Is A Dystopian Consumer Future Already Here?

This blog post is actually an announcement….I’ve started a new chapter and a new blog, and I am calling it “Consuming Culture”.

Here is a sneak peak with a link to the official new page and the the full article below. I hope you will join me on my new adventure and be among the first to subscribe. Cheers and happy reading!

Today I was wrapping up work on a Scenario Planning project. Scenario planning is basically a social science-based business exercise where we look at critical, big-sociological uncertainties (l technology, geopolitics and economic equality) and create a selection of potential future-world scenarios based on how those uncertainties pan out and intersect. In more plain english – we take our best guess at what a few pictures of life in the future might look like based on how all those factors pan out.

My job at present was taking a look at the “10 years from now” social context and trying to figure out how our needs as consumers might evolve. I also wanted to find some potential fictional examples (or some sort of “way out there” example of a product or pop culture phenomenon that exists today) that my clients could could look at or click on to spark their imagination. Given that the majority of the scenarios I am working with are varying degrees of dystopian and seemingly Sci-Fi esque, I had quite the task ahead of me.

So I thought.

Suffice that say that I was convinced I was going to hours, if not days on end creatively google-searching my way into obscure scifi-examples, or just find as many Hunger Games video clips, screen shots and fanfic videos as possible. The truth was even more mentally unhinging. In less than an hour, I had enough present-day examples of products for a scary future that I found myself feeling a little frightened.

For the full article and to be taken to my new blog website , click here