Kyle Harrison
concept

Historical Futurism

Historical Futurism

One-line: Treating the future as a discipline by looking backward at how the past imagined its future (“looking back to see forward”) — to build a feedback loop of foundational futures → a literature of dreaming → dreamers → forecasting → building. A cousin of open-source knowledge: open-source imagination. The thesis is that the shortage of optimistic science fiction has a real downstream cost, because to invent the future people first need to be inspired by hopeful visions of it.

This is the recurring concept/thesis Kyle tags as Historical Futurism across his notes. The published essay is Historical Futurism (Essay) (subtitle: “Using Science Fiction to Invent the Future”); the full research dossier is Historical Futurism - Research.

Sources from the “Historical Futurism” Apple Note

Processed 2026-09-01 from Apple Note p1495. The note’s tweets were wired to the Historical Futurism portfolio feed separately; this is the non-tweet material, which per CLAUDE.md rule 18b belongs on the concept page rather than the feed. Each source was fetched and read, not merely linked.

Ray Bradbury, “The Toynbee Convector” (1984) — the single best fit for this concept in the corpus

Shared with Kyle by Cameron Wiese. PDF saved locally to wiki/attachments/historical-futurism/bradbury-kwarc.pdf (source: https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Bradbury.pdf).

Craig Bennett Stiles is the only man in history to have travelled in time. A century ago he returned with film and tape of a healed world — clean air, ended wars, cities rebuilt — and broadcast it to billions. Humanity, shown the future, went and built it. On the anniversary, at 130, he grants one interview and confesses: there was no journey. He faked the tapes. The evidence was a forgery and the future it produced was real.

“Life has always been lying to ourselves! … To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born.”

He then straps into the machine, asks the reporter to speak his name and throw the switch, and dies in the chair — “travelling in the past now, forever.” The reporter burns the tapes and rides the elevator up into “a wondrous and surviving planet… that one man with one lie had created.”

Why it is load-bearing here. This concept’s thesis is that a shortage of optimistic science fiction has a real downstream cost, because people build what they have been inspired to imagine. Bradbury’s story is that claim as fiction, pushed to its most uncomfortable form: the vision did the work, and its factual truth was irrelevant. It sits in direct tension with Making Stuff Up 2.0 (storytelling vs. lying) and with the Paul Harvey retrofit noted in The Death of Discourse — three cases where a false provenance carried a real effect, with three different verdicts available.

Palmer Luckey on Invest Like the Best — “Inventing The Future Of Defense”

Episode 350, hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy, 31 October 2023 (https://colossus.com/episode/luckey-inventing-the-future-of-defense/). Kyle’s note framed it: “Go back to the future and see what people dreamed of when they were dreaming bigger.”

The chapter list is the reason it belongs here — it is a founder reasoning explicitly about forward versus backward invention: “Inventors working backward from existing systems versus forward from their ideals” (33:11), alongside “Ranking America’s potential for innovation” (09:37), “Why there aren’t more Thiel Fellowships” (12:43), and “How to approach a new field initially” (24:02). See Palmer Luckey and The Anduril Thesis.

Norman & Christopher Macrae, The 2024 Report: A Concise History of the Future 1974–2024 (1984)

Surfaced via a LinkedIn post by Avidan Rudansky (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/avidan-rudansky-017594138_this-has-been-an-incredibly-prescient-book-activity-7254905506736062466--ssb), transcribed here because LinkedIn is login-walled:

“Written in 1984, it predicts much of the megatrends we’ve experienced over the last 4 decades with incredible precision. In hindsight, the book describes the kernel idea of companies like Netflix, Zoom, Varda, Orchid, Moderna and many others. My favorite part is there are only 2 reviews on Amazon. One is from Christopher Macrae, one of the authors of the book along with his father Norman Macrae. In the review, he writes: ‘When we wrote the book in 1984, critics slammed us as the most optimistic futurists ever to go to print. If we were revising the book today, we’d have to raise the optimistic gear more than ever.’”

Norman Macrae was The Economist’s deputy editor; the book was written with his son Christopher and Brian Stableford, and published in the US as The 2025 Report. Its stated aim was “Goodbye to Orwell” — a deliberate optimistic answer to 1984, in 1984. This is the purest specimen of the concept available: a forecast whose authors, forty years on, say they were not optimistic enough.

Andrew Maynard, Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies

https://andrewmaynard.net/films-from-the-future/ — a physicist reading emerging technology through science-fiction films, “to explore how science and technology are transforming our future.” The method is the concept’s method: use fiction as the instrument for examining what a technology will mean. Pairs with Solution Science Fiction and Fiction as a Lens For Truth.

Kyle’s own line in the note

“Historical Futurism - Opportunity Canvassing”

Unelaborated, and worth keeping as a prompt: treating past visions of the future as a canvass for opportunities — i.e. mining old optimistic forecasts for the things that were imagined and never built. The Macrae book is the obvious first test case.

Captured entries

The 1974 Saturday Review issue

Close to an ideal artifact for this concept: in 1974, Saturday Review devoted its 50th-anniversary issue to asking twenty leading thinkers to describe the world of 2024 — a dated, checkable set of predictions by named people, with hits and misses now legible fifty years later. Revisited in 50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974.

Two of them described the internet. Andrei Sakharov envisioned “a universal information system which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact,” reached through “individual miniature-computer terminals.” Wernher von Braun, independently, predicted networked computers supporting banking and ticket reservations.

The misses are as instructive. Sakharov also expected flying cities as industrial satellites and agriculture extended across the oceans, Antarctica and the moon; he got battery-powered vehicles right but gave them mechanical legs so as not to disturb the grass. Clare Boothe Luce, writing when women were 39% of the US workforce with no female senators or governors, predicted the working woman of 2024 would be “still trying to make her way up — in a man’s world — and not having very much more success than she is having now.”

The pattern is the takeaway, and it is a caution for anyone running the same exercise today: the technologists predicted the infrastructure with startling accuracy and its consequences barely at all. Nobody in the issue anticipated what a universal information system would do to attention, institutions, or truth. See Forecasting.

On the record — Funding the Future (2023)

Asked for a 12-month prediction on Funding the Future (Category Visionaries, published 2023-08-23), Kyle reached for historical futurism as the method, with the example he says he “always points to”: Back to the Future going forward to 2015 and betting on the fax machine — “because in the 80s, fax machines were new. And so people thought, this is going to be a thing that sticks around. And they totally missed the mark on that.” The lesson he draws is to anchor forecasts to Lindy things rather than what’s new, which is how he lands on “the physical world is going to rage on” — goods still move, supply chains still need managing, and deglobalization makes them more complex — as the prediction. (The fax example does not appear in Historical Futurism (Essay), which had published four weeks earlier.)

  • Science Fiction — the genre whose shortage of optimistic visions is the thesis’s central concern; to invent the future people first need hopeful visions of it.
  • Speculative Fiction — the broader fiction-of-possible-futures mode the thesis draws on, including the Guardian “Palestine in 2048” example of fiction imagining a real place’s future.
  • Futurology — the discipline of studying the future that historical futurism reframes by “looking back to see forward.”
  • Forecasting — a stage in the feedback loop (foundational futures → dreaming → dreamers → forecasting → building).
  • Utopias — the hopeful, visionary end of the imagined-future spectrum the thesis prizes.
  • Open Source Knowledge — framed as a cousin concept: historical futurism as “open-source imagination.”
  • Historical Futurism (Essay) — the published essay (“Using Science Fiction to Invent the Future”) articulating this thesis.
  • Historical Futurism - Research — the full research dossier behind the essay.

Entity Ideas capture (Roam)

Raw idea notes from Kyle’s Roam Entity Ideas page (ingested 2026-07-31). Preserved verbatim so the ideation-phase capture survives.

Fiction of Future — the sci-fi book club

Kyle ran a science-fiction book club through 2019, reading each novel as a forecast rather than a story — which is Historical Futurism applied to fiction. Sessions and their discussion notes now live on the book pages:

Saved tweets

Captured from Kyle’s Apple Notes on 2026-08-21 against link rot. The raw note text is held privately in the wiki.

  • Delighted To Share Our New… (tweet)
  • Is The First Entry In… (tweet)
  • Paradoxically, The Most Inspiring Ideas… (tweet)
  • Science Fiction Is A Great… (tweet)
  • This Is Why I Wish… (tweet)

Verbatim source notes — restored from Roam, 2026-09-21

  • Reading science fiction is training on how to dream
  • We have a responsibility to dream bigger dreams and then seek to bring those dreams into reality. We shouldn’t be afraid of failure. And we shouldn’t relentlessly seek progress at all costs. The goal is simply to raise the collective imagination of all those who may go on to find ways to make lives better for more people. We want to create a reality, where people can say “then I remembered that its the year 2023, and life is better than it otherwise would have been.”
  • The Jaunt by Stephen King
  • Years ago, I saw a display where something like the World Economic Forum or some such organization had a big futurism conference where scientists, architects, technologists, and more came and discussed the future. Meanwhile, they had artists attending sessions and drawing images of the future they heard. I’ve never been able to find those drawings, but the one that stuck so firmly in my mind was an all-terrain robot that could drive into the most remote villages on earth, stacked with medical supplies, and a dedicated satellite that enabled a medical professional to video-in on a monitor attached to the robot to deliver remote care.
  • There really is very limited storytelling that portrays an optimistic view of the future. And while that is likely downstream of a lot of the things going on in the world that leave limited room for optimism, it also has a downstream impact. Fewer optimistic stories about the future lead to fewer people wanting to invent the future. The negative view of the future also leads to poor perception of technology in the media, and an overt pessimism in people’s lives.
  • Those kinds of artistic displays are a powerful part of feeding the imagination flywheel. Some of those efforts are out there. SciFi author, Ken Liu, hosted The Story Summit. Some exhibits, like Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination, have attempted to bring these types of efforts together.
  • Mentions of Nineteen Eighty Four in Openness of AI deep dive
  • As we inspire more dreamers, we want to build the feedback loop. Optimistic science fiction inspires builders. The builders build. They imagine a future. Then, the artists come full circle and they take those dreams, and communicate them to the everyday person.
  • Saney, Isaac, Cuba, A revolution in motion. Fernwood Publishing (2004)
  • {{DONE}} ((t9lTy3BfF))
  • I remember years ago I got to attend a talk by Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist who works at Google. It was, quite possibly, the most powerful talk I have ever attended. Not because of anything he said, but because of the willingness with which he bandied about the potential realities the future could bring. He was so fluent in what had gone before, and what could come from now on.
  • The impact on everyone is meaningful, but in particular kids. We might hope that movies like Oppenheimer would inspire kids to be physicists, but that one might have missed the mark. AI could be a moment to catalyze that excitement about building the future, but it doesn’t just happen.
  • Westworld (movie)
  • There is actually no good fiction, but that’s upstream of a lot of things
  • {{DONE}} ((7GjLGcBSg))
  • To some extent, the criticism is a function of how much you double down or aggressively preach your predictions, especially if you’re making money off of people believing you (ARK Invest has plenty of experience with that type of criticism.)
  • The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke
  • Convo with Dan Ni
  • Source: Future(s) Studies Subreddit; special thanks to Sahil Bloom for exposing me to it
  • The observable is so much more concrete than the imagined, even though 10K years ago is almost as imagined as 10K years in the future (e.g. pre-recorded history)
  • He also makes a similar point that I’ve made where there are very few science fiction universes that you can look at and say “it’s all great, I’ll take it all!” But there are corners of science fiction that are optimistic and great, and in even in some of the universes in movies I listed above, there are aspects of the future that are exceptional! WALL-E might be a condemnation of our abuse of the planet, but we managed to create perpetual civilizations in space that could last 700 years!
  • In his post, Nick Maggiulli shares two great quotes:
  • {{DONE}} ChatGPT Conversations
  • {{DONE}} ((XIcGcSzhm))
  • aka “The more things change, the more they stay the same”
  • One day, I got curious enough that I went inside to learn more about what they did. I don’t know what I expect (time machine manufacturing, maybe?) But turned out the business was pretty normal. Advisory services, partnerships, and a pretty cool 10-year forecast that they’ve been doing for 50 years! I still have the flyer they gave me when I walked in.
  • The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
  • The Dispossed by Ursula LeGuin
  • But what happens when you actually start to play the game? In my mind, the act of playing the discipline of futurism starts in forecasting, making predictions, and eventually seeking to bring those predictions to fruition.
  • If you’ve read my writing long enough, you know that I love storytelling. It’s probably the topic I’ve written about the most. Stories can be fact, or fiction. But sometimes, great stories can start as fiction and build to fact. Imagine if, instead of a 24 hour news cycle, you had 50 year news cycle (a publication that only came out every 50 years). You wouldn’t take up the pages catching up on 50 years of gossip or tragedy. As you laid out the most important details, you would see that the curve of history bends towards progress.
  • Ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated by the Disney Imagineers. I’ve always been a sucker for Disneyland and the imagined world that it represents. There is something magical about people who leverage the physical world to recreate the sense of wonder you can get from watching a movie. These people are builders.
  • {{DONE}} EigenGender Book List
  • That was my first exposure to the idea of futurology, futurism, and futurists. From there, it became one of my portfolio ideas. I’ve found myself collecting writing, experts, and resources to understand how people have predicted the future, what they got right, what they got wrong, and why.
  • A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
  • Hype vs product/market fit. How good is the thing at doing the job? Fax machine in back to the future but fax was never that good at the job
  • I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
  • World Economic Forum art project that I’ve never been able to find again (e.g. robot that drives out with medical care and 5G to offer telehealth to remote villages)
  • {{DONE}} Convo w/ Thomas McGannon
  • Another perspective is one I’ve written about before, and it comes from Matt Cohler, a former partner at Benchmark:
  • Graphic novels/comic book series:
  • The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
  • The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
  • Second Variety by Philip K. Dick
  • Blade Runner (bio-engineered humanoid clap back, 1982), The Terminator (killer AI, 1984), Gattaca (eugenics-driven society, 1997), The Matrix (murder assimilation robots, 1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (robot child love and human extinction, 2001), Minority Report (criminal justice system built on determinism, 2002), The Day After Tomorrow (climate change disaster, 2004), I, Robot (robot rebellions, 2004) Idiocracy (education downfall, 2006), Children of Men (population collapse, 2006), WALL-E (earth abandonment and fat space bodies, 2008), The Road (post-apocalyptic wasteland, 2009), and Ready Player One (sad VR bummer-fest, 2018)
  • Ecommerce fell right back in line with trends
  • Across the street from the Creamery, I would walk past the windows of The Institute For The Future. I would see displays showing off trinkets of the past: Walkman, Gameboys, and other 90’s paraphernalia. I had no idea what the organization did, but I was always fascinated seeing gear like this:

Referenced in