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.

Captured entries

• https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/25/what-will-palestine-be-like-in-2048-writers-turn-to-sci-fi-for-the-answer — Guardian: “What will Palestine be like in 2048? Writers turn to sci-fi for the answer.” Fiction as a tool for imagining a real place’s future. Science Fiction
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Humanity_Institute — Wikipedia: the Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford; Nick Bostrom’s multidisciplinary center for big-picture research on humanity’s long-term future). Saved in Kyle’s April 30th, 2020 Roam “Quick Capture” log. Historical Futurism

Related concepts

• 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.

• https://chatgpt.com/share/67ba1cba-bfdc-8000-90b6-e90bee9414cb
• https://www.perplexity.ai/page/the-institute-of-historical-fu-0LNth4beTmS3VqLAHesSmA
• https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X0TpRGXKdog
• I just assumed they were the museum thing cause that’s what it looked like from the outside.
• Learning 1: Institute of the Future = pretty cool
  • http://www.iftf.org/home/
• Learning 2: We should start a museum called “Museum of Yesterday’s Future”
  • Create a profession out of studying how people have viewed the future and combine that with futurism to learn from those trends
• Axios Post
• 🖼️ image (saved locally)

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:

• Leviathan Wakes — January 1st, 2019

• The Water Knife — February 8th, 2019

• I, Robot — March 6th, 2019

• Lock In — August 7th, 2019

• Related:: Historical Futurism

• Book Club

• Predicting the Future

• https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/science-fiction-future-technology

• https://interestingengineering.com/10-sci-fi-predictions-from-tv-and-movies-that-came-true