FARSIGHT

Writing in the ruins of post-war Europe, Dutch futurist Fred Polak argued that societies rise and fall based on the vitality of their images of the future. By that measure, he believed, Western civilization was headed for terminal decline.
In his 1953 masterwork The Image of the Future, Polak traced how magnetic visions of tomorrow, whether religious or revolutionary, had pulled history forward since the ancient Greeks. Without them, he warned, civilizations stagnate and collapse.
Who was Fred Polak, and how well does his sweeping and pessimistic diagnosis of the modern world stand the test of time?

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Hosts: Casper Skovgaard Petersen, August Leo Liljenberg, Tallulah Richards
Published by the ⁠⁠⁠Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies

From the utopian ideals of LSD in the sixties to the grunge-infused nihilism of heroin in the nineties, culture and intoxication seem to have always mirrored each other. Might uncovering the nebulous relationship between drug and zeitgeist help us predict our future high?
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Author: August Leo Liljenberg
Narration: August Leo Liljenberg (with ElevenLabs AI)
Published by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies

Time and technology are inextricably linked. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, doing things slowly, inefficiently, and without precision looks existentially preferable. The Information Age is replacing sloth with speed as its new Deadly Sin.
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Author: Caitlin van Bommel
Narration: Manya Lind (with ElevenLabs AI)
Published by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies

Mysticism meets Big Oil in the tale of Pierre Wack, the eccentric French economist who brought scenario planning to the corporate world during the geopolitically turbulent 1970s.
Then, as today, a war in the Middle East upset global energy markets, showing the limitations of traditional forecasting. Yet not everyone was equally unprepared. Wack and his team of scenario planners at Royal Dutch Shell had highlighted the risks to Big Oil constituted by the rise of OPEC, public and political backlash to the industry, and other vulnerabilities ahead of the 1973 oil crisis. The story of how Wack and Shell were able to use scenarios to navigate the global shake-up of capitalism has become the mythologised origin point of corporate foresight. Yet Wack’s obsession with the mystical dimensions of scenario writing – his “spiritual documents” – is often glossed over.
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Hosts: Casper Skovgaard Petersen, August Leo Liljenberg, Tallulah Richards
Published by the ⁠⁠Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies

Mythical stories of future doom have been supplanted by scientifically grounded ones, with the interconnectedness and complexity of our world-system pushing us closer towards a scenario of inescapable global collapse.
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Author: Christian Kaarup Baron
Narration: August Leo Liljenberg (with ElevenLabs AI)
Published by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies