The Dream Society

Announcing my next project

About a dozen years ago, while serving on my neighborhood association board, we hosted a local official. He chose to use part of his time to advocate for an upcoming “yes” vote on what seemed to me to be a non-controversial and well-tested public health measure with settled science¹. The meeting devolved quickly into a shouting match about said topic, and it created intense cognitive dissonance for me. Truth, I realized, no longer had a privileged seat at the table - if it ever did. A factually correct position requires the same amount of marketing and persuasion as any other. In other words, if we as a society had ever deferred to experts, those days were over². As someone raised by two hard-science PhD parents, with a job focused on dispassionate analysis of data, supposedly in the height of the Information Age, this was a deep surprise.

Over the next few months, I want to tug at this thread with you³. Legendary futurist Jim Dator recently released a book entitled Living Make-Belief: Thriving in a Dream Society. Being an academic publication, with a boring Springer cover and a beyond-$100 price tag⁴, its most likely future would be to quietly influence the field by being occasionally referenced in research papers. However, the basic thesis, that the society based on the Information Age is fading and a “Dream Society” based on images and performance is taking its place⁵, is one of those “big ideas” worth sharing, and I’m determined to do it in my sphere of influence.

I’ll use Dator’s book as primary text for the semester, examining its arguments, bringing in examples and looking at data, etc. I’ll also draw on two other books for support. The first is Rolf Jensen’s The Dream Society, which is a book written in 1999 about the emergence of this new paradigm rather than a reflection on its progress⁶. This will provide an opportunity to reflect on how the idea has evolved over the past 25 years, and how well the predictions and images of the future presented in the earlier work have held up to the cruel march of reality.

The second is UH program director Andy Hines’s ConsumerShift⁷, written in about 2012 about how changing values among consumers in developed nations mean new techniques are required for companies to do effective marketing and relationship-building. It presents a whole different framework for thinking about recent changes, and a different theory of change to explain it (in short, economic development drives an increase in physical and economic security, changing values in society, and the rest is more or less downstream from there). I intend to see how well these two explanations fit the data and to what extent they might be harmonized as different ways to view the same dynamics⁸.

I hope you join me on this journey. I’d love to hear your own views, datapoints, and disagreements in the comments throughout this series (and always, but it seems especially appropriate as an exercise in collective sense-making).

1. I’m not trying to be cagey: it was Metro Councilor Sam Chase, and the topic was fluoridating Portland’s water. I just don’t want anyone to get lost in the details.

2. This is an idea that came up during my interview with Philip Jones.

3. Instead of taking a class this semester, I’m doing a second Foresight project for the university. These are fun and a great learning experience, but don’t result in anything I can write about (unless the project becomes publicly available or I get special permission to share it like I did with the project I did at work for Providence). Consequently, I am in need of something else to write about, both to maintain my practice of writing as thinking, and to produce something of value for you, the reader.

4. No judgment here: my only book chapter to date is trapped in very similar circumstances.

5. While I was using Claude to help me edit this article, it noted that my practice of inserting footnotes in a different register/personality could be construed, in fact, as meta-commentary on this performance-focused paradigm.

6. I bought this used from Amazon, and what arrived was the dirtiest and smelliest book I have ever received. I don’t know what happened to the poor thing, but it stinks like an old neglected aquarium.

7. Andy was kind enough to send me a copy. If you’ve read the prior footnote, don’t worry this one smells fine.

8. This plan has meant that in the past few weeks I’ve had to carefully read two dry nonfiction books and skim a third, but that’s the kind of thing that I do for fun.