2023 Year in Review
The first of many annual reviews, I hope
As 2023 draws to a close, I want to take a look back at my first year of studying Futures and reflect on what I’ve learned and how my perspective has changed. I started 2023 with almost no ideas about what futurists did beyond keynote speaking and media interviews, so there was plenty of room for growth.
Learning
I started the year with Intro to Futures, taught by John Sweeney. This was a great introduction to the field and its ideas, tools, and luminaries. It was a low-resolution, gentle introduction to the entire field, and by the end I had adopted my own definition of the field: the art of increasing imagination about the future in order to enhance agency - or, in the words of Wendy Schultz (who is teaching my next course!), “teaching people to daydream effectively”. I also entered a writing contest about the future and did a bad job!
Over the summer, I turned my attention to applying my new learning to images of the future in popular media - games, TV, movies, books, and art. This was a great use of my natural tendency to spend free time watching sci-fi and overanalyzing it. Juggling three or four projects at a time as I was working through a book, watching a TV series, etc, was challenging but mostly in a good way.
In the fall, I took Futures Research, taught by Andy Hines. Dr Hines systematized the Houston Method of strategic foresight after joining the program, and is now leading the entire program, so it was great to get his instruction and feedback as we simulated doing a real project. I felt overwhelmed at first but caught up, and I really think there’s no better way to learn these skills than to be immersed in it.
I also tried using some of my new skills at work, writing drivers and scenarios based on the signals I was seeing. I quickly found that trying to do futures work was the fastest way to find out what I don’t understand, but I did well enough that I’m planning a more comprehensive futures project for 2024.
Writing
As part of my education, I decided to turn my experience into a newsletter; I’ve kept to a weekly schedule and this will be my 50th issue. In my debut, I listed three motivations for writing the newsletter: to understand Substack by experiencing it, as a way to restate what I’m learning and deepen my understanding, and to share with people who might be interested. So far:
I’m pretty comfortable with the core functionality of Substack, but I haven’t branched out to videos, podcasts, or Notes.
I’ve really learned a lot in my classes, and going back over my notes to write these has been a huge part of it. I’ve found myself many times writing a paragraph, realizing I have no idea what I’m talking about, and going back to the source papers, to the class recording, or a few times to deeper research to solidify my own understanding well enough to communicate it.
Some people are interested! Thanks to everyone who has subscribed, shared articles, commented, etc1. The newsletter currently has 51 subscribers and nearly 3,700 views across 12 states and 11 countries2.
The strict weekly schedule has been stressful at times, but it has been great to build discipline and have something consistent to offer people.
The Year Ahead
One of the things I’ve noticed about the academic Futures community is that there’s a lot of gatekeeping and drawing of lines between “real” and “charlatan” futurists3. One of the key things that people use as a litmus test is that the charlatans will frequently make bold predictions, whereas more legitimate practitioners follow Dator’s first law and offer multiple possible futures. I originally got into futures so I could make better predictions, and the first thing I learn is not to make predictions! All this to say, I won’t make a prediction about what 2024 will hold for this newsletter, but I can point to the Trends, Issues, Plans, and Projections that may serve as guides to what futures are more plausible:
So far, I’ve been enjoying my classes and been able to balance work, school, and writing with the non-professional side of life; I expect that to continue.
I enjoyed taking the summer off of classes this year and shifting to futures content in media, but it’s possible that a summer elective class will be offered that is compelling enough to displace the standard electives of Alternative Perspectives and Design Futures - for example, a class on futures and games would be pretty compelling.
I’m planning on doing my capstone project this coming semester alongside a regular class, and the current timeline has me reasonably confident that the former should be wrapped up by the time the latter peaks in intensity.
Based on this, here are four mini-scenarios for 20244.
Baseline: at this point I’ve got a decent rhythm for classes and the newsletter, and I can keep plugging away and telling you about it. Moderate success ensues.
Collapse: currently my education is funded by my employer, which is also kind enough to fund the rest of my life. If they decide that a healthcare system can no longer justify the expense of retaining a pretentious generalist, I might have to put schooling on hold for a while to find or establish myself in a new job.
New Equilibrium: my classes in the new year don’t have the same general-audience appeal as what I’ve done so far (being more specialized or retreading content with new but not very exciting twists), and my writing slows down to something more like monthly and readership declines.
Transformation: maybe the newsletter really takes off and my reputation grows, and I take the leap into full-time writing and consulting. In addition to the newsletter, I self-publish a book or two based on some of the themes I’ve explored here this year.
The strategy for right now is pretty similar: keep working hard in class, meet and network with people I meet through the program, and practice writing so I can better write things people think are worth reading.
Bonus Content: Music
In the interest of doing something completely different, I thought I’d share some songs that I heard for the first time in 2023 that I can’t believe I missed for so long. As science has repeatedly demonstrated, the quality of music produced by humanity peaked somewhere between 1994 and 19965, but there are still little pockets of excellence if you can find them6. Your tastes may differ, of course, and then you can ponder the experience of being objectively wrong.
“Archie, Marry Me” by Alvvays (2014): I heard this song come on in the bouldering gym and immediately stopped what I was doing to find out what it was. It’s unique, catchy, fun, and sweet. Plus, I love going to weddings, and marriage rates in the US have plummeted in the last 50 years, so I feel like it’s a nice plug for a neglected institution.
“Gold Guns Girls” by Metric (2009): Another decade-old song from a Canadian female-led group, but on the opposite end of the alternative/indie spectrum. I first heard of Metric last year7, and this song was suggested to me by the YouTube algorithm a few times during late 2022, but I thought the name was too ridiculous to give it a try. I was proved wrong straight from the opening hook through the end, as more and more layers build up and complement each other and I’m forced to confront the nihilistic logic of acquisition and consumption built into organisms and capitalism.
“The Silence” by Manchester Orchestra (2017): This one was less organic - I got the band as a recommendation from my music-buff friend ChatGPT8 and picked the song with the most views. Over the course of 8 minutes9, Andy Hull lays out an epic journey with the emotional raw edge of REM’s Michael Stipe and the bleak rural outlook of Oliver Anthony. This song is all I hoped to get from Mumford and Sons but never did10. This very middle-of-the-road 7.0 Pitchfork review of the album lays out the album’s strengths and weaknesses, but the first paragraph somehow serves as a detailed explanation of how the song was custom-engineered to deeply penetrate my skull and then release barbs to latch itself tightly in my brain.
Thanks for making it to the end - Happy New Year, and I promise to keep the music criticism to a minimum over the course of 2024.
Special hat tip to John Sweeney, who by himself was responsible for sharing articles resulting in 104 views and 6 subscriptions.
Based on my single subscriber there, it may be too early to say that I’m big in Japan.
Presumably part of this is because it’s a profession without professional licensing of the kind that defines doctors and lawyers; I got a similar vibe in the data science community in the 2015-2020 timeframe. The recent WFSF accreditation of the UH program might be a step in this direction.
Please excuse the lack of clever names.
This fact should be so self-evident that no citation is needed.
Nearly two decades ago, society thought we had solved this problem with Pandora, but the business model wasn’t very crisp and maybe the Music Genome Project was the wrong approach. Today, I strongly recommend putting your favorite bands into GPT-4 and asking for recommendations.
I feel like, as an American, I have a good excuse for this.
And now you see the subtle foreshadowing of the earlier footnote.
The last time I was totally enchanted by an 8-minute song was “Oh Comely” by Neutral Milk Hotel, also from Georgia.
I’m not the first to discover this, but you can only sing the word “heart” with deeply earnest intensity so many times before it loses all meaning and effect.