Half of the British political world thinks we are insufficiently scared about the present; the other half thinks we are insufficiently excited about the future. The latter is a non-partisan movement, or at least a cross-partisan one. From fully-automated luxury communism, through centrist Abundance, to the more right-coded Looking for Growth, all the way to Anglo-futurism (somehow paradoxically simultaneously futurist and reactionary), policy thinkers are rejecting incrementalism and learned helplessness and articulating provocative future visions that could – with a tweaked planning system and Natural England ritually immolated – lie just a couple of parliaments away.

All these movements could usefully learn from Could Should Might Don’t. It is less clear that anyone else will. Nick Foster has worked for, among others, Dyson, Nokia and Google’s highly speculative Moonshots division. What he appears to have learned, mostly, is that he hates other futurologists – or, as he calls them, ‘futurists’, with a lower-case ‘f’ to distinguish them from followers of Marinetti.

He sets out a helpful taxonomy. ‘Could futurists’ love science fiction and paint shiny pictures of glass city domes and flying cars. ‘Should futurists’ set priorities (explicitly or implicitly), make plans and track Key Performance Indicators. ‘Might futurists’ identify scenarios, chart uncertainty with Voros Cones and produce design prototypes. ‘Don’t futurists’ warn of the unintended consequences of the other three; they endlessly creosote Chesterton’s Fence, standing athwart futurism yelling ‘Stop!’

The most entertaining sections come when Foster lays into each tribe in turn. Could Futurism is full of ‘escapist, bombastic tropes’. Their natural habitat is the TED talk or the poundshop version as a conference keynote:

Having marched confidently out on to the stage, dressed in the T-shirt-and-suit-jacket uniform of the professional public speaker, they wait for the lights to dim, steeple their fingers in messianic contemplation and pause for silence before making a single, provocative statement.

Their shallow science-fictional visions are fatally compromised by their roots in the myth of the heroic individual. Foster prefers a ‘Future Mundane’, where new technologies co-exist with old and most people’s lives continue much as ever.

Should Futurism revels in spurious precision:

It bases its ideas about the future on the trajectory of measured data and finds its roots deep within our adoption of the scientific method, an approach that has become so ingrained in us that we trust it perhaps more than we should….But once the line on a chart changes from solid to dotted and we step beyond the present into the future, these numbers cease to be data. These dotted lines don’t know the future; they’re projections, hunches or stories that are created from what’s happened in the past. So let’s call them what they are. They’re ‘numeric fiction’.

And all this aims to deliver a version of ‘better’ that is assumed to be agreed but actually waves away competing aspirations.

Might Futurists are Foster’s own tribe, but he still mocks their love of the plural ‘futures’ as a ‘trendy affectation’ and worries about thinktanks (which he sites in this quadrant, though arguably they belong in Should) as

peculiar and shadowy players… taking up the slack where governments don’t want to look (or lack the resources to do so) and driving agendas based on their faction’s agreed-upon version of ‘better’.

And because Don’t Futurism relies on many of the same tools as the other quadrants (storytelling, data extrapolation, scenario development)

it can quickly unravel into dogmatism, pulling populations apart into simplistic, pugnacious factions of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ and leading to emphatically oppositional politics, ideological extremism, and the perils of all-or-nothing bigotry.

At its best, Could Should Might Don’t is an entertaining demolition of futurology as an industry. Even when it misses the mark, it often manages to hit another target. (For example, Foster both dislikes science fiction and has relatively little recent exposure to it, so what he is criticising in Could Futurism is a straw man. Sadly, this straw man coincides exactly with the etiolated Gernsbackian version beloved by Silicon Valley, so, despite its thinness, his criticism holds true.) We do, though, need shiny pictures of the future – solarpunk, for example – if only to counter the worst of the alternatives.

The book also promises to be a guide to thinking about the future, and here it delivers nothing practical. No general reader is going to employ a strategy firm (we have not yet reached fully automated luxury consultancy); few are unfortunate enough even to be bamboozled by conference speeches. Civilians would be much better off with Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable, while professionals will find Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View more instructive. In positive terms, Foster’s only real recommendation – a sound one – is to take an ethnographic approach, homing in on specific and granular differences. As William Gibson said (and Foster might have heard had he not distrusted all science fiction, not only that particular flavour): ‘The future is here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.’