Most futures work begins with the assumption that tomorrow is available to us. That with enough strategy, creativity, or capital, we can build something better than what came before. What if your intellectual lineage doesn’t include optimism? What if you were trained to see power as persistent, systems as durable, and change as the exception?
I learned this early, before I was a futurist, before I was a designer. Back when I was an undergrad studying African American Studies at UC Berkeley. The frameworks I encountered there traced how power endures. How history repeats in loops designed to keep some of us locked out of time altogether.
That was my first real exposure to Afro-pessimist thought. It offered clarity. It gave language to what I had always felt: that for many of us, the future was structurally foreclosed.
Years later, when I entered design and foresight, that training never left. The tools were sharp, the intentions good. Every visioning session felt like a performance of forgetting.
The Optimism Industrial Complex
There’s a machine running in every conference room where futures work happens. It churns out the same product: better tomorrows through better thinking. Innovation labs that cost six figures and refuse to study failure. Design sprints that prototype solutions without examining what broke. Strategy sessions where teams imagine abundance without naming scarcity.
This machine runs on forgetting. It requires participants to check their trauma at the door, to treat history as background noise, to believe that sticky notes and good intentions can engineer away structural harm.
The optimism industrial complex lets organizations feel innovative without being accountable. It lets teams feel visionary without facing the communities their previous visions displaced. It turns transformation into a product you can buy.
If you’ve ever sat in a design thinking session and felt something was missing — if you’ve wondered why every solution looks the same, why every process skips the hardest questions — you’re feeling the edges of this machine.
What Wake Work Looks Like
Christina Sharpe calls it “wake work” — the ongoing labor of staying with the truths that haunt us, of tracking the afterlives of what we’d rather forget. This became my method.
When organizations hire me to “reimagine,” I start by asking what they’ve erased. What they wrecked on the way to whatever metrics made them feel innovative.
Last year, an impact investor wanted help rethinking their portfolio. I walked them through a map of extraction: the neighborhoods their capital had displaced, the founders they ignored, the metrics that dressed up harm as efficiency. Someone finally said, “We focused so much on what we wanted to build, we forgot to look at what we were breaking.”
Exactly. That’s the problem with vision: it’s easy to look forward and miss what’s under your feet.
When I run scenario planning, I insist we start with worst-case continuities. What if the system doesn’t change? What if your intervention fails? What if this “problem” is a design feature working as intended?
Many facilitators rush past these questions. I ask people to sit with them. You can’t build anything real from a foundation of wishful thinking.
Futures As Survival Practice
The futures I care about carry scar tissue. They emerge through refusal, adaptation, the daily practice of making something from nothing.
Black people have been doing futures work for centuries — to survive what the world was. We learned to imagine around corners. To prepare for the worst while holding space for something else. To build in the cracks of systems designed to disappear us.
This is futures work without the machinery of optimism. The uneven, unsexy labor of staying alive and helping others do the same.
The optimism industrial complex promises that the right process will deliver the right future. Pessimism offers the discipline to work from what’s actually here.
I choose pessimism.
