CASHING IN ON TOMORROW

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

Who will fight the next war in the Middle East? Where will the best new jobs be found next year, and where will the most old ones be lost? How much will a gallon of gas cost in July 1998? What will be the hot consumer-electronics products of 2008? How will the Internet change commerce in the 21st century? Where will the next environmental catastrophe occur--and what can be done to prevent it?

These are the kinds of questions that are asked--and, for a price, answered--by the forward-looking folks who call themselves futurists. Once the calling of wild-eyed Cassandras and 19th century writers and social scientists on the radical fringe, long-range forecasting has become a sophisticated and quite profitable industry. Its practitioners, who appear with increasing frequency in the press and on the best-seller lists, run the professional gamut: from pop-culture chroniclers like Faith Popcorn ("cocooning") and Douglas Rushkoff (Cyberia) through digital-media stars like M.I.T.'s Nicholas Negroponte and the Institute for the Future's Paul Saffo to buttoned-down management gurus like Peter Drucker and John Naisbitt (Megatrends).

But they all stand in the shadow of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the husband-and-wife team whose 1970 blockbuster, Future Shock, blasted the infant profession into the mainstream and set the standard by which all subsequent would-be futurists have been measured. A quarter-century later, having been catapulted back onto the front pages through their association with Newt Gingrich's "cyberbrain trust," the Tofflers are about to be repackaged for the digital era by Creative Artists Agency, the Hollywood agenting Goliath. The vehicle for this effort: a multimedia clearinghouse called FutureNet, which is building everything from a site on the World Wide Web to a weekend televised magazine and an ambitious half-hour weeknight TV show called Next News Now. NNN will report not what happened today or yesterday but what will happen tomorrow. "There's a History Channel but no Future Channel," says Alvin Toffler. "We plan to remedy that."

The Tofflers didn't invent futurism, of course. H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and George Orwell were all practicing futurists working under a science-fiction guise. Fittingly, perhaps, modern futurism was born with the atom bomb, in that moment in history when it was suddenly possible to imagine a world without a future. It was Herman Kahn, a graduate of the Rand Institute, the Ur-think tank, who gave the nascent profession credibility with such groundbreaking books as Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962), which used sound scientific principles to predict with great specificity the likely effects of a thermonuclear war.

But it was the Tofflers who brought futurism to the masses. Future Shock made the new profession cool. The book and its best-selling sequels, The Third Wave (1984) and Powershift (1990), examined not just tomorrow but today, not just one industry but all mankind, making the paradigm-shattering argument that what was really changing society was the radical acceleration of change itself. Future shock, the Tofflers said, is what happens when change occurs faster than people's ability to adapt to it. The book resonated for the 1960s counterculture, and in some ways it echoes even louder in the digital era. "People today," says Alvin Toffler, "are scared silly."

That's the great thing about pondering the future these days: there seems to be so much more of it. Between the computer revolution and the end of the cold war, between the birth pangs of the international economy and the death throes of the traditional nuclear family, the demand for solid, scientifically based forecasting is greater than ever. Hard numbers are difficult to come by since so much "futurist" work goes on under the guise of economic forecasting or strategic analysis, but corporate America clearly has the religion. The generation of strategic planners who came of age in the '60s and '70s has planted its forward-looking credo so firmly in U.S. boardrooms that it permeates the corporate hierarchy. "People who used to have purely planning titles have been incorporated into other roles," says Sharon Bennett, executive director of the Strategic Leadership Forum, an industry association. If you're in management at a modern company and you don't spend at least part of your day thinking like a futurist, you probably aren't doing your job.

The independents are flourishing too. "Ten years ago, we had trouble getting clients interested in the future five years out," says Joe Coates, president of the Washington-based consulting firm Coates and Jarratt. "Now we have 50 clients who are interested in the future 10 years or more out."

The first thing Coates does is challenge a government agency's or corporation's assumptions about its future. His modus operandi, in essence, is to gather together a company's top executives and start playing with their minds. "If you can get somebody to say something they really believe about the year 2010, it's like magic," he says. "Instantly you get everyone around the table asking two key questions: How do I know I'm right, and what are the consequences if I'm wrong?"

The oft-quoted Saffo, who in his decade with the nonprofit Institute for the Future has consulted for everyone from the U.S. Defense Department to a Swedish online service, prefers to distinguish between "visionaries" like Negroponte--"people who have a vision of what the future should be and are trying to make it happen"--and workaday "forecasters" like himself. "My job is to help our clients expand their perceived range of possibilities," Saffo says. Of course, in that capacity, he acknowledges, "you can affect outcomes."

Sometimes, however, it's hard to separate the cause from the effect. "Futurism isn't prediction anymore," says Rushkoff. "It's state-of-the-art propaganda. It's future creation." As he sees the process, two of the futurists' most potent tools are terror and exclusivity. "They put their clients in a state of fear and then explain that they hold the secret knowledge that can save them," says Rushkoff, whose own shrewd brand of high-tech utopianism earns the 34-year-old New Yorker six-figure book advances and up to $7,500 an hour strategizing for the likes of the Sony Corp., Telecommunications Inc. and Interval Research.

Nobody propagandizes for the future more enthusiastically these days than Wired magazine, the four-year-old glossy compendium of new-media prognostication and high-tech fetishism. Even as it was loudly fueling the public frenzy for new-media stocks and entrepreneurs, however, Wired was quietly affiliated with a Bay Area outfit called the Global Business Network, which garners annual revenues of some $6 million writing scenarios of the digital future for corporate clients. The ties between the two institutions run deep, and later this month Wired Ventures Ltd.--several of whose chief stockholders are GBN partners--plans a public stock offering. If all goes well, Wired and GBN insiders stand to be handsomely enriched by the very high-tech fever they've helped spark. "We have business ties, intellectual ties and friendship ties," says GBN founder Peter Schwartz of his friends at Wired. "Now I hope we'll cash in."

The Tofflers, who made this market in the first place, hope to cash in as well. To that end, FutureNet is talking with cable and broadcast channels and several Fortune 20-size companies about financial backing and developmental partnerships. The Tofflers have also recruited as executive partners TV producer Al Burton (Charles in Charge) and the tech-savvy film producer and entrepreneur Jeff Apple (In the Line of Fire). The tone of FutureNet's offerings, Toffler says, will be "not just for the digerati and not heavy. After all," he laughs, "it's television."

Twenty-five years ago, the Tofflers wrote in Future Shock that "a well-oiled machinery for the creation and diffusion of fads is now an entrenched part of the modern economy." A generation after their first great sermon, the high priest and priestess of futurism may finally get to practice what they've been preaching.

--With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles