Link to the original essay here. Julian Bleecker’s response here.
Dear Julian,
Always happy to read your thoughts (this is also, by the way, the first response to the essay from someone who deals with futures).
As you know, I have a soft spot for your work and for design fiction in general, as it has that material, crafty, everyday, and somewhat messy quality (I mean these words in the most positive sense) that sets it apart from its slick, artsy brother (speculative design) and its annoying managerial cousin (the Platonic world full of cones, circles, and spheres of methods).
I see your point regarding the Fisher/Jameson quote. I promised myself it would be the last time I use it, only because I focus—originally, I believe—on the imagination part and not on the capitalism part. Also: let’s go back to the source to revive Jameson’s work, now that he has passed away.
The thing with the hustle: it’s not the hustle itself (I hustle a lot on social media), but the specific way it is carried out. I don’t need to tell you that LinkedIn, with its optimistic slang, has become a mainstream joke. Now, does the late futurist want to kill the good in their ideas by expressing in every single post how “thrilled” and “excited” they are? By branding yet another plausible (read: commonsense) but abstract diagram with their handle and hashtags? The choice is theirs. I admit that in the text I indulged in more snark than necessary, but come on, I need to have my fun too!
With the notion of help, we come to the crux of the issue. What gives the late futurist the certainty that they’re helping people imagine things differently? Differently from what? Are they even aware of their own standpoint? Don’t they see that there is something nostalgic about the very idea of the future? Most of the recent things I’ve read on futures and the radical imagination are bland rehashes of the contemporary art discourse from five years ago (the same ritualistic, fuzzy, new-agey discourse that alienated a lot of art practitioners; the joke in that field had to do with “mossy” exhibitions). So, by all means, do your thing, build your pre-totype, write your speculative fiction, run your workshop, but don’t call it “help”.
Here’s a good quote by Philip K. Dick, who himself needed help, that could well be applied to late futurists: “Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”