An Unscientific Analysis of Jokes about the Future

I'm coming off a great time at the University of Houston Foresight program's 50th anniversary celebration/annual gathering, and instead of writing about drivers of change or trends or whatever, I figured I'd take some time to do some data analysis on the posts I've pulled so far for the Meme Futures Sentinel project (read an explanation here).

So it's been almost 2 months since I started the project, and when I checked the archive so far, there have been around 500 posts on BlueSky that start with "The year is [YEAR]..." format. That seems like a good start to do some premature data analysis for now, and maybe I can keep updating this analysis periodically as the archive of posts grows (keep me honest, if you want more!).

Overanalyzing BlueSky Jokes about the Future

For this period, I think it's important to note we're looking at BlueSky posts between March 18 and May 8. For now, let's look at some high level data:

A lot of posts are focused within the next 5 years:
32.3% of these posts about the future were set between 2026-2030. While some jokes are set much further in the future (like the 6000s), most still fall within this century.

Most posts are set within the next 30 years:
69.8% of posts take place within the 2050s or earlier. 130 in the 2020s and 123 in the 2030s.

Back to Dator's Second Law

Now, bringing us back to Dator's second law that "Any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous," let's look at the two most popular posts from this period for our meme format and see what we can learn from them:

What's the story behind this post? Anything based in reality, or just an absurd take on 2028?

Welllll, actually there's a lot of truth to it (at least the Saudi PIF part). Many gamers are probably aware of Saudi Arabia's commitment to the gaming industry, but it's probably not common knowledge that the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund has committed to, and already made, large investments in the gaming industry as part of its "Vision 2030" plan to diversify the economy. For example, the PIF's gaming arm, Savvy Games Group, purchased an 8% stake in Nintendo in 2023 (the actual amount fluctuates).

Given the timing of this particular BlueSky post, this joke is most likely in reference to the most recent acquisition of Pokémon Go's owner, Niantic, by Scopely, a gaming company owned by the PIF's Savvy Games Group. Woo boy.

And now let's look at the second-most-liked joke about the future from this period:

This one is in reference to the announcement that DoorDash and Klarna are partnering on buy-now-pay-later services for food delivery. This spawned a whole slew of BlueSky reactions, but also hits on the absurdity of the extremely plausible, yet previously seemingly unthinkable, scenarios that emerge from otherwise banal corporate press releases and partnership announcements.

Some Parting Thoughts

Ok, so this isn't going to replace real horizon scanning for me, but I think it's important to note that there's a real kernel of truth in some of these absurd futures. It's an insight shrouded in a joke. So what are my take aways?

1. Futurists, futurians, futurologists, foresighters, and designers (especially designers) should lighten up. We need to rediscover the humor and fun in our work. As practitioners we'd benefit from cutting ourselves some slack, and our clients would likely benefit from us cracking a joke or two every now and then too. One of my major takeaways from seeing the new generations of foresight students at University of Houston is that they have definitely discovered the fun in foresight, and we should all be looking to do that.
2. Find the truth in the humor and really sit with it. I know this is a trite insight about comedy in general, but when futurists talk about the utility of absurd or preposterous or ridiculous futures, and our on-again-off-again roles as tricksters and court jesters in the corporate world, we should take that seriously and start nurturing new ways to tap into that. This is my first attempt, and I hope you've enjoyed it.
3. Based on these 500 posts, people seem to cluster around futures that lie within the next 5 years, and not much thinking goes beyond 2050, even though the more far out dates have some of the more fun/absurd ideas. I'll keep monitoring these, but it does seem like a 5 year timeline is where the general public is most comfortable projecting out, understandably.
   

What do you think? Next time, I'll do a deeper dive into content and the topics/themes that seem to emerge and resonate the most. More to come!