A Citizen's Guide to the Future

Future Tense was initially conceived of as a one-year event collaboration between New America, Arizona State University, and Slate magazine. But here we are a dozen years later still exploring the impact of technology on society through our daily ideas journalism and a series of events, all under our Slate tagline: “A Citizen’s Guide to the Future.”

The question of how to preserve internet freedom has been a mainstay of Future Tense — an inquiry that looks very different in 2022 than it did in 2010 — but our citizen’s guide to the future has also focused on space exploration, climate change, AI governance, and many other subjects. The Future Tense team is small but benefits tremendously from the substantive expertise of New America policy programs, ASU’s academic units, and Slate’s writers. It is to amplify them, first and foremost, that this platform exists.

And people often ask how a D.C. think and action tank, a public university, and an online general-interest publication can have a longstanding, productive collaboration, given the differing interests and character of the institutions involved. The short answer is “Torie” — our extraordinarily talented editor, Torie Bosch, whose diplomatic skills match her journalistic chops. The long answer is that our three stakeholders, while very different entities, do share a strong conviction that we need to have more inclusive deliberations about where our country is headed. The governance and development of science and technology cannot be left solely to scientists and technologists in a democracy; we all need to have a say in designing our future. And for that, we need to become avid storytellers, as well as curators and translators of academic expertise and policy, seeking to expand understanding of how technology impacts the way we live. Our three institutions also share a belief that often the best we can do is identify the right questions, and not pretend that we possess all the answers. But these partnerships are fragile and can often end the first time someone at one of the partner organizations balks at a particular article or event, which makes having thick skin so important for the three “Future Tensers.”

For a representative flavor of what we cover, the four most recent articles we published as I write this have been on solar panels, the impact of climate change on military bases, the vulnerability of your health data to third-party commercialization, and whether you should allow guests to charge an electric vehicle at your home. We ideally seize upon a very concrete story or scenario to discern larger, often unexpected and surprising, truths. On the event side, our most recent inquiries looked at how climate change is impacting coastal America (in partnership with New America’s Future of Land and Housing Program) and how U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and some of our sci-fi authors (we publish speculative fiction, too!) think about the role of imagination in policymaking.

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