This is just an outline of some ideas I was playing around with this morning. Down the line, maybe it could be worked into something with a sensible narrative. (I wonder if it will still make sense to me at all in a couple of months.)

Principles of Futurism

• To understand what’s changing, understand what stays the same.
  • Know what’s foundational in human interests.
  • Know history.
• The future is a mix of inventions and their unintended consequences.
  • Trends reflect discernible drives and desires.
  • Opportunities taken lead to crises and disruption.
• Capturing and coordinating inventiveness is the key to power.
  • More inventive activity concerns means (getting by) than ends.
  • Grand, end-oriented inventiveness is an integrating endeavor.
    • Aggrandizing motivations vary: art/beauty, power, wealth
• Current futurism is premised on expectation of accelerating returns.
  • Licklider, Engelbart, Goode.  Conscious self-augmentation.
    • Elites are trained to promote merit-elitism open to all.
  • But power laws persist despite lower barriers to entry.
    • The future is here, but not evenly distributed.
• There has been a shift from a war for eyeballs to a war for fingertips.
  • Incessant requests to like, vote, comment, give feedback.
  • Leveraging inventiveness to bait audiences, like schools of fish
• Invention marketing exploits power laws with baiting strategies.
  • Create surplus expectations of scarcity to drive demand.
  • Alienation reflects scarcity of standing, security, or wealth.
• Urbanization disrupts clan tribalism, enables demographic silo-ism.
  • Power laws proliferate across populations and interest groups.
  • There will be vast rewards for baiting toward integration.
• A planned future concentrates end-defining inventiveness in gatekeepers.
  • Gatekeepers may externalize risk while monopolizing gains.
  • Gatekeepers may impose unsustainable contradictions and dogma.
  • Gatekeeper may impose structures which block certain invention.
  • In imposing rules, gatekeepers set the terms of liberty.
• To say “Invent or be reinvented” unempathetically dismisses power law.
  • Who requires the powers of grand invention?