11 It is futurity that is disavowed in the funhouse mirror projections and moralizing parochialisms and instrumentalities of "The Future."— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
I added a few more points after sleeping on this twitter-essaylet:12 "The Future" is an reactionary repudiation of the *political power* of open futurity for instrumentalizing and moralizing counterfeits.— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
13 Added, and at the risk of belaboring my point: Gibson's aphorism is often misquoted by appending a "yet" at its end,— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
14 literalizing what is, I think, a common implicit misreading that renders it an exhortation to progress or, worse…— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
15 an expression of a futurological faith that "The Future" will one day be evenly distributed (New and Improved, just you wait).— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
16 But I read Gibson's aphorism as an observation and as a warning: "uneven distribution" "here" is indispensable to "The Future."— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
17 This is because, I would say, the struggle for sustainable equity-in-diversity is indispensably a matter of political struggles,— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
18 while "The Future" forecloses the open futurity and publicity in which the struggles of the political (and the rhetorical) are staged.— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
19 (Added, I'm teaching a class next Spring, "For Futurity" which I am thinking through at the moment, so the topic is very much on my mind,— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
20 especially the puzzle of reconciling my decades-long anti-futurist critique with the inspirational provocations of Afro-Futurism.)— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2016
As usual, these observations turn out to owe rather more to Hannah Arendt than they do to William Gibson, but the provocation of the turn of phrase is his for good.
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