What Futurists Get Wrong About Future Human Society
Hollywood loves to give us the dystopian future that is eventually saved by some brave character. Such as Matt Damon in Elyssium, where the elites enjoy the advantages of a technologically advanced society where the masses do the hard labour. Futurists such as Kevin Kelly (a brilliant mind indeed) describe a post-scarcity society. We will not own anything, we will rent things and buy what we need just for when we need it. Peter Diamandis suggests we will travel easily back and forth to the moon and move about in autonomous vehicles. All seem to point toward an egalitarian society. (In the world of anthropology, most are loathe to like the term “egalitarian society.” There’s no evidence any such societies have ever existed in the true sense of the meaning.) A post scarcity world, Universal Basic Incomes, democracy is a given for the most part. All bear a common thread. All however, are based on one narrow viewpoint of civil society and few, if any, consider human history.
This has profound impact on how we can and should look at our future digital world and societies. Because of the internet, we are just starting a profound shift in what we want our societies and cultures to be. Futurists aren’t helping. Here’s why. And how they can do better.
In the age of Enlightenment and for centuries after, many thinkers, anthropologists, historians and the like, spoke of “primitive societies” such as our ancestors, all wandering around the countryside, nomadic. Then there was the idea of the “noble savage” in North America. Largely considered tribes and bands in a constant state of war with no societal structure that could be considered advanced. The evidence however, is proving this concept to be wrong. In fact, the evidence suggests that the likes of Rousseau and Hobbes stole many ideas such as human rights, from Native Americans and wrapped them in nice packages and narratives that suggested Western Europeans were the enlightened ones. They were not.
Since the age of Enlightenment and Western European colonialism, the lens placed on societies and especially future ones, has been based on these theories. Which also includes land ownership. The assumption too that the rise of agriculture shifted all humans. Often known as “caging” in anthropology. But there is evidence of societies that tried agriculture and abandoned it because they didn’t like its impact on their society and culture. Then there are societies that would use agriculture in the cooler months and forage in a different land area in the summer.
These societies that switched between agriculture and foraging had shifting political structures as well. In the summer, the chief could be a complete dictator and everyone obeyed. That same chief in the agrarian period, was largely a play chief. He could not tell people what to do because they wouldn’t listen to him. This is still seen in some societies today such as the Hadza.
the brilliant, feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock has suggested, perhaps rightly so, that supposed egalitarian societies are less about equality than autonomy. Take the Nuer tribe in Africa. Originally considered the most egalitarian, this has been reconsidered. It is impossible in Nuer society to tell who is “above” someone else. Even the women hold a more equal position to men and can sometimes be considered male for purposes of ancestral lines.
Futurists tend to look at future societies from the viewpoint of their own culture and society and base them largely on how things exist today, dismissing what we have come to learn about our ancestral humans. That they experimented with politics and political structures in often more complex and smarter ways than we do today. For Western futurists, it is hard to fully blame them. They were educated based on a colonialist and Industrial Age set of theories and philosophies. On the very premise that any civilisation or society prior to the Enlightenment was savage and primitive and not very complex.
This leaves them, often subconsciously, projecting a future society and outcomes based on one model of human social evolution. It limits thinking of political systems and structures to democracy or autocracy. Dystopian or egalitarian. The likelihood is that it is neither. Or some hybrid.
Digital technologies, such as the internet and the communications tools that operate on it (i.e. social media) are enabling humans at a global scale to have a dialogue on what they want. It is messy and will be so for some time. Futurists would do well to look at societies prior to the Enlightenment. Not discount colonialist thinking, as it can offer clues, but include what we once called the Noble Savages, recognizing them as our intellectual and social equals.
