The Future as Stage, Not Subject

Too much future as marketing. Not enough future as thought or practice.

We have reached the point where the future is a stage name rather than a subject.

This week I came across a post promoting the Festival of Marketing. Among its attractions was a Future Marketer Stage, with discussions on better hiring experiences, changing senior marketing leadership and driving organisational change. All perfectly reasonable subjects. But where, exactly, is the future? Where are the emerging systems and structural disruptions, the alternative possibilities and the uncertainties that come with them? Where is the attempt to imagine a world sufficiently different from our own that it might require us to think differently?

Perhaps those conversations are happening elsewhere in the programme. Even so, the promotion captures something I have been thinking about for some time. The language of futurity has become detached from the practice of thinking about the future.

Everywhere we look, the future is being invoked. Future leaders, future consumers, future cities, future work, future everything. Conferences promise it, consultancies package it and organisations endlessly announce their readiness for it. Yet the more we talk about the future, the less capable we sometimes seem of imagining one.

A second example appeared the same week. A post about the Boardroom of the Future described how House of Hackney now symbolically makes room for past, present and future generations in its board meetings, alongside the interests of the natural world. The author was preparing to discuss what the boardroom of 2050 might look like.

This is a more interesting case. There is a genuine attempt here to extend the time horizon of decision-making beyond immediate commercial interests, and giving future generations a symbolic seat at the table is not meaningless. It challenges the assumption that only those who are present, powerful or immediately profitable deserve consideration. It also raises a further question. Are we investigating what the boardroom of 2050 might actually become, or expressing what we believe today’s boardroom ought to be? Both are legitimate activities, but they are not the same one.

That points to a distinction between three increasingly common uses of the future.

The future as a label. The word is attached to an event, initiative or conversation without materially changing its subject. It becomes a branding device, a promise of relevance, a way of making familiar concerns sound more important.

The future as an aspiration. Here the future stands for a preferred set of values or outcomes. We invoke future generations, better societies or more responsible institutions to encourage different behaviour today. This can be valuable, but aspiration on its own does not require us to examine how the world might actually change.

The future as a practice. Here the future becomes an object of sustained inquiry. We investigate emerging change, challenge our assumptions and explore how different futures might come about. Most importantly, we use that work to inform what we do in the present.

These categories are not mutually exclusive. A compelling aspiration can motivate serious futures practice, just as a well-named event can introduce people to genuinely challenging ideas. We should simply be careful not to mistake one for another.

This is where I find myself returning to the cultural critic Mark Fisher and his writing on the slow cancellation of the future. Fisher was concerned with a culture increasingly unable to produce genuinely new possibilities and condemned instead to recycle familiar forms. Today we may be witnessing a peculiar variation on that condition. The future hasn’t disappeared from our culture; if anything, it has become almost impossible to escape. But its proliferation as language may be concealing its disappearance as imagination.

We are surrounded by the signifiers of the future while being steadily deprived of the intellectual and imaginative practices that might help us engage with it.

There is something oppressive in this. We are constantly told to prepare for the future, adapt to it and become future-ready, yet we are rarely invited to ask which future, whose future, or whether we might want to create something different. The future becomes something to which we must respond, rather than something in which we might participate.

This is the paradox I explore in Too Much Future. We are overfed on other people’s visions of tomorrow and increasingly starved of opportunities to imagine our own. When even the word future becomes little more than a label attached to familiar conversations, something important is being lost.

Thinking about the future is a practice. It requires imagination and interrogation, a tolerance for uncertainty, a willingness to entertain alternatives and, ultimately, agency. It asks for more than rebranding the present in the future tense. And it must do more than produce attractive visions. Futures thinking becomes consequential when it changes what we notice, what we consider possible and, in the end, what we decide to do.

We don’t need more things called Future. We need more people actually practising futures thinking.

Too much future as marketing. Not enough future as thought. And certainly not enough as practice.