[LINK] "The Future Is Unevenly Distributed"

[rfmcdonald]

George Dvorsky's io9 report on a futurists' conference in Toronto with global attendance points out the obvious fact that First World concerns aren't universal, with multiple interesting examples from different points on the Earth's surface.

"Futurist" has two meanings depending on the context. The traditional definition has to do with holding a positive sense of the future. It's an expansion of the humanist suggestion that progressive developments in society, institutions and technology can make the world a better place. The second meaning refers to people who makes it their business to predict the future. That would more accurately be referred to as futurology.

The futurists at the WorldFuture conference most definitely subscribe to the former definition. And as the panel discussion revealed, visions of the future tend to get more restrained depending on the state of things in one's home country. It's difficult to dream of a grander future when conditions are tough. Consequently, the panelists centered their discussion around such topics as clean water, literacy, poverty, internet use, unemployment, ecology, and the threat of terrorist attacks. For many countries, the alleviation of these problems is part of a broader futurist project.

The situation in Egypt provided an excellent example. Panel member Kamal Zaki Mahmoud Sheer talked about how shocking the Arab Spring was to his country — but in a good way.

Full size The toppling of the Mubarek regime sent a wave of hope through the country where previously there was none. Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, the general public was concerned about the processes of democratization.

"The future suddenly opened up before us," he said, "and it created a new kind of engagement where we could actually have discussions about creating a constitution and new institutions." The Arab Spring inspired the rise of a futurist voice in that country — one that could suddenly and freely engage in strategic thinking and long term planning.

The Dominican Republic's Yarima Sosa shared her colleague's sense of hope, but her priorities were elsewhere. Sosa's talk focused on a bare necessity of life most of us take for granted: food. She talked about how one in six people on this planet go hungry every day, and how a diminished quality of life results in despair and loss of hope.

As Sosa's talk revealed, a fundamental goal of developing world futurists is to grab hold of their own destiny. To that end, she is working to see the UN pass a resolution in which they acknowledge the problem and start to work on regulating the food market. "The system needs to be more transparent, to bring more ethics to it, and to show that food cannot be used as a financial asset," she said, "it should be used as a source of nourishment, and not for the wealth of a couple of people playing on their computers."

Sosa is engaging in what she calls "creative destruction" — the act of putting an old world to rest in favor of a better one.

Go, read.