Frictionless isn't Fictionless

Futurism in review: flying cars and frictionless commerce

Phillip and Brian chat about the futurism movement in art and how it relates to commerce, specifically, the idea of passatisme, which is an obsession with the past that signals everything backward would be supplanted by futurism. Generally, it sounds a lot like effective acceleration or the beginning of a movement where people are railing against a prevailing nostalgic posture that culture has of looking backwards, and they are aggressively trying to pull the culture into looking forward. It feels very much like a Future Commerce thing to talk about, so we did. Listen now! 

Believe in Pasta. Believe in the Future.

Key takeaways:

• {00:11:46} - “One of the dangers of futurism is that it's let's throw everything good out, and replace it with whatever isn't that. Let's not look to the past to inform the future. Let's not enjoy things that we've had, and there's a dichotomy and also a distrust of things that people found to be good previously, and a belief that things can and will be better in the future no matter what, so we should just not even look to the past. I think that there's a lot of danger in this way of thinking about the future.” - Brian
• {00:19:47} - “What's really interesting here is that our modernist futurism is dystopic, But retrofuturism was optimistic. So we can be nostalgic for the past's vision of the future, which I think is its own interesting dichotomy.” - Phillip
• {00:31:31} - “The end game of eliminating friction is a specific kind of future that a specific set of people out there are looking for where certain activities are eliminated from intervention in any way or requirement for a human to be involved.” - Brian
• {00:43:58} - “If the future is gleaming cities with flying cars, I'm not entirely sure that that's the future that I'm looking for, which is a specific quality of life. It is a specific set of things that I hope for, and I think that there are ways to get there here and now that we could be investing in and taking big swings around that would make a meaningful difference for commerce and for the general populace.” - Brian

Associated Links:

• Brian’s 2020 Future Commerce Insiders article It’s Time to Build Things That Last
• Insiders #167: Heavenly Bodies: Worldbuilding through Brand Collaborations, by Angelica Frey
• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce+ for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

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