26th March 2021. Afrofutures | Innovation

The challenge of Afrofuturism; understanding transformative innovation

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#1: The challenge of Afrofuturism

The Object of Sound podcast looked at Afrofuturism recently, and its starting point was Alisha Wormsley’s notable artwork, ‘There are black people in the future,’ displayed briefly in Pittsburgh before being removed by the city after complaints. (Podcast running time 23’55”)

This helped me to understand one of the challenges of the Afrofuturists: that, as the host Hanif Abdurraqib explained (I think), they are trying to work out “How to build a world they can’t see but they know needs to exist.” And in turn, this helped me understand why the expressions of futurism were mostly cultural—music, fiction, fashion.

His guests were Sudan Archives, Jenna Wortham, and Kimberly Drew, and they walked through the lineage of this as they saw it. In music: Sun Ra; George Clinton, through Parliament and its offshoot Funkadelic; Alice Coltrane; more recently Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae. The fashion I was less able to follow, although the host enthused about Labelle’s otherworldy costumes, and there was a discussion about the imagery of the Black Panthers, even if this has maybe distracted from their programme. In fiction, Octavia Butler, of course.

Most of my futures work has been done in the form of consulting or practice, for clients who were confident of their legitimacy in the future world. In contrast, these black artists are trying to “prompt a possibility of a world that isn’t yet formed.” Or in Octavia Butler’s words, “to behave as if they have no limitation.”

And hence, perhaps, the sense that runs through all these musicians that the future might involve something alien. When Sun Ra reinvented himself—Sun Ra was not his birth name—it was as (says Wikipedia) “an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace”. Parliament’s breakthrough record, Mothership Connection, has a cover showing Clinton stepping out from a spaceship. One of Janelle Monae’s best-known lyrics is

I’m an alien from outer space/ A cybergirl without a face.

And in a sense this is a familiar strategy in work about desired or experimental futures, going back to Thomas More. If you can’t imagine it in this world, or if it is too dangerous to imagine it in this world, then imagine it in another and re-import from there.

#2: Understanding transformative innovation

Bill Janeway is a former venture capitalist who now teaches at Cambridge University on the relationship between technology, innovation and finance. He’s just put a series of lectures on ‘Venture Capital in the 21st Century’ online. The production values are high. These are some notes from the first lecture.

Janeway is interested in the first lecture in how innovation happens at the technological frontier: in his phrase, “by trial and error and error and error.” This is beyond the area of risk, where conventional finance operates, and also of uncertainty, where venture capital works. Instead, we are in the territory of ignorance. The future returns on investment therefore aren’t known, and conventional tools don’t work. In all of this he’s following Schumpeter and Keynes.

When we’re trying to invest at the frontier, there is much waste along the way. Innovating at the frontier depends on sources of funding that are decoupled from concerns about economic returns. We are in a world, in the words of Herbert Simon, where “attention is scarce, problems are immensely complex, and crucial information is absent.”

Hence the “mission-driven state” steps in. This is the reason why the state, typically, funds upstream science, combined further downstream with “novel applications of finance capital.” Innovation occures through a “three sided game” between the mission driven state, speculative finance, and the market economy. There is no stable equilibrium.

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