The Shady Business of Selling Futures

. This “future” is less a specific moment in time than an act of promotion. Invoking it can be such a powerful signifier of progress and optimism that it can burnish questionable or staid ideas and initiatives and motivate people even in the face of the most dismal realities. “What the future offers,” wrote German historian Reinhart Koselleck, “is compensation for the misery of the present.

In her bookJamie Pietruska explains how, amid the late 19th century’s scientific advancements and rising secularism, “prediction became a ubiquitous scientific, economic, and cultural practice,” manifesting in things like weather forecasting, fortune-telling, and prophecies about how business would grow or contract.

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