The Brooklyn Rail

Ideas of utopia are intrinsic to the design process. Any innovation is a prediction or assertion of the future. Therefore, whether intentional or not, interrogating design opens up an entire world of questions. Futurology, the focus of Glenn Adamson’s newest book, has always been an interest of mine. While not purely an art book, Century of Tomorrows is about futurology interwoven through US history, which applies to art, as well as many other subjects. It’s situated in the US because “the United States has also long had a unique relationship to the future,” as Adamson writes, “considering itself to be a providential land, the place where tomorrow happens first.” Originally, when I came across this quote in the book, I approached it with a modern lens, thinking that places in Asia are where “tomorrow happens first,” both literally and figuratively. The US has been a trendsetter in thwarting the British colonial power and forging an American identity, captured in the phrase. The book communicates that futurology is especially important—amidst the whispers of fascism in 2025 and collective shortsightedness—because a solutions-oriented approach encourages shaping a better world.

For futurologists, “the future will remain a riddle with an infinite number of solutions, and as with the tarot, just thinking about that conundrum can have positive results.” Adamson asserts that “legitimacy of futurology is one of modernity’s defining features,” and the main role of a futurologist is “to follow an interrogative method, all built around this single question: what if.”

The book is organized with categories: “Heaven and Hell,” “Machine,” “Garden,” “Lab,” “Party,” and “Flood.” Within these, narratives unfold about the Great Awakening, the history of insurance, weather forecasting, eschatology, spiritual figures like Wovoka, the World’s Fair Westinghouse time capsule (1938), eugenics, and the RAND Corporation. Evident from these wide-ranging topics, this is a survey text helpful for those interested in futurology, conducting research on US history, science fiction, or cultural studies.

While futurology is critical to revealing our societal values and fostering a way of thinking that can bring about real paradigm shifts, it remains highly imperfect. It is a field that is not purely scientific—although those methods can be assistive—but instead a pseudoscience that introduces bias. For example, Wernher von Braun, a rocket scientist and prominent Nazi, was granted freedom in the US to continue scientific advancements. “Technology is simply a force in the world, [von Braun] argued. It is the politicians, not the inventors, who determine how it should be deployed,” Adamson notes. “It is a sign of Americans’ postwar technophilia that they accepted this self-justification.” It is highly problematic that the people at the helm of our future would bring antisemitism and oppression into it. Von Braun wasn’t the only person who had this contradiction. Many futurologists were prominent eugenicists, segregationists, or even religious fanatics who developed and considered utopian ideals for a select few, but branded it as something universal.

The book also presents a chorus of voices not traditionally shared on the subject of futurology. One such is Wovoka, a religious leader and founder of the Ghost Dance movement, a religious movement started in 1889 in Nevada that preached the eradication of the settler-colonial way of life and praised the Indigenous ways of life as superior. It gained traction to affirm and double-down on Indigenous pride in the face of horrific loss. Another movement included is Afrofuturism and self-determination. Adamson cites figures like Marcus Garvey, who dreamed up the Black Star Line, a collectively owned shipping company that facilitated the Back-to-Africa Movement; Kwame Nkrumah, who was a political theorist, revolutionary, and the first prime minister of Ghana after British colonial rule; Sutton E. Griggs, who wrote Imperium in Imperio (1899) about Black Americans making their own empire within the US; Horace R. Cayton Jr., who called Chicago’s neighborhood Bronzeville a Black Metropolis in his study of the same name; and Floyd McKissick, who co-founded Soul City in North Carolina. These examples under the umbrella of futurology are important to validate the envisioning of Black scholars not just to determine futures and ideas for Black people, but society at large. Black bodies and people’s labor were always embedded into the idea of modernity and progress.

In the vein of modernity, the book demonstrates how mechanization fits into futurology. For example, the word “robot” came from Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play about machines taking over. It comes from the Czech word robota meaning “the drudgery like the work performed by serfs on their master’s land.” Others had the same weary thoughts about machines, but also imbued them with the hopes and dreams of progress: “the art critic Sheldon Cheney put it in line like this, in 1930: we are past the possibility of challenging the machine, of curbing it … we must move by machinery, communicate by it—live by it.” Almost a century later, with the ubiquity of smartphones and the advent of Cybertrucks and electric cars, the question remains: how do we live by it?

Even Buckminster Fuller, a car designer turned futurologist, envisioned geodesic dome structures that inspired Minnesota’s Experimental City in the 1960s or Disney’s EPCOT in 1982. It was adopted, but on a very small scale. He also authored the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) which emphasizes the individual and collective efforts in shaping our future. He wrote, “The planet is a vessel hurtling through the void, with a finite amount of fuel. Humans are the crew [“We are all astronauts,” as he liked to say] and we’re tasked with keeping the ship going, which means shepherding what resources we have and using them wisely.”

The book suggests that our views about tomorrow show how we think today; accuracy is less important than the thought process in futurology. Art is a cultural apparatus in which we can study how we feel about the future and even project how it is collectively shaped. At a top-level, I wonder if the art of our time communicates our current escapism and dreams of more inclusive futures. Personally, I’d rather our future be theorized by artists than billionaires and corporations. How can our “what if” be mobilized for and by us?