Who makes the future? (Score 1)

Jon,

You ask, "Who gets to define the future"?

However, the question you seem to be answering is, "who wants to influence your definition of the future, and how are they doing"?

You use Disney's "Timekeeper" exhibit as a metaphor for the ability of large (in this case, commercial) power blocks in society to influence our attitudes toward those powers and their place in our society. You then express concern that the messages they promote is inaccurate at best (while acknowledging that individual visions have done no better), but more often hypocritical and self serving.

As I read it, you fear that this message is overwhelming any more organic visions of the future that we, as individuals might hold in the absence of these pervasive messages.

What you fail to acknowledge is that our time is unique in history for being the age where these massive power blocks are deploying their last desperate efforts to retain the hold they've had on the discourse, and from that, society's vision, of the future.

What corporatist entity has the power to say something won't be printed, anywhere, ever? Which corporation has the power to place dissenters under house arrest, for decades? How many people have been marked as sub-human and killed en-masse for the corporate vision? Historically, both nation-states and various religions have used such powers to enforce their world-views and particularly, their visions of the past and future. The most obvious example these days is the tale of the last 50 years or so of mainland China. Even there, current communications technology and competing visions of the future are eroding the power elite's ownership of the discourse.

All that is left these days is persuasion -- and admittedly, commercial enterprises have become very good at it. The classical power blocks have even acknowledged this, largely abandoning traditional methods of influence to hire specialty companies that push their message like any other product.

And persuasion too has its limits, at least to those who live in cultures saturated by it; "Social Darwinisim" encourages cultral traits that resist the blind acceptance of any statement coming via the media -- you can see it in the trends in advertizing, and the attitudes of the people who view them. Let's face it, if we all believed Ron Popeil when he tells us we "need" a pocket fishing rod, our society would rapidly be destroyed by the first foriegn power that got their hands on a TV station. We also see the unfortunate results of such an ecosystem -- some individuals are unable to cope, with unfortunate results. Advertizers are always looking for more suseptable targets (markets); those too young to have learned caution, those who have psychological weaknesses that can be exploited, those from cultures that do not have the innate distrust and cynicism of media as most western cultures have.

And finally, the powers themselves, the Corporations. For "Corporatism" to be the overwhelming power you describe, it would have to be far more organized, and malicious, than any power heretofore seen. The symptoms that you see are far more the incidental consequences of decisionmaking with *poor* communications than the design of a powerful few with excellent communications. A classic example is the decisionmaking and communications surrounding the decision to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger on the that cold January day in 1986; no one intended for there to be a disaster, but the needs of many individuals, *and the communication channels avilable to them*, made it almost inevitable.

We live in interesting times. When we make visons of the future, we make futures. Today, more of us make more futures for ourselves and our children than ever before; that's why I'm optimistic that "the future", whatever it is, is brighter, and a lot more interesting than anything the folks at Disney can Imagineer....