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Journalists can’t see the future, but they are able to peer through the lens of history to better understand the present. It’s a founding principle of Retro Report, the co-producer of this series. The future may be starkly different than the present, but it’ll be easier to understand once you uncover its deep continuity with the past. The social and technical transformations we’re currently living through are profound, but this isn’t the first time rapid, singular change has occurred. Before computer networks disrupted our communications, networks of steel rails and grids of artificial light upended our very concepts of space and time, day and night. Subtract trains and light bulbs from a modern city, and how much of it is even left?

The future has a history. And the stories we tell about incoming change—the stories we’ve always told about such changes—fall into consistent patterns. Dator gained some of his stature in future studies with his famous observation that predictions about the future—whether they’re coming from a corporate spreadsheet, a church pulpit or Hollywood—all boil down to roughly four scenarios. Growth that keeps going. Transformation upending the past. Collapse of the present order. And  discipline imposed, in some cases, to hold such collapse at bay.

“Most people, through their education, and through their acculturation, are locked into a single view of the future. They have never been encouraged to think about these alternatives, or forced to think about them,” Dator says.