Two Lights at Sea

This is the favorite anecdote of one of the World Future Society's longtime members, Marvin Cetron, who led off a speech or two with it:

Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather off the California coast for several days. As night fell, the captain noticed the patchy fog and decided to remain on the bridge.

Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, "Light. Bearing on the starboard bow."

"Is it steady or moving astern?" the captain asked.

The lookout replied, "Steady, captain," which meant the battleship was on a collision course with the other ship.

The captain called to the signalman, "Signal that ship. You are on a collision course. Advise you alter course 20 degrees."

Back came the answering signal, "Advisable that you change course 20 degrees."

The captain said, "Send another message. I am a senior captain. Change course 20 degrees."

"I am a seaman second class," came the reply, "Change your course at once."

The officer was furious. He spat out, "We are a battleship squadron. Change your course 20 degrees."

The flashing light replied, "I am a lighthouse." The squadron changed course.

[Attributed to Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, via Lighthouse Prose.]


Lesson: Know which light you are, and which light you're looking at. Be prepared to change course.

Back to the Futurists at the Movies

We're now just a couple of years away from the 2015 imagined in Back to the Future Part II (BTTF-II), and I'm ashamed to admit that I hadn't seen the movie (directed by Robert Zemeckis, co-written with Bob Gale)  since it first hit theaters in 1989. So I spent another weekend watching yet another sci-fi marathon, including the third installment of this popular trilogy. Perhaps my biggest shame: that I had never seen Part III until last weekend.

Arguably the biggest deal about sci-fi visions of the future is the flying car issue. BTTF-II gave us aerial traffic that looked a lot like the ground-based traffic we still have today. I did like the story's use of VTOL technology, though I do question how they imagined the engineers of the future could make these vehicles so quiet. The hoverboard was pure trend extrapolation; sadly there is little in the way of supermagnetic personal mobility at the consumer level just yet.

BTTF trilogy fans still entertain themselves with discussions of this past vision of the future we're approaching, but I take these films more or less at face value. They're entertainments. The special effects are there to show off the skills of special-effects departments, led by the awe-inspiring work of Industrial Light & Magic, the offspring of director George Lucas (one of the few movie makers who can truly be called a futurist).

What caught my eye at the end of BTTF-II was the listing of several "future consultants" in the credits. At IMDb, these eight individuals are lumped in with personal assistants, dog trainers, caterers, and body doubles under the category "Other Crew."

These "futurists" comprise an assortment of visual artists, including Mike Scheffe, the "construction coordinator" for the BTTF deLorean (the time machine), and hair and makeup designer Kerry Warn, whose other film credits include turning screen goddess Nicole Kidman into Virginia Woolfe for her Academy Award winning performance in The Hours.

This might be what real futurists do best--envision and present a visually realistic image of what the future may look and feel like.

The real futuring work in the film is less flashy than the holographic billboard for the 19th sequel of Jaws. It has to do with the existence not just of alternative scenarios, but of alternative realities. At any point when Biff or Marty or Doc could go back to the past to alter the linear path of the future, it created a new outcome and a new reality. But it did not (as happened in the original BTTF) erase the previous reality.

There's your solution to the time travel paradox: Not just multiple, but infinite universes.

And one more thing BTTF-II got terribly right: Any scenario in which a Donald Trump-like entity (to wit, rich Biff) has created a massively vulgar, decadent, and dissolute world is by definition a dystopia (see also the non-George Bailey scenario of "Pottersville" in It's a Wonderful Life).



Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST. Her opinions on sci-fi, physics, politics, and entertainment are strictly her own.

All I Know about Marketing I Learned Watching RCA and American Idol F*ck Up Clay Aiken's Career

Let me caveat this by saying I have no background in either music or marketing. But I have a lot of opinions and a little parable.

When RCA (unwillingly, I suppose) signed up Clay Aiken, he had just wowed the world and won American Idol (almost) in May 2003. I give the marketers credit for knowing they had to release a single from him almost immediately in order to leverage the buzz.

So, rather than forcing Clay to hold off recording until after the winner, Ruben Studdard, had recorded something, AI and/or RCA took both performers' "wow" songs and released them to the music-buying public (ignoring the fact that their real audience was TV viewers, not music lovers - prelude to the F*ck ups to come).

In Clay's case, the AI-mandated "winner's anthem" was "This Is the Night" (an original), but the wow song was "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (a standard that he made his own).

The wow song should have been the single released to radio, but it wasn't. F*ck up number one.

To make matters worse, the recorded version of BOTW tried to improve on Clay's perfect live performance by making it more grandiose. The engineers seem to have added more layers of the background choir on top of Clay's brilliant glorious power note, which had left everyone gasping for breath. On the recording, that note was buried. F*ck up number two.

By the time RCA had to work a full-length album out of Clay, they probably had an idea that they were not dealing with the next Justin Timberlake, but that didn't stop them from trying to make him into one. The marketing department got him lots of Tiger Beat and 16-Magazine type photoshoots, bleaching out his nerdy, small-town smart-ass charm and playfulness into something kind of artificial and creepy. F*ck up number three.

Short-term success of that approach got Clay millions of album sales for Measure of a Man, but the product was packaged in layers of over-engineered boy-band pop and largely disposable tunes that, a few years later, Clay himself would forget even recording. F*ck up number four.

All this time, RCA let Clay's true audience be marginalized and even ridiculed. The enthusiasm and fervor came from a demographic that RCA frankly didn't want: older women who are not perceived as cool. RCA wanted Justin Timberlake fans to buy Clay Aiken music, but it let Clay's natural audience bear the ridicule of being branded as "crazy blue-haired Claymates." F*ck up number five.

Actually, another natural audience for Clay was also discounted: Children. In 2003-04, the perception of being gay (Clay did not come out publicly until 2008, though he was "out" to the industry) was still unjustly associated with being a child molester. It didn't help when late-night comedians like Conan were telling exactly those kinds of insensitive jokes and inviting their own audiences to revile a good man. RCA should have stepped up to the plate and protected its product. F*ck up number six.

I remember standing in the electronics department of Walmart one evening when a promotion for Clay's 2006 album, A Thousand Different Ways, came on the flat screens of a dozen shiny TVs: I watched two tiny hyperactive tots come to a serene stop, mezmerized by Clay's soothing voice. If RCA had chosen to leverage Clay's appeal to the toddler demographic, he could have had his own children's show like his hero Mister Rogers or even an uplifting animated series like Fat Albert. F*ck up number seven.

I'm only counting the ones I remember off the top of my head; there are many many more, including the way Clay's Christmas TV special in 2004 was produced, which again engineered all of the personality and charm out of Clay Aiken's performances.

RCA wasn't the only f*ck up here. Decca tried to mold Clay to the PBS crowd, which it too thought it had a handle on with models like Michael Buble to apply. But in editing the TV special, which was even filmed in Clay's own hometown, they stripped the snark, the teasing, the twinkle out of their product. And they couldn't overcome the "Clay Aiken's a joke and so are his fans" tarnish that had built up from RCA's mismanagement--even in their own marketing staff, who tweeted that they couldn't believe they had to promote this guy.

I did say this was a parable and that I learned something about marketing from what I observed.

Marcus Aurelius told us to understand the thing in itself. What is "its" nature? Marketers have to understand both their product and its audience. You may be gaga over Lady Gaga, but if you've got Clay Aiken to sell, don't expect to attract the little monsters. (I'm generalizing, of course; there are a great many Gaga fans among Claymates. So why not the reverse?)

I bring this up now because my organization is trying to revamp its marketing strategy. I was told yesterday that our older members don't count. They're the "chicken and greenbeans" people. They are not cool, and they are not the "future" of our organization.

I totally disagree. From one perspective, yes, young people are the future. But younger people, while they are young, typically have no loyalty, no time, no perspective, no attention span, and no money. Our membership base skews older because they have matured and grown into our market. They have loyalty, time, an attention span, and perspective; before they retire, they have money, too.

The problem with going after what's cool is that it changes, and often very quickly. You chase it, catch it for a moment, and it evaporates. I prefer warmth, sincerity, integrity. Our organization can offer that. We can be the steady light in a stormy sea. We may be viewed as nerds by the general public, just as Clay and his Claymates are, but we've got something real and valuable and well worth offering.

Another metaphor, and then I'll let it go. Marketers see a hot trend in gold prices, so they go panning for gold. I will just tell you not to throw out the emeralds, diamonds, and other gems in your pan just because you don't know how to market them.

The last caveat: The opinions I express are my own.

Burying Fukushima?

On solutions to the nuclear crisis in Japan: If the decision is made to entomb the entire Fukushima complex, as has been most recently recommended by physicist Michio Kaku, at least one constituency needs to be informed: The future.

In the 1990s, the concern among American nuclear physicists was over nuclear waste and how to warn future generations of its existence. What signage would be required? What barbed-wire fence would last for 10,000 years?

From "The 10,000-Year Warning: Alerting Future Civilizations about Our Nuclear Waste" by Gary Kliewer, in the September-October 1992 issue of THE FUTURIST:

"How could you label Pandora's box so that on one would mess with it for 10,000 years?

"The U.S. Department of Energy recently asked a panel of experts to design a marking system that would warn people against digging into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeastern New Mexico, where radioactive materials from U.S. nuclear defense operations will be permanently entombed. The markers need to last as long as the danger, and this waste will pose a threat to human health for 300 generations.

...

"The panel confronted a number of challenging questions: How do yoo make a sign that will never fade away? What languages do you use? What surface do you write the message on? How do you relay a clear message to an audience so distant in time that you cannot know its culture, politics, level of technology, or religion?"

One of the answers to those questions drew from ancient wisdom: using symbols like the hieroglyphics carved in Eygptian pyramids, so the messages would convey our warnings pictorially.

Kliewer wrote:

"By setting down in granite symbols the contradictory messages of the creative and destructive powers of our technology, perhaps we are leaving a far better message in the desert than we intend. Our descendants will see that we, a civilization lost in their distant past, cared for their safety. Perhaps they will also see that we understood both the natural world and our place in it. Our warning will imply the hope that they too will look ahead for the well-being of their descendants."

-----

Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST.

The Futurist Playlist

Music can express ideas and feelings both through the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies that evoke passions and through the words that distill complex thought into poetry.

The future has been the subject of awe, fear, hope, cynicism, and inspiration, reflecting our changing relationship with what may be ahead.

So here I humbly submit the Futurist Playlist, a collection of 20 tunes (available for download from Amazon.com), and a few thoughts on why these songs were selected.

View the Futurist Playlist at Amazon.com, Permalink: http://amzn.com/l/RAFLG976G73DS

01 Also Sprach Zarathustra (aka, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Composed by Richard Strauss in 1896, this theme gave the idea of the future a sense of grandeur in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the dawn of the space age, it was time for humanity to look back upon its history and ahead to its potential with equal parts of humility and hope.

02 The Times They Are a-Changin’ (written and performed by Bob Dylan)

Bob Dylan’s 1964 release gave voice to the civil rights and war protest movements of the early 1960s, inspiring all who questioned authority and defied the status quo. The driving force for the changes Dylan described was the younger generation, and the song advises the adults not to stand in their way:

Your old road is
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

03 A Change Is Gonna Come (written and performed by Sam Cooke)

More specifically focused on the changes in race relations, Sam Cooke’s 1963 piece is more personal than Dylan’s.

It's been a long
Long time comin'
But I know a change gonna come
Oh yes it will

But compare Cooke’s mournful optimism with the self-actualizing anger in Curtis Mayfield’s Future Shock.

04 Future Shock (written and performed by Curtis Mayfield)

(Warning, some language may be deemed objectionable by some listeners.) In 1973, an addition to concerns about civil rights and war came from the “future shock” of environmental degradation. Curtis Mayfield urged us not to “dance” but to take active control:

We got to stop all men
From messing up the land
When won't we understand
This is our last and only chance

05 In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus) (written by Rick Evans and performed by Denny Zager and Rick Evans)

Written in 1964 but not released until 1968, this song judges the very long-term prospects for humankind, as technological tampering begins to assert itself in the cultural landscape. “In the year 6565,” they warn:

You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube

06 Imagine (written and performed by John Lennon)

Throughout history, culture feels the pulse of trends and countertrends, so this playlist reflects both pessimism and optimism. Of the latter sentiment, perhaps the most inspiring example I can imagine is John Lennon's Imagine, from 1971:

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world …

07 Space Oddity (written and performed by David Bowie)

We return to the theme of space exploration as the emblematic destination of the human future. David Bowie’s recording coincided with the U.S. lunar landing in 1969, but gave it a personal touch with “Major Tom." Bowie also gave a wink to the celebrity culture surrounding the astronauts of the era:

This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You've really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear

For better or worse, the future now belonged to popular culture; compare the de-glamorization of the astronaut life in Elton John’s follow-up to Bowie, Rocket Man.

08 Rocket Man (written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, performed by Elton John)

Though I tend to think this song is more about drug use than anything else (“Zero hour nine a.m., and I'm gonna be high as a kite by then”), the song was allegedly inspired by Bernie Taupin’s sighting of a shooting star. However, the 1971 song illustrates how quickly the future’s heroes became mundane to the general public:

And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week

09 Tomorrow (from the musical Annie, music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin; performed by Andrea McArdle)

An anthem for the hopelessly hopeful, the congenitally uncynical, this scrappy little bit of American inspiration from 1977 was an oasis in the encroaching deserts of globalizing competition.

Just thinkin’ about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
’Til there’s none!

10 In the Future (written by Ron Mael and performed by Sparks)

For, despite Little Orphan Annie’s cheerful confidence in Tomorrow, society was growing increasingly skeptical of what futurists had been perceived as promising. In this 1975 song, one can almost hear the writer adding, “Yeah, right” after:

The sweep and the grandeur
The scope and the laughter
The future, the future
The future's got it covered
With what will be discovered

11 Road to Nowhere (written by David Byrne, performed by Talking Heads)

A decade later, the cynicism was considerably more overt:

They can tell you what to do
But they'll make a fool of you …
We're on a road to nowhere

12 The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades (written by Pat MacDonald, performed by Timbuk 3)

Like many people hearing this song, I mistook its upbeat flavor for a bright outlook expressed by a young scientist. Superficial research (i.e., Wikipedia) reveals the writer’s view of a more-sinister future during the height of the Cold War: the brightness of nuclear holocaust being the inducement for wearing shades.

Well I'm heavenly blessed and worldly wise
I'm a peeping-tom techie with x-ray eyes

13 Don’t Worry, Be Happy (written and performed by Bobby McFerrin)

Another tick of the countertrend metronome back toward optimism--or numbing complacency, some may argue. The 1988 song is said (by Wikipedia) to have been inspired by late Indian sage Meher Baba, and its laid-back, breezy Caribbean vibe offers a soothing balm against the stresses of the time.

In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry you make it double

14 Year 3000 (written by James Bourne and performed by Busted)

By 2002, pop culture seems to have shrugged off the futurists’ “promises” but embraced the fantasy and fun of such films as Back to the Future, which inspired these lyrics.

I took a trip to the year 3000
This song had gone multi-platinum
Everybody bought our seventh album
It had outsold Michael Jackson

A few years later, popular boy band the Jonas Brothers covered Year 3000, substituting Kelly Clarkson (of American Idol) for the Michael Jackson reference in the lyric.

15 The Futurist (written by Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Hudson and performed by Robert Downey Jr.)

Okay, this is just my opinion, but I suspect Robert Downey Jr. titled this song and his album The Futurist to get my attention. :) It worked. I just don’t see what the song really has to do with the future. But he has a lot of fans, and I hope our including The Futurist on the Futurist Playlist will get their attention. After all, the future is now about social networking, right?


That said, I will give RDJ credit for keeping a personal perspective on the future, as the song is about commitment and fidelity:

It'll be like lovers
For the rest of our lives
No run around
Think twice... Twice

16 Falling (written by Martin Hansen, Magnus Kaxe, and Fred Alexander; performed by Clay Aiken)

This 2008 pop-rock song (egregiously overlooked by radio) explores an aspect of futurism that is not often considered, which is the uncertainty and confusion of living in times of rapid change. Unlike Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, the narrative here is a more specifically personal one, but it is no less poignant and urgent:

And I'm falling, I am falling
From the world I used to know
Been trying to hold on
To something for so long
Now this never-ending dream won't let go

17 100 Years (written and performed by John Ondrasik, Five for Fighting)

Here is a reflection on a personal future and the expression of awareness for how short our time really is (though not using the brevity of life as an excuse for self-indulgence).

Half time goes by
Suddenly you're wise
Another blink of an eye
67 is gone

18 Kids of the Future (performed by the Jonas Brothers; originally “Kids in America,” written by Ricky Wilde and Marty Wilde)

This 2007 remake produced for the film Meet the Robinsons embraces the exuberant spirit of youth, perhaps an “Annie” for the twenty-first century:

There's no time for looking down
You will not believe where we're going now

19 One Child At a Time (written and performed by Nnenna Freelon)

The Nnenna Freelon song that inspired the Futurist Playlist in the first place, the witty Future News Blues (1992), is unfortunately not available as an mp3 download. But I recalled from my interview with her at the time that a sense of the future was very much embedded in her writing. As a mother and an educator, Nnenna knows how much the future matters.

These ideas are even more vivid in the earnest One Child At a Time, written in 2000, urging all of us to take responsibility for the future:

We all have a part to play
Teacher, friend, or mentor
We’ll make it a brighter day
With children at the center

20 Over the Rainbow (written by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, performed by Eva Cassidy)

There’s so much I love about this particular version of the song made famous by Judy Garland for the 1939 film, Wizard of Oz. This 1998 arrangement illustrates that what is old can be made new again with a new voice, newly inspired. Tragically, Eva Cassidy died of cancer before this recording was released to British radio and became a mega-hit.

The lyrics, of course, speak to the daydream that inspires us to pursue a better world, even if the journey ultimately brings us back home again, as it did in the movie:

Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Our musical journey to the future takes us through fear, anger, inspiration, cynicism, idealism, and courage. The essential truth is this: There is always hope.

View the Futurist Playlist at Amazon.com.

Lyrics quoted and album art posted for illustrative purposes only; ownership belongs to the respective copyright holders.

The Futurist Playlist was compiled by Cynthia G. Wagner, with the input of @WorldFutureSoc Twitter followers: Richard Yonck, Anthony Michel, and John Cashman. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Future Society or, to be honest, those of most real music experts. *g*

Back-up Plans, aka Alternative Scenarios

Thanks to the comments recently added to my previous blog, the snow pictures, I realize I didn't quite lose everything when I crashed my laptop's hard drive.

Note the use of the active voice in that statement. Heh. Laptops don't take kindly to being "jostled," I suppose. The friend of a friend who was believed to be capable of recovering files from dead drives proved not so able.

Other than a few new Clay Aiken videos from the Golfing for Inclusion event earlier this year, which are replaceable from the massive vaults of my fellow fans (oh what a cloud they've built!), the most critical files I lost were the videos of our org's president and board chairman, which I was in the process of splicing together for promoting our conference in July.

As my brother would say, gum wouge (bum gouge).

The other files I thought I lost were my personal photos and videos from 2010, including the above-mentioned, below-posted snow pictures. There were also the snaps of the pretty tulips I bought from the grocery store to brighten my spirits earlier in this horrible winter. All my other files, from 2009 back, were either on the external hard drive or on data DVDs (which are unfortunately horribly unorganized, but that's a different problem).

The back-up "clouds" of Photobucket and Blogger and Snapfish and the like are not quite satisfactory, since they automatically resize the images. To make my calendars for next year, I need my high-res originals. But aha! I found that I'd actually uploaded those latest pictures to my office computer, so the originals were safe.

Anyway, since my crashing of the drive, my brain has been in quite a bit of a muddle. A couple of weekends ago, I misplaced a thousand-dollar check and my car. (Both turned up eventually, thank goodness.) I can blame all the distractions I want, but unless I start dealing with the clutter in my life and mind, the Crashing of the Drive could turn ugly. Literally. It makes me a little worried about this upcoming road trip to Raleigh. I don't have a back-up plan for her own self.

love, hosaa,
head in clouds

Punk Rampant!

My curiousity sometimes leads me down curious avenues, and when I was watching a DVD of Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet recently, a bit of the dialogue didn't quite sit right.

The Nurse is trying to find Romeo to tell him where and when to meet Juliet, but he's hanging out with his friends. She has a go-around with sharp-tongued Mercutio, whom she declares a "scurvy knave." All right, that's good Shakespeare.

But then her servant Peter is rolling on the ground laughing, and she screams at him, kicks him down the steps, and bellows out, "Punk rampant!"

(with apologies: the video has been removed)

WTF?

Well it sounds good, but it ain't Shakespeare. Zeffirelli's film came out in 1968, so at first I suspected the line was contemporary, perhaps borrowed from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, the definitive film on punks rampant. But that didn't come out until 1971.

I did a Goodsearch for the phrase, but came up empty. So then I turned to Google Book Search, and by gum... It's from The Dutch Courtesan By John Marston, 1605:

Freevill (to Franceschina): Go; y'are grown a punk rampant!

So the phrase is authentically of Shakespeare's era (or a tad later) and not Zeffirelli's. But how modern is it! "Punk Rampant!" could describe any number of contemporary scurvy knaves.


Love, hosaa,
mind rampant

Parallel Worlds

In my little world everything is either Clay Aiken or future related. So here is today's parallel-world example.

Voice of America covered the World Future Society's conference this summer, and here is their little story: Futurists Consider Trends, Look to the Future.

An American inventor once said, "We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there".

With that in mind, perhaps, an international gathering of so called futurists, attended the annual conference of the World Future Society recently, to discuss their views and concerns about tomorrow's world.

VOA Paul Sisco reports.

At least one of our members complained about how our organization is being cast in a bad light in this news clip, that it makes us look like a bunch of eccentrics. [Substitute "futurists" for "Claymates," and you'll see what I'm getting at.] It's actually a professional futurists' listserv where the angsting is taking place - you know, one of those insiders' back channels.... [this should sound familiar to hard-core Clay fans]

This is the second time that some less-than-fabulous publicity popped up about our organization in the last few years, but I've learned so much from being a Clay fan that it's easier to get some perspective.We get so little mass market attention that, when we do, we're super-sensitive to what is being said about us. I think we Clay fans can be the same way. I want every single passing mention of Clay to be about how fabulous he is, but that just doesn't happen.

The reportage about the futurists' conference, to me, was fairly neutral, and obviously done by a reporter who had no clue what futurists are about. "So-called" futurists do not stand up and tell you what the future is going to be like. We show you ways that you can be prepared for what may happen.

The diversity of our membership, the diversity of points of view, actually facilitates that understanding. Clay fans discuss all aspects of Clay's life and career, bringing their own values and filters and experiences to the discussion. And that's what "future fans" do at WFS conferences.

That's one reason I've always thought of Clay as a poster boy for the Wild Card scenario (a low-probability, high-impact event). We watched him jump head-first into the deep end of an unknown future, and what an adventure it's been!

Getting back to the VOA clip:

It’s not bad at all, just a little superficial. The “Jetsons” theme beginning and ending is very typical of what non-futurists think our field is all about. It’s one reason we did the Sci-fi theme in the September-October issue of The Futurist (which also mentions the Jetsons). It’s a popular hook, and we just have to deal with that. A phrase like “so-called” futurists just shows the writer’s lack of awareness, like people who still use a term like “so-called greenhouse gases....”

The point the video reporter makes that futurists don’t know exactly what will happen in the future is the same point we make ourselves. The fact that the future is unknowable is the reason we work so hard to understand trends, wild cards, forces of change, and so on. The expectation is common among non-futurists that futurists are supposed to come up with a pat answer to the question, “what’s going to happen in the future?” This video showed that this is not what we do. It also showed that we’re a diverse group of people who approach the study or understanding of the future from different perspectives.

The lack of real content in the video (other than the interviews with WFS communications director Patrick Tucker and conference chairman Nat Irvin) is just because it’s only a couple of minutes long. For what it was – a mention of our work and a sampling of the people who do it – I thought the piece was fine.

Futurists, like Clay Aiken fans, are passionate supporters of something in a world that seems often indifferent if not downright hostile. We want everyone to agree with us that the Future and Clay Aiken are incredibly interesting and important and worthy of universal attention and support. But sometimes we're the butt of a joke. It hurts, but that doesn't make what we support less important, less interesting, or less worthy of attention.



love, hosaa
inspired anyway