Futurists and Seeing 2026

“One must see, simply see things the way they are, and not give oneself over to games of the mind. It is not common to see what is there. Naturally we look with our minds – with our interpretations, inferences, preconceptions, comparisons, expectations, and through all our previous experience. To see is a function of a pure consciousness.” —  Pierre Wack in Chermack’s Foundations of Scenarios Planning

This is perhaps my all-time favorite futurist quote. I’d assert that “seeing” is perhaps the fundamental skill of being a futurist. Pierre Wack of course was doing his thing in the 1970s and his great contribution was being able to see the world and its changes in a pure, unfiltered way. That insight has served us well.

But that was a different era. The times have changed … a lot … and my view is that seeing is now more challenging than ever before.  

Today’s capitalist context today is so much more mediated. We are being manipulated, persuaded, cajoled, sold, shouted at, whispered to, and lied to around the clock. Can we trust any of it? The obvious response is to verify, but how … when it’s everything???

For instance, I have been visiting eco villages. There is quite a range in how well the reality matches the pitch. In several cases, it is not even close. So, our scanning identifies the rise of eco-villages. We don’t have time to visit each one, but how do we know if the signal we saw is “true.”

We know that more and more of the web is bots, deepfakes, and outright fraud. We know that more and more reliable materials that used to be publicly available are going behind firewalls to prevent being scraped and regurgitated by our noble AI Robin Hoods … stealing from everyone and enriching themselves … (and admittedly, for now, tossing back some crumbs).  

Might we see the re-emergence of more physical scanning? Since the emergence of the web, most scanning has gone virtual … with good reason as the reach has expanded immensely. Some old timers might remember buying physical copies of publications, making copies, or physically cutting them and filing them in folders in a bank of file cabinets. We could do more people-based and ethnographic research, but it is time-consuming and expensive.

Might we unplug? The danger is losing touch.

We can hone our fraud-detection skills. And we don’t have to “decide” on each piece of information but simply file “support” for different alternatives and weigh it when necessary.

For me After Capitalism is creating a world where we can trust what we see. Alas, there is a lot of work to do! – Andy Hines