Too Much Future
Five Essays on the Age of Big Futurity
Tracey Follows 2026
What happens when a futurist begins to wonder whether we have too much future?
We are surrounded by predictions about what comes next. Governments, corporations, consultancies and artificial intelligence produce forecasts, scenarios and models of tomorrow on an industrial scale. Relentlessly circulated through mainstream media, digital platforms and institutional communications, these futures become more than predictions. They become the environment within which we understand what is possible.
I call this Big Futurity.
Too Much Future is the experience of living downstream of it: overfed on other people's futures, starved of our own.
In this short collection of five essays, I examine what happens to human imagination and agency when more and more of the future is produced, mediated and authorised elsewhere.
The five essays
1. Too Much Future — How the industrial production and circulation of futures can leave us with more predictions but less room to imagine our own.
2. Haunted Futures — Revisiting Mark Fisher's lost futures, and the difference between an abundance of predictions and an abundance of possibilities.
3. Four Conditions of Futurity — Introducing Authored, Outsourced, Invisible and Imposed as four ways of understanding our relationship to the futures being constructed around us.
4. Half an Hour of Future — A counter-practice to Big Futurity, drawing on my System & Self futures-thinking method to reclaim space for imagination and personal agency.
5. Premature Selfhood — Exploring what happens when technological systems begin anticipating, describing and shaping who we become.
These essays form part of my wider A System of Ideas, exploring technological change, futurity, identity and human agency.
At their centre is a proposition:
Every future is written between the system and the self.
Read Too Much Future
Download the complete PDF — free
This is a deliberately brief, 47-page collection, made available freely for reading, sharing and further discussion.
PDF edition ISBN: 978-1-0654934-0-2
Also available as a Kindle ebook.
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© 2026 Tracey Follows. Published by Futuremade Ltd.
Read Too Much Future
Download the complete PDF — free
This is a deliberately brief, 47-page collection, made available freely for reading, sharing and further discussion.
PDF edition ISBN: 978-1-0654934-0-2
Also available as a Kindle ebook.