Who said the future is now

It is hard to clearly identify which elements of the present will become more widespread in the future. Throughout the 20th century, social transitions in the West often involved the trappings of wealth becoming more accessible to wider sections of society, such as automobility, better-quality housing, high-quality healthcare, and consumer technology.

Many contemporary future scenarios present the future as a utopia of wealth and health furnished with a panoply of high-tech gadgets and permitted by continued economic growth. However, it is also possible that the future, for some or all, will involve a gradual or rapid reduction in standard of living. Thus, the future might consist of the expansion of the current lifestyles of either the rich and powerful, or the poor and oppressed.

The future is always created on uneven foundations. In order to understand how we can create futures that do not exclude, isolate, or exploit, we have to understand how the future is written in the present.

More specifically, we are interested in how minority elements are, in this moment, unequally distributed; how these inequalities are likely to be reproduced or altered in the future; and how these inequalities may actually determine the future or futures at which we arrive.

Through exploring how existing differences create unequal futures, we can begin to understand how to look forward in a way that is beneficial to those who are often excluded from mainstream narratives of change. By considering three key domains—the social, the spatial, and the temporal—this article will briefly describe some of the ways in which we may be able to see the future as being unequally distributed in the present.

It will then consider what impact these distributional inequalities have with regard to those who may play a significant role in attempting to write the future. We close by offering some possible ways of dealing with inequality that involve technologies. Social Inequalities. It is often the case that certain social groups identifiable by gender, class, race, physical ability, etc.

However, because these visions shape policies and technologies that affect everyone, these social inequalities raise questions of power. Moreover, the unofficial futures of everyday experience, hopes, dreams, and imaginations are often not considered in these future visions. Efforts to incorporate everybody in views of the future often result in dystopian images, highlighting current differences in exaggerated ways.

Science fiction literature offers some clear examples. Ballard's novel High Rise presents us with a fictional interpretation of class and futures, which is useful when assessing how social inequalities within the everyday are constructed and consumed.

In the novel, class divisions are physical the higher the floor in Ballard's tower block, the higher the class of resident. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World also portrays fundamental inequalities at the heart of the imagined society, though here these are built into genetics and conditioning, not just architecture.

While these fictional futures extend and emphasize current inequalities, in many ways fragments of utopia exist already. For example, in the Western world, the majority of people can access clean drinking water in such sufficiency that they flush their toilets with it; calorific food is available in such quantity that they can become obese; and free health care is available in some countries e.

It might be naive to expect utopia to exist only as an endpoint or a final destination. Such a view highlights that we should recognize and cherish these fragments of utopia as and when we find them, and realize that it may be necessary to fight hard to keep them. Spatial Inequalities. The rural-urban divide is one spatial axis that highlights differences that are apparent across potential elements of the future. New modes of transportation, such as car clubs or Uber, are increasingly available in cities but have little reach into rural areas.

And expansion into rural areas is questionable, highlighting how different futures may emerge as a result of location. Moving from physical mobility to virtual mobility, access to high-speed Internet is another example of current reality in urban areas that may soon constitute a relatively near future for rural ones. In terms of global distributions of lifestyles and wealth, the late 20th century and early 21st century have seen an increasing dispersion of modern, Westernized, middle-class lifestyles from Europe, North America, and Australasia to parts of Asia, South America, and Africa.

In the latter we can see a rapid transition toward futures that are very different from their recent pasts, due to extended energy supply networks, availability of consumer goods, or the introduction of emergent technologies such as the Internet.

In parallel, the past decade has also seen what might be considered by some as less progressive futures developing, such as the descent into civil war and collapse of infrastructure in parts of the Middle East e. Sometimes, though, space causes less of a divide. Mobile phones provide a fascinating case study in how fast a new technology can establish itself globally, rapidly leveling access to the services that a technology can provide.

Mobile phones highlight not only the speed with which futures can arrive but also a virtual shift in the everyday, from one experienced through direct contact to one where connections transcend the physical. Here the future may also hark back to the past. Computing and the virtual realm can be seen as an extension of the oracles and shamans of the past [ 2 ], our desire for knowledge and foretelling transplanted from chicken entrails to Wikipedia and social media.

We haven't moved far from the past, and the past will always remain with us as Rebecca Wright and Colin Pooley discuss on page Social media highlights the nature of information inequality. In an era of post-truth, access to information and how we use it has become a vital part of our present. Consider algorithms developed to reduce information overload that instead yielded undesirable results such as Eli Pariser's filter bubbles.

Or recall Facebook's infamous experiment with tweaking people's timelines to affect their emotions [ 3 ]. Personal newsfeeds often determine what information users see, and access to good quality information may be thought of as more important and influential than ever before. Temporal Inequalities. Latest Editorial And News. Recent Videos There are no videos currently available.

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