idle gaze 009: embrace the unreal trend forecast.
When captivating prophecies are more powerful than correct ones
“Increasingly, we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow.”
In 2015, documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis released Bitter Lake, a surreal analysis of the war on terror, from Afghanistan in the 1950s right up to modern times and the New American world order.
Curtis focussed on the stories politicians and governments tell us about the world. But the same can be said for the corporate soothsayers and trend consultancy prophets. Their attempts to make sense of the present and predict the future has become increasingly futile, when the world no longer makes any sense. The stories they tell people increasingly do feel unconvincing and hollow.
But finding patterns in human history is an instinctual urge. In times of instability, we fill our culture with attempts to connect the dots in the disorder, to figure out where we go next. We analyze political polls, with full knowledge of their inaccuracy. We publish sci-fi, to understand the way our world works by contrasting it with other, more alien realities. And we consult trend forecasts.
But in the world of trend forecasts, numerical rigour and exact correlation have become overvalued commodities. Forecasting models and corporate analysis might give off a whiff of credibility, but in reality, what matters is imagination. Following intuition, hunches and making creative leaps is a now a bull market.
Because imagination - unlike the illusion of false precision - can help us to envision, and maybe even enact a better future.
The trend forecaster Emily Segal recently published an opinion piece in the Guardian framing the ‘great conjunction’ - the meeting of Jupiter and Saturn in the skies, as more than just the birth of a new astrological period. She posits that the start of the next Air Epoch (2021-2221) will usher in new societal and cultural shifts:
“Historically, Earth periods like the one we are about to exit focus on materialism, hierarchies, resource acquisition, territory control, and empire stabilization (see the late Roman empire, high middle ages, and industrial capitalism). Air periods, by contrast, favor the renovation of hierarchies, decentralization, shifting orders, rapid translation, mass mobility, trade networks, and rampant spirituality.”
The opinion piece was condemned for positioning astrology as a quantifiably accurate predictor of the future. But that misses the point. Sometimes it’s more important to be captivating than correct.
Like trend forecasting, stargazing is also concerned with pattern recognition. But instead of drawing on real-world signals, astrology is the language of symbols that describes those parts of the human experience that we don’t necessarily have equations and numbers and explanations for. It’s an appreciation for magic and spirituality, the knowingly unreal, and the intangible aspects of our lives. Like astrology, trend forecasting can help us to imagine a better future, a reminder that when society is in crisis: This too shall pass.
Sometimes the most interesting trend forecast isn’t the one that tries to accurately predict the future, it’s the one that inspires the viewer to transform it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.