Futurism

This is a primer on the word “futurism” and on the hundred-year argument about who gets to use it.

When somebody picks up an old word or sentence for a new project, look at what came along with it.

tl;dr: Merriam-Webster gives “futurism” two senses: an Italian art movement and a point of view that finds meaning in the future. Three more are missing. People have fought over the word for more than a century. In English, it first named a school of reading biblical prophecy. The Italian poet Marinetti claimed it in 1909 for a movement whose founding text glorified war, ten years before co-writing the Fascist Manifesto. The science of the future called itself “futurology” and then settled on foresight and futures studies, while “futurism,” the noun it avoids, keeps its hold on the public, sold from conference stages and reclaimed by Afrofuturism and Solarpunk. In October 2023, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen rewrote a passage of Marinetti’s manifesto with technology standing where poetry had stood and listed him among the patron saints without comment. Five meanings now sit on top of one another in one noun, and whoever uses it is standing on one of them.

Table of contents

The paraphrase in the manifesto

On 16 October 2023, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, known as a16z, published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” under Marc Andreessen’s name. In a section called “Becoming Technological Supermen,” it says:

“To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: ‘Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.’ We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology.”1

The manifesto of a different time and place is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” published on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, and the passage is its seventh point. The standard English translation runs:

“Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.”2

All three sentences have been rewritten, the first two turned around with their sense intact. In the third, poetry becomes technology, the attack becomes an assault, and the forces acquire an article. Marinetti's theory of what poems are for arrives in 2023 as a theory of what technology is for. Andreessen supplies no author and no date.

The five meanings arrive here as layers, in the order they were laid down: a school of reading prophecy, an art movement and the counter-movement that fought it for the same name, a science of the future, a product sold from conference stages, and a family of deliberate reclamations.

The oldest layer: prophecy

Before it belonged to painters, futurism belonged to readers of the Book of Revelation. Of the four ways biblical scholarship reads the apocalypse, futurism is the one that places its prophecies in a time still to come. That reading is usually traced to the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Ribera, who published a long commentary on Revelation in 1590. The English word for it came later, in the polemical literature of the nineteenth century, where E. B. Elliott writes in 1862 about “the futurist scheme.” It spread through John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren, then the Scofield Reference Bible, and it survives in the paperback afterlife of the American bestseller series Left Behind.3

So the word entered English in a job where the future was already written and the reader’s task was to spot the signs. Every later futurism swapped the script for something else: machines, planning, capital, and liberation. The promise of privileged access to what comes next survived each swap.

Marinetti’s futurism

Marinetti’s manifesto has eleven numbered points. Point 4 makes the offer: “the beauty of speed,” a racing car “more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” modernity as an aesthetic.4 Two of the eleven settle the political question. Point 9 states:

“We want to glorify war — the world’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”

Point 10 follows:

“We want to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind, and to fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice and opportunism.”4

The political chronology follows quickly. The Partito Politico Futurista announced itself with a manifesto in February 1918 and was formally constituted in November with a program that mixed nationalism with women’s suffrage and an eight-hour day. In 1919 it allied itself with Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, founded on the Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan on 23 March. The written Fascist Manifesto appeared in Il Popolo d’Italia on 6 June 1919, credited to Marinetti together with the national syndicalist Alceste De Ambris. Marinetti walked out on 29 May 1920 over Mussolini’s accommodation with the monarchy and the Vatican, drifted back, entered the Accademia d’Italia in 1929, and stayed inside the regime’s cultural apparatus until his death in 1944.5

Art history splits the movement into primo futurismo from 1909 and secondo futurismo after the First World War, a workable filing convention. Günter Berghaus, whose Futurism and Politics deliberately spans 1909 to 1944, warns against using the split to keep the founding years clean.6 The violence was in the founding text, and the politics turned up nine years later to collect it.

Walter Benjamin supplied the formula that scholarship has used ever since. In the epilogue to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he quotes Marinetti’s manifesto on Italy’s war in Ethiopia, in which war is called beautiful because “it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body” and because “it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns,” and concludes, “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.”7

The counter-movement: Russia’s futurism

The same name was in use in Moscow, on opposite terms. In 1912 the Hylaea group of poets around David Burliuk, Alexei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov published “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” demanding that Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy be thrown overboard from the Ship of Modernity. When Marinetti came to Moscow in January 1914 expecting recognition, the Russian futurists met him with open hostility. A leaflet by Khlebnikov cast him as a foreign intruder, arriving to collect a movement he had no hand in making. Their own manifesto predated his visit by two years, and they kept the name while treating the Italian claim on it as an import they had not asked for.8

The Russian avant-garde then attached its energy to the order that came out of 1917 and watched the room shrink under Stalin. Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930. Italian futurism found a political home in fascism. Russian futurism was lifted by a revolution and then broken by a state.

The second birth: futurology

The science of the future was named separately by someone with the opposite politics. Ossip K. Flechtheim coined “Futurologie” in American exile in 1943, with a democratic claim built into the definition: the future as a matter for public argument. Fred Polak argued in 1955 that societies are pulled forward by the pictures they hold of themselves, and Bertrand de Jouvenel treated the work as an art of conjecture in 1964. Herman Kahn at the US military think tank RAND gave scenario work its Cold War grammar, and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock in 1970 made public expertise about tomorrow recognizable to a mass audience.9

Then the field began to leave both nouns, futurism and futurology, alone. Ziauddin Sardar’s “The Namesake” of 2010 inventories the resulting confusion and reports futurology as the most hype-laden option on the shelf.10 The institutions avoid futurism as well. The Association of Professional Futurists describes its purpose as “demonstrating the value of strategic foresight and Futures Studies”; the World Futures Studies Federation calls itself the global body for futures studies scholarship. Futurism appears in neither self-description, though the Association keeps the person-label futurist in its own name.11 The British government’s foresight program, launched in 1994 as Technology Foresight, dropped the Technology, and never carried either older noun.12 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby made the same move on the design side, naming their practice speculative design, which opens a spread of possible futures as material for argument and keeps its distance from work aimed at reaching one of them.13

Duden and Larousse know only the art movement. English is where the split lives, and Merriam-Webster carries both senses on the same page with nothing joining them: the art movement and “a point of view that finds meaning or fulfillment in the future rather than in the past or present.”14 The turning away is written into that second sense. Marinetti wanted the museums destroyed, and Afrofuturism, taken up below, claims the future as home ground because the past and the present are hostile terrain. Foresight and futures studies describe what they do as work on the present, which would explain why the field walked away from the word.

Marinetti’s offer still works. I own a Uniqlo T-shirt with “Futurism” printed on it. Nobody prints “foresight” on a T-shirt because the suffix names a stance, the way modernism and surrealism do, while foresight names a capacity and futurology a discipline. The reclaimers kept the suffix and put a prefix in front of it for the same reason. I work through this vocabulary in Futures Terminology.

The commercial layer

Futurism also went on sale by the hour, from corporate conference stages. Alf Rehn’s essay “On the Rarity of Uncommon Futurism” describes a futurism that traded boundary-pushing for the commodification of specific images of the future and names the mechanism: the keynotification of futurism.15

Ford shows what the word does when the practitioners decline it. Inside the company, the vocabulary is futuring, trends and scenarios, while a Yahoo Finance piece from 2016 described that same work as the company “channeling resources into futurism, a growing field of study and practice.”16 The noun comes from outside, supplied by the people who write about the practice.

Reclaiming the word

The claims that changed the word most came from people who had every reason to distrust it. Mark Dery coined Afrofuturism in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future,” defining it as

“Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture … might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’.”17

Dery himself draws no line back to Marinetti; the opposition between futurism and Afrofuturism came from later commentators. His prefix names whose technoculture the essay is about.

Nnedi Okorafor split off Africanfuturism in 2019 to put Africa where the existing term put the diaspora, describing hers as “specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West.”18 Lawrence Lek’s video essay put Sinofuturism on the map in 2016; Gulf Futurism is associated with Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Al Qadiri; Grace Dillon gathered Indigenous Futurisms; Catherine S. Ramírez named Chicanafuturism.19 Solarpunk, which imagines ecologically repaired futures, claims the term outright while sorting itself against its neighbors: “Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.”20 José Esteban Muñoz went the other way in Cruising Utopia, choosing futurity for a temporal orientation he wanted kept clear of any movement.21

Every one of those prefixes is an argument about whose future, or what kind of future, the plain word had been describing.

A growing list of futurisms

This list gathers the currents that claim the word, and it will keep growing. A current gets in when the people behind it use the word in their own name or stake an explicit claim to it. Labels that stayed with the critics who pinned them on, like the “reactionary futurism” of the next section, are left out. The order follows the year of the coinage or, where no coinage year is documented, of the earliest public text I could check. That puts Ethnofuturism, an Estonian term from a separate lineage, ahead of Afrofuturism, the term that started the family gathered in the previous section.

  • Ethnofuturism. The poet Karl Martin Sinijärv invented the word in 1989 inside Hirohall, a group of five young writers in Tartu, for art that joins archaic ethnic material with modern or futuristic form. The first conference of young Finno-Ugric artists, held in Tartu in 1994, carried it beyond Estonia. Since the late 2010s, far-right groups in the Baltics and in Ukraine have used the same word for an ethnonationalist program tied to the Intermarium project.22 Ethnofuturism. Bridge between national and international in Estonian poetry
  • Afrofuturism. Mark Dery coined it in 1994 in “Black to the Future,” an essay and set of interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose, for speculative fiction that treats African-American concerns in the context of technoculture. Afrofuturism on Wikipedia
  • Indigenous Futurisms. Grace Dillon, an Anishinaabe scholar at Portland State University, coined the term in 2003 in homage to Alondra Nelson’s collection on Afrofuturism and gathered the field in the 2012 anthology Walking the Clouds. Its introduction reads the collected stories as narratives of biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabemowin word for a people’s process of returning to itself.23 Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation About Indigenous Futurisms
  • Chicanafuturism. Catherine S. Ramírez introduced it in 2004 in an Aztlán article on the art of Marion C. Martinez. On her own site she writes that Chicanafuturist works “explore the nexus of race, gender, science, technology, the environment, and the future from a Chicanx and decolonial perspective.” Chicanafuturism, Catherine S. Ramírez
  • Gulf Futurism. Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Al Qadiri presented it in Dazed in November 2012 with nine examples, from the Kuwait Water Towers to municipal master plans. They read the Arabian Gulf, with its interior wastelands and its environmental collapse, as “a projection of our global future.”24 Al Qadiri & Al-Maria on Gulf Futurism
  • Solarpunk. Adam Flynn’s “Solarpunk: Notes toward a Manifesto” of September 2014 speaks of “our futurism” and sets it apart from cyberpunk and steampunk, so the claim to the word rests on the text while the name carries no -ism. The future it describes is built by repurposing what already exists. Solarpunk: Notes toward a Manifesto
  • Arabfuturism(s). Sulaïman Majali proposed it in 2015 in “Towards a possible manifesto; proposing Arabfuturism(s) (Conversation A),” a text set as fragments of a conversation. It calls Arabfuturism “a re-examination and interrogation of narratives that surround oceans of historical fiction” and places it “beyond the logic of the state.”25 Cost of Freedom: A Collective Enquiry, pages 151 to 153 (PDF)
  • Sinofuturism. Lawrence Lek’s hour-long video essay “Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD)” of 2016 calls it “an invisible movement” and “a science fiction that already exists.” The essay embraces seven stereotypes of Chinese society, among them computing, copying and gaming, and reads China’s technological development as a form of artificial intelligence. Lek names Afrofuturism and Gulf Futurism as his inspirations. Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD)
  • Africanfuturism. Nnedi Okorafor defined it in a blog post in October 2019 as a subcategory of science fiction with Africa at its center. It can stay on the continent, though it often reaches beyond it. The same post names Africanjujuism as its sibling in fantasy. Africanfuturism Defined
  • Pasifikafuturism. Gina Cole developed the term in “Wayfinding Pasifikafuturism,” her 2020 doctoral thesis at Massey University. Pasifikafuturism “situates Oceanic science fiction in the afterlife of colonisation” and works from the ancestral practices of wayfinding and waka building toward Pacific conceptions of the future. Wayfinding Pasifikafuturism
  • Zoefuturism. Yen Ooi takes the name from zoe, the Greek word for life, and describes “a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality.” The idea draws on Roger Ames’s zoetology and treats humans as becomings, shaped by constant change. Issue 302 of the BSFA journal Vector, guest-edited by Ooi and Stephen Oram and dated January 2026, is devoted to it, and Ooi lists that issue as the first official publication on Zoefuturism.26 Zoefuturism

The reactionary reclamation

That brings the argument back to 2023. The last section of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto is a list titled “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism,” fifty-six names, among them Ada Lovelace and Milton Friedman. Marinetti stands on it as a bare name, with no mention of the movement he founded. Nick Land, who named accelerationism and the neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment, is on the same list.27

The reception read the choice as deliberate. Janus Rose at Vice called Marinetti “one of the architects of Italian fascism” and put the point plainly: “Other futurist thinkers and artists exist. To call Marinetti in particular a ‘saint’ is a choice.” Dougald Lamont quoted points 9 and 10 of the 1909 manifesto and summarized: “The futurists were proto-fascists.”28 Ezra Klein, in the New York Times ten days later, reached for the noun himself while leaving the Marinetti passage untouched: “So call it what it is: reactionary futurism.” The formula welds a grim present to a bright tomorrow.29 Andreessen took the sentence without the name, and the reception supplied the noun, as at Ford.

The more careful readings stop short of equivalence. Andreessen’s text advocates no violence and no state power, and no public answer from a16z to the Marinetti question has surfaced.30 The borrowing establishes a line of descent the manifesto chose for itself: aggression as virtue, mastery as the proper relationship to the unknown, and an aesthetic that reads acceleration as beauty. From the Californian Ideology to the Texan Ideology follows that structure into land, energy and political authority. TESCREAL maps the neighboring cluster of tech ideologies.

An open fight

Words carry their histories whether or not their users know it. That was the point I made in a reply to a reader about this vocabulary, with “Luddite” as the parallel, a name taken from the machine breakers and turned into a slur: a meaning can shift for a century and still leave the older sense lingering in the connotations. My conclusion at the time was that I was looking for a better name for the work I do.31 Neo-Luddism is the same problem seen from the other end, a word taken from a defeated movement and turned into an instrument for closing arguments.

Everyone else is in the same position. The professional bodies picked foresight, the practitioners at Ford picked futuring, Muñoz picked futurity, my own search for a better name is unfinished, and the public went on saying futurism to all of us. Each of those departures left the noun standing in the open, which is what made the next claim on it cheap. It does its heaviest lifting for whoever wants the aura of the future without the argument that the suffix promises. The ones who claimed it on their own terms, from Dery through Okorafor to Solarpunk, changed what it meant by putting something in front of it.

A word nobody wants to carry plain is available to anybody who does, and the last hundred years suggest that somebody always turns up. So the open question is which of the five layers the next claimant builds on, whether they say so, and whose future gets easier to see once they do.

No future is neutral carries the claim underneath all of this: an image of the future has beneficiaries. Neo-Luddism, From the Californian Ideology to the Texan Ideology and TESCREAL map the contested name and the ideological neighborhood around it.

Berghaus’s Futurism and Politics is the standard reference on the Italian movement, Sardar’s “The Namesake” on the terminology fight inside futures studies, and Dery’s “Black to the Future” on the reclamation that started the family.61017

  1. Andreessen, M. (2023). “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen Horowitz, 16 October 2023, https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/. Roughly 5,200 words in fifteen sections. The quoted passage sits in the section “Becoming Technological Supermen”; the section placement comes from secondary analyses of the text. A full-text check of the manifesto for this note found neither “futurism” nor “futurist” anywhere in its own prose; the claim here is about the manifesto and the exchanges around it, and no wider claim about Andreessen’s vocabulary is intended. ↩

  2. Marinetti, F. T. (1909). “Manifesto of Futurism,” point 7, in the R. W. Flint translation, the standard English version, https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/. The relationship to Andreessen’s version is a paraphrase of all three sentences with “poetry” replaced by “technology” in the third and not a single-word substitution in an otherwise identical quotation. ↩

  3. On the four schools of apocalyptic interpretation and the futurist reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(Christianity) and https://www.preceptaustin.org/revelation-intro-systems. On Francisco Ribera (1537–1591), who began writing in 1585 and published his commentary on Revelation in 1590, and on the later English coinage: https://adventistbiblicalresearch.org/articles/futurisms-countdown-fact-or-fantasy. E. B. Elliott’s Horae Apocalypticae of 1862 uses “the futurist scheme.” The interpretive approach and the English word for it are separated by nearly three centuries, and no source found here dates the word itself earlier than the middle of the nineteenth century. ↩

  4. Marinetti, F. T. (1909). “Manifesto of Futurism,” points 4, 9 and 10, Flint translation, https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/. The manifesto ran on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. Point 4 in full: “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” The body quotes only the two short phrases, which carry no dash. “Modernity as an aesthetic” is my own gloss on that point. “Scorn for woman” appears inside the same sentence as the glorification of war, as part of the list in point 9, and not as a separate article. The quotations from points 9 and 10 keep the punctuation of the source translation, including its dashes. ↩ ↩2

  5. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_Political_Party, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti. The dates: party manifesto, February 1918; formal constitution, November 1918; San Sepolcro meeting, 23 March 1919; publication of the Fascist Manifesto in Il Popolo d’Italia on 6 June 1919; Marinetti’s departure, 29 May 1920; Accademia d’Italia, 1929; death, 1944. The 1919 relationship between the futurist party and the Fasci is documented as an alliance; no clean date of formal merger exists in the sources consulted. The division of writing between Marinetti and De Ambris is undocumented. ↩

  6. Berghaus, G. Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944. Berghahn Books, https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BerghausFuturism. Berghaus confirms futurist participation in the founding of fascism while rejecting the simple equation of the two, and the publisher’s own description notes how little is known about the transition years from 1918 to 1922. ↩ ↩2

  7. Benjamin, W. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” epilogue, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books. The Marinetti passage Benjamin quotes comes from Marinetti’s manifesto on the Abyssinian war and runs to five sentences beginning “War is beautiful because”; two of them are quoted here. ↩

  8. On the Hylaea group and the 1912 manifesto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Futurism. On Marinetti’s January 1914 visit to Moscow and the hostility he met, including the Khlebnikov leaflet: http://www.ruthenia.ru/sovlit/j/3280.html. On Burliuk and the later trajectory of the group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Burliuk. The record in these sources of open hostility, a refusal of any communication, and the leaflet’s framing of Marinetti as a foreign intruder; reading the 1914 rebuff as a dispute over who owned the name; and the contrast between the Italian and Russian political outcomes are my own summary of these sources. ↩

  9. Flechtheim, O. K., who coined “Futurologie” in exile in 1943; de Jouvenel, B., L’Art de la conjecture (1964, English as The Art of Conjecture, 1967); Polak, F., The Image of the Future (1955); Kahn, H., and the RAND tradition of scenario work; Toffler, A., Future Shock (1970), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock. On the coinage: https://www.sszp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020_conference_METES__p-53__KlinecI_History-World-Futurological-_4a.pdf. Flechtheim’s dates are given inconsistently across the research base, since 1943 refers to the coinage and 1966 to History and Futurology; the two should not be conflated. ↩

  10. Sardar, Z. (2010). “The Namesake: Futures; futures studies; futurology; futuristic; foresight: What’s in a name?” Futures 42(3), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2009.11.001. ↩ ↩2

  11. Association of Professional Futurists, https://www.profuturists.org/about-the-association: “dedicated to promoting professional excellence and demonstrating the value of strategic foresight and Futures Studies for their clients and/or employers.” World Futures Studies Federation, https://wfsf.org/about-wfsf/ and https://wfsf.org/about-futures-studies/, describing itself as the independent global peak body for futures studies scholarship. The word “futurism” appears on neither of the pages checked. ↩

  12. On the UK Foresight Programme, which began under the 1993 white paper Realising Our Potential, launched in 1994 as Technology Foresight, lost the word “Technology” after consultation: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PN-97/POST-PN-97.pdf. On corporate foresight as a management term from the 2000s: https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/98319109/Corporate_foresight_An_emerging_field_with_a_rich_tradition.pdf. ↩

  13. On speculative design and its self-demarcation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_design. Dunne and Raby’s phrasing comes from a talk and is paraphrased here, since the full transcript was not verified. ↩

  14. Duden, https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Futurismus; DWDS, https://www.dwds.de/wb/Futurismus; Larousse, https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/divers/futurisme/54123, all three defining Futurismus and futurisme as the Italian art movement and very little else, so the English split has no equivalent in German or French. Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/futurism, which lists the art movement “begun in Italy about 1909” and “a point of view that finds meaning or fulfillment in the future rather than in the past or present” as separate senses. ↩

  15. Rehn, A. “On the Rarity of Uncommon Futurism,” Thinking Askew on Medium, 29 January 2015, https://medium.com/thinking-askew/on-the-rarity-of-uncommon-futurism-f46791c0c891. The Readwise capture of the piece carries it under the title “When Futures Turn Boring.” The full text was checked for this note: “call it the keynotification of futurism” stands there verbatim, and the surrounding sentence describes futurism becoming less interested in pushing the boundaries of knowledge and more interested in commodifying specific images of the future. A second phrase, “the appearance of future expertise, not the substance of it,” which earlier glossary material attributed to this essay, appears nowhere in it. ↩

  16. On the vocabulary used inside Ford, where the work is described as futuring, trends and scenarios along STEEP factors: https://www.thecurrent.com/innovation/ford-chief-futurist-jennifer-brace. On the journalistic framing: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ford-house-futurist-her-job-212809798.html, 1 March 2016. ↩

  17. Dery, M. (1994). “Black to the Future,” the essay that coined Afrofuturism, in interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose. The definition is reproduced identically across the secondary literature, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism. The ellipsis in the body stands for a clause the source sets off with dashes: “and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” No Marinetti or Italian futurism reference appears in Dery’s own text in any of the sources checked; the opposition between the two terms is a reading introduced by later authors. ↩ ↩2

  18. Okorafor, N. (2019). “Africanfuturism Defined,” https://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html. ↩

  19. Lek, L., “Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD),” 2016, https://www.lawrencelek.com/works/sinofuturism, described by the artist as a critical and playful approach to subverting cultural clichés. Lek names Afrofuturism and Gulf Futurism, the latter associated with Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Al Qadiri, as his inspirations. Grace Dillon coined Indigenous Futurisms in 2003 and gathered the field in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012); Catherine S. Ramírez introduced Chicanafuturism in 2004. The primary sources for Gulf Futurism, Indigenous Futurisms and Chicanafuturism are given in the section “A growing list of futurisms.” ↩

  20. Flynn, A. (2014). “Solarpunk: Notes toward a Manifesto,” Project Hieroglyph, Arizona State University, 4 September 2014, https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/. The same sentence was later carried over verbatim as point 8 of “A Solarpunk Manifesto” (ReDes); Flynn’s essay is the original. ↩

  21. Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press. ↩

  22. On the origin: the linked article from the Estonian Literary Magazine (no. 15, autumn 2002) lists the five Hirohall members and calls Sinijärv “the direct inventor of the term.” Kari Sallamaa, “Sata vuotta etnofuturismia,” https://www.tuglas.fi/sata-vuotta-etnofuturismia, dates the invention to a gathering in May 1989. The 1994 conference of young Finno-Ugric artists in Tartu is recorded at http://www.suri.ee/etnofutu/texts/moiste.html. On the later use: Wishart, A. (2018). “How the Ukrainian far-right has become one of the biggest proponents of Intermarium,” New Eastern Europe, 25 September 2018, https://neweasterneurope.eu/2018/09/25/ukrainian-far-right-become-one-biggest-proponents-intermarium/. Wishart describes far-right groups, particularly in the Baltics, building a philosophical backbone for Intermarium under the name Ethnofuturism, reports an “Ethnofutur Conference” held by Sinine Äratus (Blue Awakening) in Tallinn in February 2018, and writes that Ukraine’s National Corps “supports and shares Ethnofuturist philosophy.” The dating to the late 2010s and the word “ethnonationalist” follow Wikipedia’s article on Ethnofuturism, which speaks of an adoption by the “alt-right.” Wishart’s term is far right, and the entry follows that usage. Wikipedia’s second source for the claim, a paper by Louis Wierenga, was not opened for this note. ↩

  23. Dillon in conversation with Pedro Neves Marques, e-flux journal no. 120, September 2021: “In 2003, when I coined the term ‘Indigenous Futurism’ (later ‘Futurisms’), I was doing it as an homage to Alondra Nelson’s collection.” The plural came later: “Indigenous Futurisms, in the plural, was a choice that I made after 2012.” So three dates belong to this entry: the coinage in 2003, the anthology Walking the Clouds (University of Arizona Press) in 2012, and the plural after that. The anthology is online at https://monoskop.org/images/0/0f/Dillon_Grace_L_ed_Walking_the_Clouds_An_Anthology_of_Indigenous_Science_Fiction_2012.pdf. ↩

  24. The Dazed piece is dated 14 November 2012 and is the earliest public statement of the term I could open. It places Gulf Futurism next to the European art movement: “Similar to early 20th century Euro-Futurism and mid-century American kitch and retro-futurism.” The spelling is the source’s. Secondary literature dates Al-Maria’s work on the idea to 2007 or 2008; no dated primary text from those years was found. ↩

  25. The PDF prints the author’s name as Sulaiman Majali and carries the copyright years 2015 and 2016; later scholarship cites the text as Majali 2015, pages 151 to 153. A reworked version, “Towards Arabfuturism/s,” appeared in Novelty magazine; that page and the artist’s own copy at smajali.co.uk could not be opened for this note. On the start of Majali’s Arabfuturism project in July 2015: Sobczyk, P. (2020). “Space is the Place: Reflections on Arabfuturism,” PARSE Journal 11, https://parsejournal.com/article/space-is-the-place/. ↩

  26. Ooi’s page carries no date, and no coinage year is claimed here. Three items carry dates: the call for proposals for Vector 302, published on 1 April 2025 with the same definition, https://vector-bsfa.com/2025/04/01/issue-302-zoefuturism-call-for-proposals/; Ooi’s list of works, which dates the issue to January 2026 and calls it “the first official publication on Zoefuturism,” https://yenooi.com/all-works.html; and a conversation published by Vector on 28 February 2026, in which Stephen Oram speaks of “Zoefuturism, the phrase she coined,” https://vector-bsfa.com/2026/02/28/zoefuturism-yen-ooi-and-stephen-oram-in-conversation/. The print issue itself was not read for this note. ↩

  27. The “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism” list closes the manifesto with fifty-six names, https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/. The names run in alphabetical order by first name, so Marinetti’s place in the sequence, between Elting Morison and Frederic Bastiat, is an artifact of the sorting and carries no editorial signal. He appears without annotation. Nick Land appears on the same list and is widely described as the originator of accelerationism and of the neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment; no documented Marinetti lineage runs through his work, which is derived primarily from Deleuze and Guattari, so his presence is recorded here as a fact about the list. ↩

  28. Rose, J. (2023). “Major Tech Investor Calls Architect of Fascism a ‘Saint’ in Unhinged Manifesto,” Vice, 17 October 2023. The historian Adam Tooze, interviewed in Foreign Policy on 21 November 2023, read the borrowing the same way. Lamont, D., “Uncritical thinking,” Substack, 29 January 2025, which quotes points 9 and 10 of the 1909 manifesto directly. Public URLs for these three pieces were not verified for this note; the quotations are as recorded in the research base. A Jacobin cover story from early 2024 reads the reference the same way and adds Marinetti’s antisemitism of 1939 as context. ↩

  29. Klein, E. (2023). “The Reactionary Futurism of Marc Andreessen,” The New York Times, 26 October 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/marc-andreessen-reactionary-futurism.html. The full sentence: “Rather, it’s the pairing of the reactionary’s sodden take on modern society with the futurist’s starry imagining of the bright tomorrow. So call it what it is: reactionary futurism.” Klein does not discuss the Marinetti paraphrase or the patron saints list. ↩

  30. The caution is drawn from two of the sources most willing to name the pattern. The essay “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto revisited” at artefactsofwriting.com, 10 June 2025, writes that “The ghost of Marinetti in Andreessen’s prose raises the specter of a technofascist temptation,” and both that essay and Tooze stop short of asserting political identity between Andreessen and the historical futurists. No public statement by Andreessen or a16z addressing the Marinetti reference specifically was found. Asked about Klein’s column and its “reactionary futurist” label in a Q&A with James Pethokoukis for the Faster, Please! Substack on 10 November 2023, Andreessen leaves the word alone, praising Klein’s intelligence and moving on to the CHIPS Act: https://fasterplease.substack.com/p/my-long-read-q-and-a-with-marc-andreessen. An a16z podcast of 14 November 2023 responds to critics of the manifesto in general; only an excerpt of the transcript was checked. ↩

  31. An exchange about connotations lingering and the Luddite parallel comes from an unpublished note of my own written in reply to a reader’s comment; the conclusion recorded there is that the search had moved from dropping the label to finding a better name for the work. See also Futures Terminology and https://garden.johanneskleske.com/futures-terminology, where the argument runs that “nobody who stands on stage and proclaims, ‘This is the future (and it’s inevitable)!’ can call themself a futurist.” ↩

Linked References

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
This is a Primer primer on AGI.
From the Californian Ideology to the Texan Ideology
This is a Primer primer on the shift from the Californian Ideology to the Texan Ideology.
Futures terminology
What is this work we do with futures, and what do we call it? We seem not to be able...
Neo-Luddism
This is a Primer primer on neo-Luddism and on the two-hundred-year career of the insult it is built from.

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