Fixing the ‘Fix’, Or: Why My Feelings About Corporate Futurism Matter!

Corporate futurism is a growing practice in which companies engage with foresight methods in a bid to manage uncertainty, understand complexity, build resilience against perceived threats, and unearth opportunities for growth. The practice is contested on various fronts – legitimacy, efficacy, political nature, intellectual lineage – and yet, a varied, distributed, thriving market for corporate futurism services exists. For some, corporate futurism presents as a legitimate tool for tackling the overwhelming task of strategically navigating the permacrisis. For others, it masquerades, enchants and – ultimately – upholds the status quo, through its “cruel optimism”-esque power (Berlant, 2011) to lock those who undertake it into a sense of ‘having done something’, preventing them from materially challenging the present (whilst charging a tidy sum for the pleasure). Corporate futurism, then, as a practice and a market object, generates an array of affective reactions, from excitement, hope and a sense of agency to disparagement, frustration and disgust. For some, myself included, it evokes an ever-shifting combination of them all. It is these shifting, sometimes contradictory, often puzzling, feelings – taken together as an uncomfortable sense of dissonance, “there’s something not right here” – that prompted my looking deeper into corporate futurism’s promises, product and practices (Milne, forthcoming). In this paper, I return to those initial feelings not simply as a reminder of the explicit contradictions in the practice that prompted the study of seemingly irrational and potentially unethical strategic action; instead, I seek to gain understanding through those mixed feelings by taking them seriously and utilising their resource as an affective form of knowledge, a corporeal “inner diaphragm” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002) which acts as a phenomenological filter for processing a subject’s surrounding environment. As such, I listen when I assert to myself that there are implications left on the table in my study of corporate futurism: ‘it’s not that which is bothering me, so there must be something more to uncover here’. I dive into this uncovering by providing a sketch of the journey I undertook in understanding what my unresolved feelings were, landing on them being a sense of ‘ick’ towards corporate futurism. I then explore why I still felt (feel!) these feelings despite undertaking a sociological inquiry which grasped at corporate futurism’s epistemic machinery, operationalisation as a decision-making tool, and affective practice. By comparing these ‘leftover’ feelings to critical-emotional responses to technocapitalist fixes (Harvey, 2001; Morozov, 2013; Segal, 2017), I then draw on Sianne Ngai’s “Theory of the Gimmick” (2020) to term a ‘fix’ which induces a strong oscillatory reaction in critics, flitting between a sense of squandered opportunity with a hint of hope in its redemption, a ‘gimm(ick)’. I conclude that – for me – corporate futurism can be redeemed if and when it keeps its promises. Though the broader finding of this paper is that the very process of treating critic’s feelings as mattering is worth further pursuit for wanting scholars: what might seem initially as a personal bid to resolve those ‘end of study’ remaining feelings in fact can be a resource for uncovering and working towards critically-informed suggestions for alternatives which ‘work’ by the measure of those who reject technofix-esque proposals for change.