Happy Birthday, Futurists! A Movement Turns 104

If you see any futurists today, dont forget to wish them a happy anniversary. Feb. 20th is considered the movements birthday, as it was on this date in 1909 that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian poet, technophile, and promoter of the arts, had his The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism published on the front page of Le Figaro.

Marinettis manifesto was both anarchic and visionary. Marinetti championed the rise of a new age of mechanized transport and technology to usher in a blur of innovation and disruptive societal change. He also glorified warcalling it the worlds only hygieneand was one of Italian dictator Benito Mussolinis earliest and most vociferous supporters, which helped lead to the movements demise. Marinettis aim for futurismto embrace the future and systematically predict its pathproved enduring.

Today, futurists are as common at Washington think tanks as they are on Madison Avenue and in Silicon Valley. They tweet a lot and write books on corporate change management. Marinetti would never have seen it coming.On the 104th anniversary of the movements founding, here is a look at Futurism 3.0, by the numbers.

On LinkedIn (LNKD), there are 4,361 professionals who proudly fly the futurist flag, using the descriptor as part of their current or previous job title. Yes, there is such a thing as an ex-futurist. (An additional 541 go by the Italian futurista and 132, the French futuriste.) There are 3,249 self-described futurists listed on Twitter.

Tech heavyweights Intel (INTC), Google (GOOG), and Microsoft (MSFT) employ futurists, as do the big accounting firms Accenture (ACN) and Deloitte. Futurists are most likely to be found in the fields of management consulting, in IT, and also in advertising and marketing, which points to either the versatility of the discipline or the unimaginative overuse of the moniker. More than half (54 percent) of professional futurists listed on LinkedIn are social-media consultants and/or change management specialists. They easily outnumber futurist artists (935), perhaps the only group of LinkedIn futurists familiar with the movements roots.

Branding yourself a futurist appears to be easier than you think. Just 4 percent of futurists on LinkedIn say they are students and/or graduates of futurology or futures studies. For futurists, the future is bright indeed.

Here then are some notable futurist predictions:

The Good:

In his 1970 best-seller Future Shock, Americas best-known futurist, Alvin Toffler, wrote of the dawn of the super-industrial society, later to be called the information society. The book offered survival strategies for individuals to cope with information overload and the coming digital revolution, concepts Toffler coined.

The bad:

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Happy Birthday, Futurists! A Movement Turns 104