LSN : News : Foresight Friday: Fiona Harkin, director of foresight

Every Friday, the Future Laboratory team offers an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and viral moments we’re all talking about. Here, director of foresight Fiona Harkin tries to make it all make sense…

: I honestly don’t know where to start this week. Outside my door the roundabout painters have been busy reclaiming, I don’t know – their stupidity? Meanwhile, in my social media sphere, a pocket of friends and family are mindlessly regurgitating agitative, divisive, bot-driven, shadily financed content. If South Korea is the latest to ban smartphones for kids, the thought brewed in one of the darkest corners of my mind that we could do well to ban social media for over-70s. But then I reminded myself that most pro-Palestine protestors detained by police in the UK recently are over 60.

: While Insta’s new Friends Reels feature is wickedly revealing, my FYP veers from starving, trauma-riddled faces to ads for NMN supplements. Are we just too busy shopping to notice our collective inurement – our individual agency - slipping away? Because you sure as hell won’t find it while hugging a Labubu, asking AI Jesus or your Etsy Witch. The dissonance is real, and I want to scream. What in the just-release-the-Epstein-files-already is going on?

AI imagery by The Future Laboratory, UK

: But it was a different kind of flag that resonated with me this week – an ad for the British Red Cross’ Bridging Divides series. It tapped directly into the team discussions here at The Future Laboratory around a New Mutuality. We regularly re-assess our Global Drivers – the foundations of our methodology – and the signals pointing to this potential future horizon are offering opportunity; zero sum games and binary arguments are the symptoms of a clash of social, political, economic, environmental and technological systems that no longer serve a world that is moving beyond global thinking.

: It is an opportunity for a better future, one that requires a reclaiming of human agency to take root – a headwind to knock the lulling cradle of our algorithmically flattened culture. We touch on this potential for disruptive friction in our current age of convenience in the New Codes of Value macrotrend; we note in our Synthocene Era report the rise of noetics and an impending reassessment of what it means to be human; we explore the tension between tech-enabled experiences and the need for offline liminality in our upcoming Optimised Odysseys travel report; it forms the basis of our in-progress Health, Beauty & Wellness macrotrend where we track the strategies jolting us out of a homogenous beauty sector; and you can view its creative influence in Human By Design, reminding us that in a world of Helveticas, it’s good to be the Wingdings.

Quote of the Week

‘For decades, we imagined democracy to be a supermarket, where you popped in whenever you needed something. Now we remember that democracy is a farm, where you reap what you sow’

Anand Giridharadas, author and writer (source: Medium)