Future

In which Rat thinks about the present

Good time of day, humans!

The great American philosopher Yogi Berra reportedly once said:

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future¹.

It hasn’t kept humans (and rodents) from trying.

Rat might however be missing larger scheme of things here. The present does not make sense simply because the present rarely makes sense at all. Sensemaking is an iterative process, and it takes some time to arrange new facts into a coherent picture, get rid of the inconvenient ones, and plaster some fiction over the narrative holes – to come up with a perspective (or several) that makes sense.

Futurologists (or futurists – when did they take logos out of it, by the way?) try to frontrun the process; in doing so, they’re trying to make sense of events too early. If you take this into account, for example, Alvin Toffler might have done rather well. (I might have to read The Third Wave once again though, it’s been thirty years since I first read it.)

Even comedy has been quite successful. We always notice discrepancies such as lack of hoverboards from Back to the Future but gloss over, for example, the scene of «firing by fax» which was rather an absurd idea in 1985 but is close to a norm nowadays. BTTF also successfully extrapolated that junk mail will persist regardless of technological change (although «junk fax» was already a thing in the 1980s).

Does all this make sense? If not, it might be too early, especially for a Monday morning. *wanders off to get another coffee*

1. This phrase has been attributed to numerous people, Quote Investigator has more on the topic.