Glenn Adamson

eBook, ePUB

A Century of Tomorrows (eBook, ePUB)

How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present

Beschreibung

An acclaimed cultural historian takes readers on an intellectual thrill ride through the kaleidoscopic story of futurology, a surprisingly powerful force in the modern world. For millennia, predicting the future was the province of priests and prophets, the realm of astrologers and seers. Then, in the twentieth century, futurologists emerged, claiming that data and design could make planning into a rational certainty. Over time, many of these technologists and trend forecasters amassed power as public intellectuals, even as their predictions proved less than reliable. Now, amid political and ecological crises of our own making, we drown in a cacophony of potential futures-including, possibly, no future at all. A Century of Tomorrows offers an illuminating account of how the world was transformed by the science (or is it?) of futurecasting. Beneath the chaos of competing tomorrows, Adamson reveals a hidden order: six key themes that have structured visions of what's next. Helping him to tell this story are remarkable characters, including self-proclaimed futurologists such as Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, as well as an eclectic array of other visionaries who have influenced our thinking about the world ahead: Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin, Shulamith Firestone and Sun Ra, Marcus Garvey and Timothy Leary, and more. Arriving at a moment of collective anxiety and fragile hope, Adamson's extraordinary book shows how our projections for the future are, always and ultimately, debates about the present. For tomorrow is contained within the only thing we can ever truly know: today.

Technische Details

• Geräte: eReader
• mit Kopierschutz
• Größe: 63.07MB

Barrierefreiheit

• Text-to-Speech

Autor

Glenn Adamson's books include Fewer, Better Things, The Invention of Craft, and The Craft Reader. His writings have also been published in museum catalogues and in Art in America, Antiques, frieze, and other periodicals. He was previously director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and has held appointments as Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and as Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. Dezember 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781639730261
• Artikelnr.: 72260693

Rezensionen

Insightful…. A Century of Tomorrows is not an examination of The Future; it is an examination of examinations of the future. Adamson tells a story about a special class of storytellers, the future-telling people.… Adamson, having exposed various strains of failed futurology, suggests nonetheless that we will and should continue to make our best guesses, competing with one another, always remembering that every prediction is a statement about the present.