Future Present

Introduction

0.1 Seeing the Future from the Present

It sounds like a match made in corporate heaven: One adorable, iconic character, a blockbuster film by the world’s most successful director, and a crucial scene that involves your product as the key prop, destined to go down in movie history as a classic for generations to come. But of course, that’s all in hindsight. Hindsight is easy. The future is hard.

In reality, when Mars Candy Corporation was offered the chance to allow M&Ms to be used in E.T. in exchange for helping to market the movie in a cross-promotional deal that would have amounted to tens of millions of dollars of free advertising, the company turned it down. Instead, Hershey’s stepped in, leaping at the chance to get its relatively obscure new product, Reese’s Pieces, in the public eye, and the rest is history. When Elliot, the movie’s pint-sized hero, lured his alien friend E.T. into his home by using a trail of candy, sales of Reese’s Pieces exploded, tripling within three weeks.

By not understanding the power of entertainment as marketing and missing the signs of the coming product placement revolution, Mars’ story turned into a horror show. Not only did they lose out on promoting their own product, they created a monster of a competitor for themselves. But with the right vision and the ability to see the future that is right in front of you, you can avoid that fate.

Effective forecasters don’t actually look into the future—they examine the present. As the great economist Sylvia Porter said, Whatever is going to happen is happening already, so there’s no reason you can’t forecast effectively too. Forecasting is essential because culture and communications are changing fast. Like surfing, to be on the wave, you must start in front of it.

Essential to success is the necessity of knowing where culture is going in order to be a part of it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a mid-level executive bringing a new product to market, or a parent trying to understand your kids. Knowing where culture is going is more involved than simply following fads. Fads are derivative, short-lived variations on tired themes. A smart cultural forecaster spots trends whose truly innovative character influences culture in enduring ways that can be refreshed and reinvented for generations.

Though forecasting is not as difficult as it appears, that’s not to say the lessons outlined in this book aren’t challenging. But they’re not voodoo, either. You can tell the future; you just need to know what has happened in the past and which questions to ask about the present. Learning the right questions to ask about the here and now, and reflecting appropriately on history, is what this book is about.

As we look at the future we’ll review historical research and the methods and theories it produced. These are the tools, along with an analysis of your associations and affiliations, like the personal tribes you socialize with and the customers you serve, and your own anecdotal observations, that point the way to discovering and forecasting your own future.

0.2 Why Bother?

If you are in business, you know that the pace of change is growing exponentially, not just in our culture, but the world over. The ongoing and ever-improving sophistication of communications technology has made the passive consumer obsolete. The voice of one blog properly invoked can change the purchasing behavior of thousands of consumers. A Wikipedia entry can change the opinion of hundreds of investors and make for a very difficult board meeting. Individuals are now super-empowered communicators with tools that once cost millions, and probably required a government license.

No longer do people have to accept a limited number of product and service options—especially in the entertainment world—from content providers who determine the time, place, and method in which that content is transmitted. Content delivery is no longer a mediated linear process. Customers have the power to customize what they want, when they want it, and then arrange it, and choose how to receive it. Businesses that ignore changes in communication methods do so at their peril. Businesses that recognize that customers demand more finely tuned offerings (not simply more offerings), and have the wisdom to enlist their customers in developing and distributing their goods and services, will own the future.

The ability to distinguish between the flash-in-the-pan fad and a real trend is a learned skill—not an intuition—that can save millions of dollars in wasted development effort, futile marketing, and lost credibility. This book provides much of the information you’ll need to see what’s coming and profit from it.

Of course, no craft exists without art. Accurate forecasters look at ranges of probability and scenarios to predict what occurrences are most likely. The methods in this book that lead them to be essentially correct in their estimates are the same ones that you can use. The art happens when you bring a discerning, trained, and informed eye to your evidence to draw conclusions, even if that evidence leads you away from your own previously held biases. The information in these pages can give you power, credibility, and, most importantly, the ability to respond effectively to your world. You may not be a weatherman, but you need to know which way the wind blows to ride the waves of change in popular culture with ease and grace. Just avoid taking it too seriously.

1.0 Starting at the End: Here’s the Forecast You Were Looking For

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, 1908–2006.

1.1 Credit to the Critics

The Irish dramatist and literary critic George Bernard Shaw once quipped, Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

What good is a book on forecasting without a forecast?  Hopefully that’s not the only reason why you’re here, because you’re likely to be disappointed. If this book does its job, any forecast in these pages will be obvious, if not outdated, relatively quickly. A good forecast always will be both obsolete and obvious in hindsight and thus forgotten by everyone except the forecaster. Nevertheless, pop culture forecasting is still lots of fun, particularly when drinking.

Let’s assume for a sec that Shaw, Hegel, Shakespeare, Santayana, Gibson, and Porter are correct—that history repeats with trivial differences that cloak its repetition, keeping the uneducated blissfully unaware. We see this in events, movements, and actions that are happening or already have happened. Just knowing about the repetitive nature of the world has little value, however. Knowing why lets you sketch your own vision of tomorrow. As time passes, details form and depth emerges as you test and retest potential scenarios against emerging relevant events.

Today our culture is in a new phase that has permanently reconfigured the balance of power between the purveyors and the creators of things that society embraces. As the global playing field gets more level, or flat as columnist and author Thomas Friedman has written, individuals will expand their power to produce as well as consume things to buy, concepts to absorb, and trends to adopt and by which to live.

1.2 Just Pay Attention

So you want to know what’s going to happen in popular culture before it happens? It’s simple: look around.  It’s there--in front of you. You simply have to find it and follow its path to those who will adopt it or be affected by it. Find the future in the world around you. What is out there right now that is ready to scale--ready for mass adoption? Who in your tribes (your friends, customers, clients, and neighbors) is excited--and what is exciting them?

Focus on the next 15 years. Trying to look beyond that point borders on science fiction, and your forecast’s utility blurs. This approach is not a parlor game or an exercise in fantasy, but the use of time-tested tools that help you anticipate how people actually will live and what they will love, hate, absorb, or slough off.

1.3 Movin’ on Up

Where the change has started is visible using the first and most important tool in the shed: tribal identification. Immigrants, not just from Mexico and Central America, but also the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Indochina, and the splintered nations of the former Yugoslavia and East Africa, are the tribal change agents who will have the most impact on American culture. They are, literally, changing the face of America, which by 2050 will be more non-white than white. The cultural tug-of-war over the alleged reluctance of recently arrived (and sometimes undocumented) Mexicans to learn English puts language at the heart of Americans’ fears that this new wave of immigrants (just like every generation previously) could kill a sacred American value: that this country is a melting pot where everybody subordinates their ethnic identities to join the larger tribe of assimilated Americans. Of course, the careful forecaster knows that cultural subordination is a myth; it is the current culture that absorbs the best of the arriving immigrants’ culture. Thus, salsa is now America’s favorite condiment, and Spanish words are blending into our slang. Right, esse?

1.4 Do U nEd Me 2 Transl8?

Where language will have its most telling cultural effect is through the tribe that’s always most significant in any era: youth. Vernacular language is getting simpler, less formal. Relaxed language diffuses into the corporate suites and Web sites of serious businesses, in attempts to humanize what seemingly had been an overly stuffy, workaholic corporate culture. The origin of much of this informality, and the place from which this looser language diffuses into the wider society, is the youth tribe, the very tribe invading the work force as you read this. Managers will continue to be frustrated by what constitutes communication with and among younger employees. Instant messaging (IM) will continue to become more prevalent to manage essential communication that would otherwise go unmonitored, and Leet, the abbreviated language of the Web, will continue to infiltrate formal business conversation.

This reworking of language will have symbolic as well as content power. Youth is valued because of its beauty and capacity for regeneration, and typically individuals seek to capture or preserve some of that quality for themselves. Older adults have difficulty adapting as young people continually change the language while recycling fashion. New youth codes have the initial effect of preventing people outside the tribe from decoding the language. That, of course, eventually changes. Though sometimes a parent overhearing his teenager’s cell phone conversation with a friend might need a translator, over time the lingo scales, sometimes even comically so. George Bush the younger used dissed in his comments more than once, recalling shades of Lyndon Johnson trying to ingratiate himself with Vietnam-era youth by saying he was in fat city. This isn’t unique to youth, though. Think about your own line of work. You use three-letter acronyms daily, not just as convenient shorthand, but to distinguish yourself as part of your work tribe and to discern who is in--and who is not.

In a world where technology continually pushes the envelope to develop new ways to stay in touch, language that initially creates barriers to understanding will become more accessible in tone, mood, and, especially, in the slang that is one of its byproducts. Highly specialized by nature, slang will become even more refined by the shaping power of written and spoken technologies, especially the online varieties. Such refinement, you might think, would make language more colloquial, understood by the few, but global online connectedness means such refinement will make the shorthand slang more familiar to the digital world as a whole.

1.5 Break It Down

In Mike Judge’s 2007 future-shock film comedy, Idiocracy, the characters speak a degenerated slang-filled English that turns language into a silly word game. It’s used for comedic effect, but it chills too. That’s because people already speak that way. And it will become even more common in the future, since multitasking time pressures and the imperatives of technology are going to make necessary a condensed language that’s easier on the brain. Shakespeare’s wisdom will remain, but some of his words may morph into IM patter. 2b or not 2b will be the question.

As slanguage diffuses and apparently dumbs down conversations, a contrarian movement emerges. The contentiousness of the left- and right-wing political tribes, whose stridency keeps them talking at each other as opposed to with each other, will escalate to such a point that a center tribe will ascend with a yearning to communicate in language that can form a consensus. We already see the verbal bomb throwing online as flame wars (pointless personal attacks passing as debate) occur between smaller and smaller minds on topics of less and less significance. In fact, a tasteless, politically incorrect but telling observation has been floating on the Web for a number of years: Flame wars are like the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you still look retarded. Yes, I know, inexcusable—yet illustrative.

Technology changes the very language itself. Through the use of computer applications, people are making up their own rules, including language quirks that make it into the vernacular at a faster clip than ever before. Clashes emerge between English teachers upholding the Queen’s English spoken in boardrooms and those who want language to evolve. But youth is being raised on adapted language. In fact, Barbara Park, author of the insanely popular children’s book series Junie B. Jones, has had her writing widely criticized for its improper grammar, so much so that in 2004 Ms. Park was selected as one of the American Library Association’s 10 Most Frequently Challenged Authors, alongside Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and John Steinbeck. Bad company indeed!  The popularity of her books continues, and the revisionists have their way over the traditionalists—at least for a time.

Technology accelerates language adaptations such that language presented visually (as in computer text) is catching up to and passing even the vernacular in young adult literature. New words are accepted into online culture very quickly, as in Leet, where vowels are removed or replaced with numbers, and common typos are adopted as standard form. Further, Wired magazine’s John Brownlee has reported on a revivalist movement to make films with little or no dialogue; they’re easier and less costly to produce, and with minimal dialogue, they’re instantly more global—no translation required. Finally, the implications for print media are serious but not fatal. Magazines and newspapers won’t vanish, but they’ll certainly be much more specialized in the next few years—with room for only a few per tribe.

1.6 Recycling Revisited

Product cycling—of ideas and symbols, as well as concrete things—is inevitable. Rotation back and forth between utility and authenticity, between commodity and innovation, from treasure to trash and back to treasure again, is a constant. Technology is where this pendulum moves the most and where we see the greatest repercussions.

But before the pendulum begins swinging back toward the middle, some of those at the extremes will actually identify with what’s happening to them. Take, for example, the response to the October 2001 Patriot Act and its subsequent renewal in 2004. Some people grew more comfortable with their personal data being manipulated by commercial and government authorities because it made their lives easier. They were very willing to trade off their privacy for convenience or safety. The rest of the population, though, prevents this from getting out of hand because they value their privacy and fear losing it. This points to a dynamic tension that keeps things from spiraling out of control, though we seem to get dangerously close to capitulation sometimes. Within those swings, however, a short-lived yet solid, sensible center forms to calms things down. In the long run, the worst of Orwell’s nightmare is unlikely because of that ever-present center that gains strength in response to the pressure of extremes.

What’s becoming different about the future is that while the push back from extremism will preserve some of our privacy, technology has abolished any anonymity we once had. The distinction between privacy and anonymity is important. We can’t help being watched, overheard, or otherwise monitored in more ways and more often than ever before, but absent the placement of wiretaps in everybody’s home, car, or place of business, we should still be able to keep much of our private business just that—private.

Anonymity, though, is another story. If someone or some institution wants to find out about a given individual’s behavior, it’s no longer hard to do. In spite of the fact that children who grow up continually monitored by their hovering helicopter parents eventually expect to be free of such watchful eyes, the new millennial assumption of continual surveillance will be a permanent part of the next generation’s worldview.

This assumption is illustrated in the following entry from trends and innovation company PSFK’s blog:

The cover of New York Magazine for February 5, 2007 shows an image of a naked teenager photographing herself. The headline reads, ‘I am not interested in privacy. Online, I reveal everything—my breakups, my breakfast cereal, my body. My parents call it shameless, I call it freedom.’

Reflecting themes highlighted in the ‘Red Coat, Black Coat’ article Piers Fawkes wrote, the article in New York Magazine looks at ways young people manipulate their data to present their identity—for example, a simple click lets a teenager’s friends and even her boyfriend know that she’s now single. There’s also a ‘black coat’ example where a woman has tried to hide her identity after a personal video she made for her boyfriend ended up on the Web.

Backtracking from once-public online lives will become increasingly difficult, and necessary, as the Internet generation attempts to