This review of A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present by Glenn Adamson appears in the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The fashion and interior design industries of the 1920s employed ‘colour forecasters’ to watch the catwalks and predict which hues would be in demand next season. But their word had more power than simple speculation, as Glenn Adamson writes in A Century of Tomorrows: ‘Once the color forecasters achieved sufficient penetration into a given market, their customers were almost obliged to abide by their dictates, because no manufacturer wanted to release products that were out of step with the seasonal palette.’ The prophecy had become self-fulfilling and the forecasters were deciding rather than guiding.
On a small scale, the colour forecasters show how prediction is not neutral. It changes the course of events, as Adamson, a curator and cultural historian, explores in this history of the social science of futurology. This field is ‘like a lens, bringing some things into intense focus and clarity while distorting others, and dramatically limiting the field of view. It’s for good reason that crystal balls are standard tools for fortune tellers.’
Sometimes a prophecy is self-averting, and other times even fantastical and impossible visions of things to come turn those things in unexpected directions. A ‘wrong’ prediction may still have value. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey did its utmost to present a plausible – probable, even – view of the future, which was ‘wrong’ in many essentials but spurred others to their own counter-visions; and the ideas it placed into the mainstream have shaped thinking ever since – not least the icily courteous artificial intelligence HAL 9000 using homicide to resolve a logic problem. Also in 1968, the science-fiction magazine Galaxy invited readers to propose solutions to the Vietnam War, ideas including mass hypnosis and ritual suicide. The war carried on. ‘Science fiction,’ Adamson notes, ‘is not about generating future solutions to realworld problems but, on the contrary, opening up a present-day space of unreal possibility.’
A Century of Tomorrows runs roughly chronologically, but through themed sections that draw out Adamson’s argument. He focuses on the United States, where the future was generally manufactured during the 20th century. The opening chapter, ‘Heaven and Hell’, roots futurology in the religious revivals of the late 19th century, when charismatic preachers promised damnation or bliss; a time, not coincidentally, when the ‘self-help’ and advertising industries were emerging and technology was accelerating. Utopian speculation blossomed. Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward 2000–1887 inaugurated American futurology, siting utopia in a time to come rather than a distant land.
The following chapters show the American future changing. Industry triumphs, for good or ill, in ‘Machine’; more idyllic, harmonious, suburban visions arise in ‘Garden’; the emerging management technocracy tries to make a science of the future in ‘Lab’; and hedonism and hippiedom reject the slide-rule brigade in ‘Party’. Which takes us almost up to the present.
A consistent theme is a slow recognition of the complexity of existing conditions. Edward Bellamy’s year 2000 would only have worked if it was tediously populated by Bellamys. Often, utopian solutions quietly did away with people who didn’t fit in. ‘The first step in envisioning an ideal society, one would think, is to imagine the people who might live there,’ Adamson writes. It is an immense strength of his book that it is inclusive, looking beyond white, male perspectives to enrich and enliven the narrative.
Adamson’s previous books were about craft and industrial design, so he has a keen eye for how things look, as when describing the ‘visual rhetoric’ of art deco: ‘Streamlined objects seemed to be accelerating through time itself, arriving at the future just a little sooner than other, more conventional, less desirable products.’ And he takes a broad view of what constitutes speculation, for instance in his discussion of the ‘other ways to be radical’ taken by Black futurologists in the 1960s and ’70s, who turned to music:
After all, what is music but the art of shaping time? … The aims of the civil rights movement might have remained frustratingly unfulfilled, but some measure of liberation could be had readily, onstage or in the studio, in the realm of story and sound. Sun Ra, a progenitor of this approach, put it like this: ‘Politics, religion, philosophy have all been tried, but music has not been given a chance.’
Adamson’s remarkable final chapter, ‘Flood’, takes the reader close to the present day. What kind of flood? All kinds, including the complexity that has overwhelmed advanced democracies in the information age. Far from being rational and consensus-based, society has become increasingly obfuscated, divided and volatile. The sociologist Daniel Bell gave early warning of this possibility in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). In an ideal technocracy people would trust experts. But ‘in practice, [Bell] thought that as power converged on experts, controversy about their predictive mechanisms would immediately follow: “the post-industrial society will involve more politics than ever before, for the very reason that choice becomes conscious and the decision-centres more visible.”’
A Century of Tomorrows, Adamson says, was mostly written during the Covid-19 pandemic, when this ‘flood’ was acutely felt and American discourse was dividing between paranoid rejection of experts and, on the other side, near-superstitious exhortations to ‘trust the science’. People no longer disagree about conclusions – they exist in divergent frames of reference. The final pages look ahead to the information dementia promised by ‘artificial intelligence’. But these are fears that have been faced before. A Century of Tomorrows cannot clarify the future, but it provides a confident, learned guide to the present.
A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present by Glenn Adamson is published by Bloomsbury US.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.