Bibliographic record
Abstract
Regardless of any human pretense to foresight or omniscience, we are stuck with thereality that for now the future is, and remains, an open-ended question. In pursuing theissue of humankind’s preoccupation with its mastery and the ensuing contests over itscharacter, this essay begins with a tracing of future-oriented thinking’s development and thevarious manners of foresight which result, considering the future’s indeterminacy in light ofthe fundamental human impulse to plan around its projected, imaginary image. It will brieflychart the evolution of foresight as a means by which humans plan for—and in effectcreate—their futures. From early conceptions of the not-yet as a phenomena observable inthe rhythms and patterns of nature, to the later methodological rigours of modern foresightpractice, it centres the foundational concept of the ‘image of the future’ (as what is “seen” byforesight) and it’s mythopoetic function in bringing the future under a measure of humancontrol, providing placeholder knowledge and the certainty necessary to the carrying out ofactions calculated to either increase or decrease the likelihood of any particular imagesactualization. Foresight is presented as a defining characteristic of modern capitalistdynamics, operating in its most common institutional form as a means for extending thereach of presently powerful political and economic actors into the future, generating thefictional expectations that underlie the complimentary practices of speculative investmentand risk securitization. Following this, the essay turns to alternative formations which queer futurityand foresight, productively exploiting the fact that the images generated by foresight andspeculation, regardless of the power of their authors, are necessarily fictional. Relishing in(rather than retreating from) the future’s indeterminacy, queer futures proliferate possibility,disrupt reproduction, and instrumentalize desire in the performance of emancipatory futuresthrough their rhetorical and material instantiation in the present. As a counterpoint to thecapitalist and queer future imaginaries discussed, the paper closes on a consideration ofindigenous anti-futurisms which regard the imaginaries at the heart of foresight andpretensions of humankind’s command of the future as necessarily apocalyptic, thereforeincorporating foresight only insofar as it articulates the anticipation of a decline and eventualcollapse of ‘the future’ as such.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.241 | 0.144 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".