The Futures Are a Meme

"Any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous." - Jim Dator

This quote from Jim Dator has been a guiding principle for a while for those of us interested in foresight, futures studies, and thinking about tomorrow. It gives people air cover to be creative, expand their thinking, and to entertain the absurd.

Finding Value in the Absurd

I love old Twitter and seeing how people created interactive experiences from the firehose of data. I was at SXSW the year that Twitter launched, and the intersection of data visualization with Twitter data just did so much for me to demonstrate the potential of where social media was headed.

So I also love Bluesky, and I love that the protocol they use makes it possible to build cool experiences on top of their posts, which is increasingly difficult to do on other platforms, it seems. So when I came across a meme the other day in the "The year is XXXX" format, it struck me how much this format and the absurd nature of these posts links back to Dator's quote, and it made me curious just how frequently that meme pops up on Bluesky.

The year is 2028: The barricades are full of hardened pant-suit liberals. My comrade to the left, wearing an "I'm with Her" shirt stained with the blood of her enemies tells me, "We must secure the 1-40 corridor between Armarillo and Albuquerque if we are to retain the West." I nod in agreement

— Matatoes Lasagna (@matatoeslasagna.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 7:50 PM

So I vibecoded my way into building The "Meme Futures Sentinel, " a simple experiment in tracking the memes people share in "The year is XXXX" format and presenting it as a "newspaper of the futures." These posts might seem purely recreational at first glance, but there's something genuinely interesting happening beneath the surface.

These posts do what Dator suggests: they present future possibilities that break from conventional thinking patterns. They're not profound futures work, but they do offer small windows into our collective imaginations and anxieties about the futures we face collectively and individually.

Why These Posts Work

These posts function effectively as casual futures exercises for a few simple reasons:

1. Quick scene-setting: Each post immediately establishes a different reality with minimal text.
2. Extensions of current concerns: Despite their absurdity, these scenarios often take current issues to logical (if extreme) conclusions.
3. Humor as engagement: The levity makes these futures accessible and shareable.
4. Social participation: As a social media phenomenon, these posts invite others to build upon scenarios or react to them.

A Modest Form of Collective Thinking

What's interesting about collecting these posts isn't their individual brilliance but their cumulative effect. Each person is just struck to make a post using that format. It's not some grand call to action or collective foresight initiative. It just happens. Together, they form a kind of accidental futures scanning activity into the anxieties and hopes induced by the present.

This isn't a groundbreaking methodology—it's simply an observation of how people naturally use creative speculation to process uncertainty about the future, and I'm hoping to look for other examples of how internet memes about the future reveal real insights relevant to the work of foresight folks.

History has shown that what seems implausible today can become reality tomorrow. The value isn't in the accuracy of any single prediction but in the practice of considering diverse possibilities.

Some Practical Takeaways

If there's anything useful to extract from this modest collection, it might be:

1. Value in casual speculation: Sometimes our most unguarded thoughts about the future reveal important concerns.
2. Pattern recognition: Recurring themes in these posts often point to shared anxieties or expectations.
3. Accessibility: The humor and brevity of these posts make futures thinking accessible to people who might never engage with formal foresight exercises.

The "Meme Futures Sentinel" is just a small window into how everyday people think about tomorrow through social media. It's not trying to replace professional foresight work or claim to be a sophisticated methodology.

It's simply a collection that reminds us that thinking about the future isn't limited to experts—it's something we all do, often playfully, as we try to make sense of our rapidly changing world.