Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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It’s no coincidence that the authors of such works have historically skewed white, male, and capitalist in mindset; many of them work as futurists
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these books largely reflected the limited perspectives and goals of corporate futurism. Often driven by the agendas of their clients, the futures business focuses on the problems it is hired to solve. Grown in the soil of management consulting and overheated start-ups, even when these works branch out into the wider world, they are more interested in, and can more easily imagine, interstellar colonies and eternal life—which offer an immediate road to profit for some—than an issue such as prison abolition.
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How to Future: Leading and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange shares strategies about how to manage and create change in various contexts, far beyond just the commercial or technological realm. Written by Scott Smith and the sci-fi writer Madeline Ashby, it admirably attempts to open up the “futuring toolkit” for diverse audiences and goals, illustrating the application of methodologies such as scenario planning, which has its roots in Cold War militarism, in fields such as nonprofit management and public health. The case studies and depictions of process are illuminating, though the level of detail may verge on the academic for the reader who might not be applying this as a practical handbook anytime soon.
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As Toffler and his acolytes once made the accelerated, profit-driven future dazzling, the next generation of thinkers is trying to reconcile this paradox—to conjure slower, more restorative, community-driven futures that are just as irresistible.