🔮 A newsletter from the future

PLUS: My take on Marc Andreesen’s truly bonkers essay.

Hi, I’m Charley. Welcome back to Untangled, a weekly-ish newsletter about technology, people, and power. Last week I celebrated reaching 5,000 subscribers by offering everyone a 3-month free trial.

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I pride myself on synthesizing frameworks and research that help you make sense of the weird, technologically mediated world around you. Each essay is chock-full of them, and I’ve published 72 essays, so pop over to the archives and get started!

But enough about the past, let’s talk about the future, shall we?

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In Building Alternative Futures, I argued that it’s impossible to build radically different futures out of data that is tethered to the past. Instead, so-called ‘predictive’ algorithms chase the past under the guise of progress. Since I try not to be a total buzz kill, I also offered five steps to help nudge us toward building alternative futures:

1. Stop rejecting alternative approaches as unrealistic — they’re only unrealistic to the extent that you accept the status quo.

2. Reconsider what the data is actually saying by viewing algorithmic systems as diagnostic and descriptive, rather than predictive.

3. Account for what’s not counted in the data.

4. Account for the underlying dynamics that make the data, and then align solutions to those dynamics.

5. Experiment with alternative systems that are not dependent on the previous system, making new data, untethered to the past.

In this issue, I want to further develop step five because — as someone who teaches visioning and world-building exercises — I’ve noticed a few big pitfalls when experimenting with alternative futures.

The first pitfall is mapping from one’s present context to the future. Think about the last visioning exercise or organizational strategy process you went through. You likely took stock of where you are and mapped forward to a future vision. You thought about your current context — we’ll call this point ‘A’ — identified outcomes or point ‘B’, and then came up with an approach for how to get from A to B. Bada bing, bada boom.

But starting from the present and looking to the future means starting with a bunch of constraints — the stories we tell ourselves about the past, our patterns of belief and behavior, our assumptions about the world. All of this limits what we consider possible, and, as a result, ‘B’ isn’t all that radical. It instead represents a small step along a path you’ve long been walking. But if you want to create an alternative future and chart a new path? Then you need to work backward from the future to our present context, or from B to A. Describing utopias or radical futures untethered from present-day constraints pushes the boundaries on what we consider possible, often revealing new strategies.

Mapping backward from the future also helps in a different way: it breaks linear, cause-and-effect thinking. See, the first approach is problematic not just because we’re starting from ‘A’ and all the baggage that brings. It’s also because we assume all of the inputs and activities wrapped up in ‘A’ will lead to ‘B.’ That’s pitfall number two! The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes systems are ordered, where, as Dave Snowden put it, “there are underlying relationships between cause and effect in human interactions and markets, which are capable of discovery and empirical verification.” But if systems are actually unordered and complex, the future is not a neat theory of change away. Instead, you have to engage in backward mapping to inform your approach.

👉 I’m working on an essay about the difference between unordered and ordered systems and their relationship to AI’s ‘alignment problem.’ Get hyped!

Okay, so you’ve decided to start from the future and work backward, what’s next? Well, as I alluded to in step five, you need to imagine “alternative systems that are not dependent on the previous system.” Therefore we need to ensure that those imagining the future don’t simply replicate the expertise, epistemology, and ideas of dominant groups. Dominant groups aren’t going to have especially radical or different ideas about what the future could look like — after all, they’re ‘dominant’ in part because they benefit from the status quo. Moreover, as bell hooks teaches us, we need to see the margins are a site of radical possibility, a “central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives.” In other words, non-dominant, diverse views aren’t a ‘nice to have’, they’re a critical input to imagining radical futures.

To be super clear, my point isn’t that these steps will allow you to reliably predict the future. I mostly think that’s a fool’s errand that often reveals more about how power functions in the present. Rather, it’s in really stretching our imagination that we might identify and shed the stories, norms, and behaviors constraining what we perceive as possible, and align our daily actions and organizational strategies with the future we want to create. So, step five might now read, “Experiment with alternative systems that are not dependent on the previous system, making new data, untethered to the past. To do so, map backward from the future, embrace complexity, and center non-dominant views.”

🔮 Did you like this li’l riff on future thinking? Let me know — I’m considering writing more about the methods, approaches, and frameworks I draw from when doing this work.

🌍 Speaking of world-building and visioning, Kate and I have a new Facilitation Leadership Lab starting in January. Check it out, and while you’re at it, read all the really kind things our first cohort had to say about the course.

Techno-what?

I don’t typically offer a ‘hot take’ but venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published a truly bonkers essay this week called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Bonkers, how, you ask?