Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Back to the Future

Today will be the beginning of this trend spotting and future thinking blog. You random reader, ending up here by chance or destined, should know I was put under the obligation to start this blog for a future thinking course taught at Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden. Nevertheless, it’ll be a fun opportunity to let loose of some of my crazy ideas about the future and let you all know about it.

At this point, all I really know about the future is that it is unpredictable. Still, I don’t thing blogging about it is contradictory. I think it is a perfectly logical and inevitable thing to do. Curiosity and imagination is what makes us different from the dead. Man is allegedly the only animal that thinks about the future. It is what makes us great.

Futurum exaktum is a verb tense in the Swedish language, expressing something completed in the future. “It will be like that in 2010”.



Since the future is so highly unpredictable, almost any statement about it should be bold and brave. Even the most well known and visionary predictions about our future tend to be partially comical over time. Just a few years after the real 1984, the Berliner Mauer fell, probably making the world more open that it had ever been. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner from 1982, people fly spaceships and make phone calls from phone booths. In all times, man thinks of himself as very visionary while in retrospect being kind of narrow-minded. Therefore, I think the most outrageous ideas about the future often can be the most reasonable.

Our way of thinking, our preferences and our minds are constantly changing. Horace Engdahl, the guy who announces who won the Nobel Prize in literature each year, claims in Meteorer (1999): “As Charles Rosen has stressed, there is no audience for past time’s popular music. Just the odd ones survive. We don’t listen to the charming Moscheles but Beethoven, who once was considered odd on the verge to inaccessible”. [My own crummy translation].

As I said, I think that the most outrageous ideas often are the most reasonable. Hence, I hope to be able to come up with some really crazy shit during the coming weeks. I promise to come back to you as soon as I can. Please come back! You’re utmost welcome! =)

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