Jet set science: Elites,knowledge infrastructures,and the history of long-term futures

Abstract

In critical time studies, an important critique of “long-term thinking”—a politics prioritizing societal, environmental, and planetary challenges outlasting the short-term cycles of democracies, industries, and even human generations—has emerged. According to Bastian, decontextualized visions of the long term may obscure important, albeit less remote times of change and conflict; and may hide ethnocentric time markers beneath the veneer of moral self-evidence associated with serious long-term challenges. However, futures are not a level playing field. The possibility of “chronowashing”—elite capture of dominant temporalities through discourses about the long-term future—raises dual challenges for time studies and the history of science. How d1id futures come to be subject to power imbalances in the production of knowledge? In this article, I will argue that the answer depends on how to regard futures as a form of knowledge. Drawing on a history of how futures studies affected climate science, I argue that long-term futures were not so much an object of knowledge as a dynamic objective of knowledge, pursued within a networked information system connecting industrial, governmental, academic, and military institutions. Because this knowledge infrastructure required transnational, cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary, and technological coordination, a “jet set” of well-connected and frequent-flying science-policy entrepreneurs gained outsize influence on knowledge production for long-term futures. While this history speaks to power imbalances that have shaped “long-term thinking,” the knowledge infrastructure for long-term futures has also been a platform for novel social and environmental problematizations. However, historical inquiry can provide more precision about when elites veered into elitism, embedding sociological blind spots into epistemic outputs.