Transcriber: Camilla Gobatti Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
Miguel doesn’t look both ways before he crosses the street.
His watch would’ve given off the slightest of haptic feedback
if a car or a bus had been coming. Electric vehicles are so refined now,
so whisper-quiet that it can be hard to hear one coming in time.
So wearable devices now include car alerts to help prevent accidents.
He chuckles a little, remembering when he was a kid and people thought
that roads would be teeming with self-driving cars by now.
As it turns out, that was a lot more difficult
than most people, including VCs, understood at the time.
So these days, autonomous vehicles are almost all used for trucking,
delivery, and public transportation.
Greenville’s lucky to have a few autunomous electric bus lines
that run throughout most of downtown,
cheap, quiet, convenient, if you live near the city center.
It’s April 23rd. 2051 in Greenville, South Carolina.
And Miguel, 30, is a proud Latino citizen of this thriving Southern community
and has been since his parents came to Greenville during
the COVID pandemic of 2020.
The shift to takeout food during the “pandemic year”,
as it's come to be known, led to the rise of ghost kitchens,
centralization of fast-food production and delivery
and an explosion of false front restaurant brands.
Unfortunately, this transformation devastated Miguel's family restaurant in
California and sent his parents across the country to Greenville in search of
a better life. So Miguel avoids takeout restaurants,
preferring to spend his money at local face to face restaurants
and cafes owned by people in the community he knows and trusts.
And Greenville, for the last 30 years, has made
an effort to promote local businesses and community networks.
As Miguel crosses the street, he waves to George,
who’s opening the doors of Greenville’s premier butcher shop, The Meat Press.
George waves to Miguel and stands in front of the doors to
The Meet Press and instructs his voice assistant to “Open up for the day!”.
As the doors unlock, the LEDs brighten and Spotify begins to play,
George hears the hum of the protein vats in the meat printers
as they come to live for the day’s work. George is the town butcher,
or what passes for a butcher in the Greenville of 2051.
More accurately, George, a white male in his 50s
and lifelong resident of Greenville, is a meat printer. Here at The Meat Press
he grows meat fibers of various flavors
and consistencies in vats and feeds these fibers through 3D printers to produce
a variety of tasty meats that don't actually come from animals.
The US reached “peak meat” around 2025 and since then
fewer and fewer animals have been slaughtered for their meat.
At first, companies produced burger from plant-based ingredients and it was
a massive hit. But later, cultured meat, grown in vitro from animal cells
in a machine, provided protein and a low-carbon,
economically effective and tasty manner.
Greenville turned out to be a great location for a business like this,
as George was able to take advantage of
the meat fiber printers by partnering with
the local artist community to design new meat patterns and products such as
the now infamous “turducken” ugly sweater and the flamingo triumphant sculpture
which is not only a tasty part of the meal,
but also a magnificent centerpiece.
As he loads up the orders for the day,
George asks the voice assistant to remind him to print his oldest son's favorite
for dinner tonight. His two adult children
now in their mid-20s continued to live with him and his wife.
Fortunately, Greenville urban planners anticipated the need
for multigenerational housing as the number of households
with adult children living at home continued to increase in the 2030s.
And it doesn’t look like that trend is going to change anytime soon.
Well, at least according to George’s wife.
The door chimes as the first customer of the day arrives. Hey, it’s Sean!
Sean, an African-American trans man,
walks into The Meat Press to pick up some customed-printed ribs
for his roommate Linda’s birthday party tonight.
Sean in his late 30s, lives in a communal arrangement with Miguel and Linda.
Many people in Greenville choose to live in multigenerational
communal living arrangements these days.
Not only is it cheaper than living alone,
it has a significantly lower carbon footprint which saves on taxes,
and is just more fun to live in a community than being isolated
and doomscrolling through what used to be called “social media”,
which was a fad when he was living alone with his mother as a child during
the pandemic year. And so, after 2020,
fewer and fewer people wanted to be alone, and friend networks,
neighbors and roommates became more valued than before.
So new living arrangements and housing construction grew up around that desire.
Sean has a busy day ahead at the Greenville Solar Farm,
which he's managed for several years now.
The farm generates enough energy and then some for the entire city
and has for decades. During the 20s solar energy became
so incredibly cheap to produce that it just made sense
for Greenville to build its own solar farm and use a large community battery
for backup. Greenville also supplies power to a few neighboring communities
that are unable to maintain their own solar or wind farms.
Independent community power supplies became a serious trend
in the 2030s, after the massive power outages in Texas,
California and Coastal Carolina that were caused by extreme weather
due to climate change. After a warm conversation with George,
Sean uses his watch to pay for the ribs.
George will have those ribs printed and couriered over by drone this evening,
just in time for the celebratory dinner.
Linda, his roommate, is 19.
An Asian-American female and climate refugee from Coastal Carolina whose
parents relocated to upstate South Carolina a few years ago when sunny day
flooding at the coast finally became too disruptive to everyday life.
She studies software engineering online at the University of South Carolina,
which moved to mostly online learning in order to better serve
the increasingly displaced citizens of the State.
Linda receives Sean’s text on the way to her part-time job at
the Community Urban Farming Project downtown.
The city’s electric autonomous bus line allows her a comfortable,
cheap ride with Internet access, that allows her to catch up on email,
texts and occasionally homework on her way to the farm.
Urban farming, while not the majority of agricultural production by any means
in 2051, started slowly in the 20s, and caught on in Greenville
by the late 30s, when increased seasonal rains in the Eastern US
began to make traditional agricultural more volatile
and less predictable. Now the community urban farm,
located in a former office building,
produces a large amount of the produce needed by local restaurants and families.
Linda is looking forward to applying her programming skills to reprogramming
the farm's watering system to get greater water and power efficiency.
Every little bit helps the farm to become both more economically profitable
and environmentally sustainable.
And, as a bonus, she’s receiving experiential credit
for this work toward her degree.
She responds to Sean’s rib text with a green heart emoji
and then returns to writing up an invoice for Nana's produce order at
the Open Heart Kitchen this week.
Nana turned 80 this year, but she doesn't look
a day over 65. When she was younger growing up in Savannah,
people always talked about how people would live longer and more active lives
and have the opportunity to pursue an “encore” career.
But she never really believed them.
Life expectancy was going down around the pandemic year when she turned 50,
and she never expected to be able to retire.
And as it turns out, at 65, she didn’t.
But she did open The Open Heart Kitchen and Community Learning Center as part
of Heritage Green, which she continues to run today. Using locally sourced
ingredients from the Urban Farm Project
and The Meat Press, The Open Heart brings together people of all generations,
creeds and colors using the Thomas arts of cooking and conversation.
It's one of the most popular restaurants and food cooperatives in town.
And quite accidentally, Nana found herself at the heart of
a community network, driving economic development in Greenville.
And education: as traditional schooling eventually, slowly,
became more focused on placed and applied learning.
Turns out, places like The Open Heart were perfect
for engaging students in intensive interdisciplinary learning,
something they could not only think about,
but something they could feel, something they could do.
And the skills they acquire are in high demand
in upstate South Carolina as it transitions to becoming a technological,
ecological and educational hub in the mid-21st century.
Well, she'd better get busy putting that meal order together
for Linda's party tonight.
It isn’t going to drone-career itself over there, after all.
Now, the scenario I just shared with you
a “y’allternative” vision of Greenville in the year 2051 is an example
of one possible future, driven by cultural trends
and how decision-makers in the year 2021
might elect to react to them.
It's not a prediction of what will happen,
but a scenario exploring what might come to pass if current trends continue.
The futures are always multiple and what may come to pass is not written in stone,
although some trends are by now more baked in than others.
As the physicist Niels Bohr reminds us, prediction is difficult,
especially when it's about the future.
So it’s no surprise then that we end up as recipients of what
I call hand-me-down futures: received images of a consensus view of what
“the” future is expected to look like.
Commonly, this takes the form of waiting on jet packs,
flying cars, and AI that either saves the world or destroys it, or more
mundanely, 30 years in the future is expected to look a lot like today.
Maybe 10 percent different.
Or in any cute corporate futures film, where everything is clean,
largely glass, and often very, very white.
But I can hear you saying, “Wait Chris, don’t futurists predict the future?”
Well, contrary to popular opinion,
professional futurists don’t predict the future. Prediction,
according to Joe Coats is amateur night at the future’s game.
Using a set of tools including horizon scanning and trends analysis,
futures wheels, cross-impact matrices, diegetic prototyping and design fiction,
experiential futures and more, futures to examine a range of possible futures.
Work with clients to select a set of preferred futures
and develop strategies today to get us there.
The end result is often a story about the future, a scenario.
As Jim Dator tells us, a scenario is a truthful,
though not necessarily accurate statement about the future,
meaning that while the scenario may ultimately prove to be incorrect
in its anticipated outcomes,
it's built on a thoughtful gathering of trends and
a disciplined analytical process that speaks in an internally consistent,
and therefore truthful, manner to the possible futures that could unfold
from them. So why be locked into someone else’s tomorrow?
Why not take the opportunity to re-future our tomorrows and expand
the socio-futural imaginary we use to talk about, and work together toward,
the futures? “Save your predictions! Burn your assumptions!”
Words told by Pearl Jam in the “Dance Of The Clairvoyants” and that’s
the beginning of your future, really. Questioning assumptions,
burning down those hand-me-down predictions of the techno fetishists,
rebuilding our capacity to imagine and designing newer,
better futures together.
In our Greenville 2051 scenario,
we looked at over 35 STEEPV trends and used a variety of foresight methods
to build this “y’allternative” story about the future.
One that’s inclusive, hopeful,
distinctly Southern and quite possible, given current trends.
But getting to this “y’allternative” Greenville of 2051?
That’s up to us. If we’re going to survive as a species,
we’re going to have to get good at imagining futures
like the one we’ve explored today.
The good news is: futurism isn’t a black box.
It isn’t magic. The tools and techniques
of the futurists are accessible to anyone, at any time.
Today, April 23rd, 2021.
Let’s start using the tools of the futurists to re-future
the Greenville of 2051, together.