Word: futurist
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...some scandal at the Armory Show. Picabia returned to New York in 1915, prophesying that the city would soon become the center of modernist effort because its reality had made it the modernist site to beat all others. "Your New York," he told the press, "is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses modern thinking in its architecture, its life, its spirit"--everything but its art, which Dada would supply. This image of the city as social compressor also comes out in Man Ray's neatly epigrammatic New York, 1917--a bunch of slats, stacked to mimic the setbacks...
...Between the computer revolution and the end of the cold war, between the birth pangs of the international economy and the death throes of the traditional nuclear family, the demand for solid, scientifically based forecasting is greater than ever. Hard numbers are difficult to come by since so much "futurist" work goes on under the guise of economic forecasting or strategic analysis, but corporate America clearly has the religion. The generation of strategic planners who came of age in the '60s and '70s has planted its forward-looking credo so firmly in U.S. boardrooms that it permeates the corporate hierarchy...
Paranoia could be the only sane strategy for getting through the '90s. When sci-fi solon William Gibson is asked if his fiction is an optimistic or pessimistic view of the future, he replies, "A realistic view of the present. I don't think of myself as a futurist. I think of myself as someone who inhabits a baffling and in many ways terrifying present in 1996. Science fiction is always about the year in which it is written. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a McCarthyite fantasy. Today, I think, the alien is inside, a virus of one kind...
...military's microsensors and omniscient rows of video monitors may be expensive, but much of the technology needed to attack information systems is low-cost (a computer, a modem), widely available (a willing hacker) and just as efficient (one phone call). "It's the great equalizer," says futurist Alvin Toffler. "You don't have to be big and rich to apply the kind of judo you need in information warfare. That's why poor countries are going to go for this faster than technologically advanced countries." An infowarrior could be anyone in the checkout line at the local computer store...
...future supermarkets, consumers will shop without having to pay cash or sign credit-card receipts. An infrared or microwave ``interrogator'' could register each consumer as soon as he or she enters a store and be ready with account information when the time comes to pay. Supermarket futurist Gary Lind, a partner at Arnold Ward Studios/Lind Design in Hempstead, New York, envisions ``intelligent carts'' that will use optical lasers to scan bar codes automatically as items are moved in or out of a shopping cart, thus enabling customers to keep a running tab. These carts might even be programmed to organize...