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Comment by staticautomatic | Hacker News Reader

Toffler and other "futurists" have always struck me as complete and utter charlatans. His predictions or whatever you want to call them always seem to fall into one of two categories: Things that are already happening or things that have maybe a 50/50 chance of happening. As Filip Buekens wrote in "The Dark Side of the Loon: Explaining the Temptations of Obscurantism" (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55704402.pdf), "[The] promise of a deep insight into intriguing subject matters is often sufficient to lure the audience into a futile quest for understanding."

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Toffler made predictions about culture and society, not tech. He "predictions" were about about the impact of tech on the systems of society and culture as dictated by the major waves of tech evolution since the dawn of man. The Third Wave outlines the waves of history, Future Shock is about the friction of assimilating to rapidly changing tech and culture, Powershift is about the shift in power from a top down system to a producer-consumer system due to decentralization and Revolutionary Wealth is about the revolution where new business and economic models emerge such as patreon, bitcoin and the Gig economy. I recommend all of these books as they outline a framework for understanding the nature of the technological imperative.

Using observational data to make inferences about what might happen in the future is not called "futurism." It's called "intelligence."

That doesn't really matter. The point is, Toffler provided a useful framework for thinking about the world and certain changes going on in the world. Whether you call it "futurism", "intelligence", "black magic" or "quxxikigibikig" is irrelevant.

And to your earlier point... no, "futurists" aren't always going to be right about specific details of their predictions. And I doubt many of them would claim that they are, or that that's even the goal. I think the real point of "futurism" is to stimulate thinking about certain plausible events and outcomes, and equip people to gain a small edge in gauging the probability of certain events, or classes of events. In this regard, "futurism" is still valuable, even if the crystal ball is a little fuzzy.

A) It's not irrelevant at all. These people call(ed) themselves futurists. You can't hand-wave away its semantic significance and pretend we don't need to talk about how that word is bullshit.

B) I could hardly think of a less compelling defense of futurism than "a fuzzy crystal ball is better than no crystal ball."

That's a seriously reactionary film! Just one example: footage of a feminist rally followed by violent rioting.

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