A Visit with Optimistic Futurist Joe Tankersley, Author of Reimagining Our Tomorrows

Joe Tankersley

I've always been an amateur futurist it seems. Perhaps it was the 1964-65 World's Fair that set the wheels spinning. The Ford, GM and Disney Pavilions showed us fantastical visions of tomorrow. (Nothing quite so fantastical as Woody Allen's Sleeper, but close.)

In 1964, pictures of the future were all around us. I remember eating Cheerios and reading the back of the box over breakfast in which they showed a car of the future floating on a cushion of air so you could float from land onto lakes. That was supposed to happen the 80's. Back to the Future II showed skateboards that were like hovercraft as well. We apparently love the concept of hovering.

All this to say that I've routinely taken and interest in articles and books about the future. In the 80's I used to take Futurist magazine out of the library and we all read Toffler's Future Shock. Megatrends seemed to have a pretty hefty title and created a measure of buzz. And who among us has not read Brave New World or 1984?

A couple years ago a friend and I outlined a concept for a novel about a positive future, primarily as a response to the seeming multitude of dystopian futures being written about or portrayed in movies today. That exercise, of trying to solve all the world's problems in the 21st century, served as a good appetizer for Joe Tankersley's Reimagining Our Tomorrows which I acquired at the beginning of 2019.

According to his Amazon.com bio, the author is "a futurist, writer and advocate for better tomorrows. He combines his experience as a storyteller with the tools of strategic foresight to help others create compelling visions for our futures." (You read his full bio here.)

EN: What is your background and how did you come to be an optimist about the future?

Joe Tankersley: I’ve always been a storyteller and I’ve always been intrigued by the stories we tell about the future. About twenty years ago those two interests came together. At the time I was working as a writer for Walt Disney Imagineering and was assigned to a project on the life of Walt Disney. It was there that I discovered Walt’s vast body of work dedicated to imagining “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrows.” In fact, the first time I heard the term optimistic futurist was in an interview that Ray Bradbury did talking about the old Disney Tomorrowland episodes. It immediately clicked for me and I knew that this was the perfect way to combine my skills with my desire to contribute to better tomorrows.

EN: Over the course of a lifetime there have been many predictions about the end of life as we know it. The energy crisis, the population bomb and the threat of nuclear war were dark clouds during the past half century and global warming is the most recent iteration of this fearful end-of-the-world future. Is progress being made?

JT: Being an optimistic futurist is not always easy. The threat of climate change is a perfect example of the kind of challenge that can make it difficult to imagine a positive future. Being optimistic means putting end of the world scenarios into perspective. I always tell people, the past was messy, the present is messy and so there is no reason to imagine that the future won’t be messy, too. But, I do believe we have the capacity to nudge our future in positive directions. History supports this idea. Less people live in poverty today than ever before, fewer die from wars, more children and women survive childbirth. The list of our positive accomplishments is long. Humans have a fascinating ability to often wait to the very last minute to address the biggest problems but when we get mobilized we tend to be very good at imagining our way out of these predicaments.

EN: We pretty much know that bad news sells, that wars have been invented to sell newspapers. Is the media at fault for the widespread dystopian views of the future? How will this be fixed?

JT: I believe the media does have a powerful impact on our current lack of optimism about the future. While bad news has always sold there was a time when optimistic visions of the future were popular. There may be many reasons for the shift. One is the overwhelming flood of media outlets. The competition for attention has the effect of driving sensationalism. There is also the Future Shock factor that Alvin Toffler described 50 years ago. We are living in a time when change is happening so fast that our imaginations have a hard time keeping up. The result is that we retreat to darker stories.

This lack of optimistic imagination is, in my mind, the biggest threat to our future. Far greater than killer robots, or surveillance societies or out of control AI. Fixing it will not be easy. I am hopeful because I see a growing thirst from the public for positive stories. There are a handful of media outlets that are starting to try and serve this desire. If they can survive and grow, then we might see a slow shift back toward more optimistic storytelling.

We can support this movement by teaching children the value of critical imagination. Foresight should be taught in schools just like we teach history.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

EN: Have there been any new studies (neuroscience or psychology) that show how what we imagine (or tell ourselves) will create what happens?

JT: I’m not aware of any large-scale studies that look at this question at the community or nation level. There has been research done that suggests corporations with a positive vision of their future tend to outperform others. A great deal of research has also been done on the individual level- everything from the power of visualization to help athletes perform to the role of hope in a person’s health, academic achievement, and happiness. Most of those studies find a positive correlation.

EN: Social media was purportedly going to bring people together. Have you been surprised by the polarization and rise of hatred caused by social media?

JT: I’m not sure that I would agree social media has caused these problems. It has certainly been a platform for ugly views that have long been widespread. By bringing these views out of the darkness it certainly has helped to embolden some fringe players and has contributed to specific acts of violence. Long term, though, I actually believe that by exposing these views to a much wider audience we will see a greater effort to silence the hatred being spread. Transparency will turn out to be one of the most powerful weapons for protecting democracy and promoting equality in the future.

EN: What kinds of things have you learned by writing this book?

JT: The hardest thing for me in writing Reimagining Our Tomorrows was figuring out how to create positive future visions that were still filled with some sense of conflict and excitement. It is much easier to write exciting stories about the end of the world than to write stories that reflect a positive outlook without becoming fantasy.

EN: What was the most surprising feedback you’ve received from readers?

JT: I’m surprised by the diversity of readers who have responded favorably to the book. I really imagined that it would appeal to audiences between the ages of 18-35, but I’ve had people of all ages tell me that it changed the way they thought about the future. That is always humbling.

Related Links
Find it here on Amazon:
Reimagining Our Tomorrows
My review of Reimagining Our Tomorrows:
Feeling Blue about the Future? Not All Futurists Are Dystopian