There are few things that generate nostalgia quite like a lost future.
Thinking happens in unexpected places. On this occasion it was in August 2024 at a multi-day workshop organized by the Centre for Strategic Futures inside the Strategy Group of the Prime Minister’s Office of Singapore. It turned into a fascinating, highly unconventional meeting involving a staggeringly cosmopolitan group of folks.
To kick things off, I was asked to give a short fire-starter about “Polycrisis, the past, the present and the future”.
The Brief was as follows:
•You’ve spoken and written a lot on the polycrisis: How should our present moment of polycrisis recast our understanding of the past?
•What role does memory play in shaping our understanding of the present, and who we perceive to be friend or foe?
•How should we think about the future: what is the right or generative idea, framework, or posture to adopt to make sense of now, and to make progress into the future?
Developing my theme of lost futures, I riffed on the relative sense of certainty in the 1990s and 2000s. I invoked Tony Blair’s legendary comments to the Labour Party conference in September 2005:
“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India. They are seizing its possibilities, in a way that will transform their lives and ours.”
And then invoked Reinhart Koselleck to talk about futures past. Globalization, as Blair could summon it in 2005, clearly belongs amongst the lost futures of our time.
Of course, Koselleck would argue that the constant rupturing of the horizon of expectation is a recurring experience of modernity. If that is the case, then “polycrisis” might just be the latest phase of modern history.
But, there is a pitfall in making this relativizing and flattening move.
In postulating change as the constant we risk not taking change seriously. We need to reckon with the second derivative: change in change. Modernity has been crying wolf for a long time. The challenge today is to grasp that the wolf of truly radical change is actually arriving, in a new and comprehensive sense.
As Mark Blyth once put it in the Guardian, in one of my favorite COVID-era quotes: “climate breakdown … is a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities. In plain English, there is no mean, there is no average, there is no return to normal. It’s one way traffic into the unknown.”
How to orientate oneself under such circumstances?
Thinking that this was a policy-orientated meeting, I ended with bullet points of advice:
•Beware nostalgia for lost futures.
•Take change in change seriously
•Get used to the unprecedented.
•Think politically. Who is the we?
•Avoid defensiveness.
•Be aware of the way in which choices may compound crisis.
•Don’t be afraid of backing out of dead ends and looking for alternatives.
•Change happens (and is made) at every level including the most intimate.
•Open the black box of the big aggregates.
To illustrate the final point, consider that there NEVER was one globalization. Globalization discourse put a skim over the top of a hyper complex reality. At the time, I was very influenced by the remarkable work of Han Qiu, Hyun Song Shin & Leanne Si Ying Zhang et al 2023, which showed the variagated patterns of globalization in three major economic sectors - textiles, automobiles and IT.
Anyway, the ensuing conversation in Singapore was fascinating. I was delighted to learn this summer that it has resulted in what the team at CSF have called a Glossary for Other Worlds which you can download with the link.
The table of contents is enticing:
The Foreword is a riff on the opening comments I made back in August 2024. I reproduce the short text below as a taster for the many other fascinating entries in the glossary.
Lostalgia— On the Futures That Never Arrived
We live in a moment unusually burdened by its own sense of time. Many of the images that once organised our imagination of the future—technologies, lifestyles, political horizons—now feel strangely inert. Our Conference participants found a term for this shade of feeling: lostalgia. It is a nostalgia not for the past but for lost futures: the ones we were promised yet never received, or which, when they arrived, proved far from the panaceas they claimed to be.
How did we get here?
Throughout the twentieth century, societies lived inside what Reinhart Koselleck called a widening “horizon of expectation”, the belief that the future would look radically different from the past. That horizon was sustained by familiar images of progress: flying cars, miracle medicines, moon colonies, a world made orderly by science and engineering. These visions rarely arrived, yet they linger and feel evermore immanent. They form what Koselleck called future pasts: futures once credible enough to organise hope, now stranded by history, but still shaping our imagination.
Another failure is also at work: the difficulty of generating new futures. In what Mark Fisher termed the “slow cancellation of the future”, recent decades have seen culture looping back onto past styles. He remarked that to live in the twenty-first century is to “have twentieth-century culture on high-definition screens.” Time seems stuck. As if experiencing anterograde amnesia, we remember only the past futures we lost but struggle to encode new ones we might still create. As Niklas Luhmann puts it, “the future cannot begin.”
This paralysis is deepened by our own technologies of prediction. As Sun-Ha Hong argues, contemporary systems of forecasting—from data analytics to AI— 10 11 often give us the form of futurity without its substance. In churning prediction without futures, they flood us with probabilities and dashboards while narrowing the range of what feels possible. Optimisation crowds out imagination. We are saturated by frameworks and models, yet starved of meaningful horizons.
Meanwhile, many realised futures have revealed their uneven costs. The Apollo moonshot captured imaginations even as the Vietnam War burned. Hydroelectric megadams— Aswan, Hoover, Three Gorges—displayed engineering prowess while drowning villages and ecosystems. Medical breakthroughs were built on bodies that did not consent: Black men deceived in Tuskegee, poor women subjected to contraceptive trials in Puerto Rico. We might remember that the original Mechanical Turk, an 18thcentury chess automaton which captured the imagination of the day, was not a machine at all, but a cramped human operator hidden beneath gears and levers. Its story has become uncomfortably relevant again.
These contradictions remind us that no future is singular. Gains for some have meant harms for others. Technologies sold as salvation have often concealed the true cost of their making. And whenever we speak of a shared future—a “we”—it is worth asking who is included in that pronoun, and who is placed beneath the table that makes the illusion possible.
Recognising and naming this sentiment—lostalgia—does not mean abandoning the pursuit of better worlds. Instead, we ask ourselves to release inherited futures that no longer serve us, and to examine the debris they have left behind. We also ask ourselves to seek the good futures and good practices still to be had, in today’s context, for today’s needs. They may not resemble the grand utopias once promised, but they suggest paths forward for which the grounds are already laid.
This book gathers alternative ways of thinking about the world: vocabularies, frameworks, and perspectives that resist lostalgia and help us re-enter time differently. Let us make space for what else is possible.
Here’s to that!
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The globalisation summoned by Blair certainly belongs to "the lost futures of our time". Another, and decisive, lost future of our time is the West´s refusal to build the "Common European House" demanded by Mijail Gorbachev, after he had forsaken the use of force to prevent the reunification of Germany, the end of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The great occasion to create a world of peace was miserably lost.
Eugenio Bregolat
Former Spanish Ambassador in Russia and China
Putting together Lostalgia and the notes about William Gass’s book The Tunnel, both the Nazis and the Magas invoke a history that never was to mobilize self-serving delusions of the future (Take back our country!). If we are lucky, the rage at the empty promises and empty purses can be a creative form of destruction.