Haunted Futures

Why the Future Feels Both Lost and Overproduced

What if the problem is not that we have too many futures, but too few genuinely different ones?

Mark Fisher wrote about a culture that seemed to have lost its future. His concern was not simply that people had grown pessimistic about what came next. It was more unsettling. Something had happened to our capacity to imagine a future that felt genuinely different from the present.

Fisher observed this loss in culture. Music recycled earlier forms, fashion returned to previous decades, and architecture carried the ghosts of futures that had been promised but never arrived. The cultural landscape was haunted by what he called lost futures: possibilities that once seemed imminent and then quietly disappeared.

Hauntology, the term he borrowed from Derrida and made his own, captured the strange temporality of this condition. We were not simply nostalgic for the past. We were nostalgic for the futures the past once expected to have.

The future had become a ghost.

Read today, that diagnosis poses a problem. It is hard to argue that we lack future. If anything, we are drowning in it.

Governments publish forecasts on economies, populations and climate. Consultancies produce the future of work, of mobility, of healthcare. Technology companies anticipate the future of artificial intelligence, think tanks model geopolitics, and financial markets price tomorrow's expectations into today. Insurers model risk, platforms predict behaviour, and algorithms anticipate what we will want, click or buy next.

Generative AI adds something new again: machines that do not merely predict possible futures but produce them on demand. Ask for ten scenarios and you have them in seconds. Ask for fifty and you have those too.

The future, it seems, has returned with a vengeance.

So how can Fisher's lost future coexist with what I have been calling Too Much Future?

I have come to think they are not opposites at all.

In fact, they may be consecutive stages of the same problem.

From no future to futures everywhere

Fisher described a condition of cultural exhaustion.

The future no longer arrived as something new. Instead we found ourselves surrounded by repetition, revival and recombination.

Too Much Future begins somewhere else, with what might be called anticipatory saturation: the vast expansion of forecasts, scenarios, models and predictions into everyday life.

The contrast is stark. Fisher's problem was the apparent absence of alternative futures; ours is a surplus of them, generated continuously. Where he saw nostalgia and repetition, we experience prediction and pre-emption. The future he described had gone missing from culture. Today it is utterly embedded in systems.

His condition was no future. Ours is futures everywhere.

Yet there is a deeper link. Fisher's condition involved a loss of imagination. Whereas, I would argue, ours involve a loss of authorship. We have moved from imagining the future, to losing it, to having it imagined for us.

That is a very different kind of futurity.

Many forecasts, few futures

There is another reason the contradiction between Fisher and Too Much Future may be deceptive. Perhaps we do not have an abundance of different futures at all, only an abundance of predictions about a surprisingly narrow one.

Look closely at contemporary forecasting and the same assumptions keep recurring. More computation, more data, more AI. More personalisation and optimisation. More modelling, more prediction, more legibility. Whether a forecast is utopian or dystopian, the underlying coordinates rarely change. The arguments concern whether these developments will be good or bad, fast or slow, empowering or oppressive. Far less often do they question whether the trajectory itself is inevitable.

This is where Fisher's diagnosis returns. What looks like an excess of futures may conceal a shortage of futurity. We can have thousands of forecasts without thousands of genuinely different ideas about how people might live. We can have more scenarios and less imagination, more prediction and less openness.

The future can multiply without becoming more plural, if you get my drift

That difference matters because Too Much Future is not the same as too much imagination. Indeed, it may be the reverse: the industrial production of ever more detailed versions of a small number of anticipated worlds.

The industrialisation of futurity

This is why I describe Too Much Future as something more serious than a proliferation of futurists or predictions.

What we are witnessing is closer to the industrialisation of futurity.

The future is becoming something organisations produce systematically. There are methodologies for it, data pipelines, models, software and entire professional disciplines. And the future is no longer produced merely to help us think. It is produced in order to act.

A credit model anticipates whether someone will repay. An insurance model anticipates the probability of a claim. A recommender system anticipates what someone might want. A workforce model anticipates performance, and a predictive health system anticipates illness.

In each case the future enters the present as an active force. Prediction changes what happens. The map begins to act on the territory it describes.

For much of the history of foresight, the future was an object of contemplation. We explored it to prepare ourselves for uncertainty. Now futures are not simply contemplated. They are operationalised. And once a future becomes operational, the line between anticipating an outcome and helping to produce it becomes harder to see.

When prediction becomes pre-emption

This is where Too Much Future becomes a question of agency. The problem is not that someone has predicted what might happen. It is that predictions now shape what becomes possible.

If a system predicts that I am a poor credit risk, that imagined future affects my access to money now. If a system flags an area as high risk, that expectation shapes how resources and scrutiny are distributed. If an algorithm predicts what I will watch, read or buy, its anticipation becomes part of the environment in which my preferences then develop.

The system’s model of my future gets there before I do.

Traditionally, we imagined futures in order to make better decisions in the present. Now predictive systems make decisions in the present on the basis of futures they have imagined about us. The future acquires causal power.

Which leads to what may be the central paradox linking Fisher's lost futures with Too Much Future:

A future can be foreclosed by having no alternatives. It can also be foreclosed by having every alternative pre-modelled for you.

Fisher's subject faced a world in which nothing else seemed possible. Today's subject faces a world in which everything seems already forecast, scored and scenario-planned. The mechanism differs, but the foreclosure is much the same.

The outsourced future

This also changes where futurity resides. Imagining the future was once something people did. Now much of that work is outsourced: to experts, corporations, governments, markets and, more and more, to machines.

None of this means expertise or modelling is undesirable. It means we should notice what happens when the capacity to anticipate is concentrated elsewhere. The future shifts from something I take part in imagining to something presented to me as an external object. The forecast says this will happen. The model says that. The algorithm says this is what someone like me will probably do next.

At some point a subtle transformation occurs. The future moves from being authored to being received.

Perhaps this is the twenty-first-century version of Fisher's problem: not the disappearance of the future, but the disappearance of ourselves from its production.

The forms of Too Much Future

This is why I have become interested in the different forms Big Futurity takes.

There is the outsourced future, in which someone else does the work of imagining what comes next. There is the big future, made of vast civilisational narratives about AI, climate or geopolitics, whose scale dwarfs any meaningful sense of individual agency. There is the invisible future, operating inside models and systems whose assumptions we may never see. There is the imposed future, where predictions constrain what is available to us in the present. And there is the foreclosed future, in which anticipation becomes so persuasive that one possibility starts to look inevitable.

These are not separate futures so much as different relationships with futurity. What they share is the possibility that the future happens to us before it happens for us.

The problem of scale

This is also why the answer to Too Much Future cannot simply be more foresight. Producing ever more forecasts, scenarios and speculative artefacts may only deepen the condition. If the future already feels overwhelming, another fifty scenarios will not restore agency. They may diminish it further.

That thought sits behind a companion idea I have been developing: Half an Hour of Future.

Half an Hour of Future starts from a deliberately different scale. Not the future of civilisation, not 2050 or 2100, not another global scenario. Just half an hour. What happens if we shrink the scale of futurity until it becomes something the self can inhabit again?

This is not an argument against long-term thinking. It is an argument for recovering a relationship with the future in which anticipation does not automatically belong to systems with greater computational, institutional or imaginative resources than our own. A human-scale future: one we can still enter, alter, reject, desire and author.

After the lost future

Fisher's work remains powerful because he recognised what happens when people stop believing things could genuinely be otherwise. But our predicament has changed.

The future did come back, just not in the form we expected.

It returned as forecasts, models and recommendations. It returned as an industry, inside systems. And more and more, it’s appeared before we can even contemplate it.

So perhaps the opposition between lost futures and Too Much Future is false. Both can exist at once. We can be surrounded by predictions while starved of possibility. We can know more about what is likely to happen while feeling less able to influence what happens next.

The danger is not simply that we have lost the future. It is that we may have replaced imagination with prediction.

If that is true, the question for foresight changes. It is no longer only which futures are possible, but who is imagining them, who is acting on them, and whether the people who will have to live inside them retain any authorship at all.

Perhaps the immediate task is not to produce more future.

Perhaps it is to take some of it back.