THE MORNING SHOW
with
Patrick Timpone

Hal Niedzviecki

Author of Trees on Mars: Our Obsession with the Future

The future is big right now—for perhaps the first time, our society is more focused on what is going to happen in the future than what is happening right now. In Trees on Mars: Our Obsession with the Future, cultural critic and indie entrepreneur Hal Niedzviecki asks how and when we started believing we could and should “create the future.” What is it like to live in a society utterly focused on what is going to happen next? Through visits to colleges, corporations, tech conferences, factories and more, Niedzviecki traces the story of how owning the future has become irresistible to us. In deep conversation with both the beneficiaries and victims of our relentless obsession with the future, Niedzviecki asks crucial questions: Where are we actually heading? How will we get there? And whom may we be leaving behind?

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There’s a strange idea out there that we can own the future and that we need to get there ASAP. Hal Niedzviecki expands on this idea in this philosophical discussion using stories and examples.

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, culture commentator and editor whose work challenges preconceptions and confronts readers with the offenses of everyday life. He is the author of many books including the short story collection Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened and the nonfiction books Trees on Mars: Our Obsession with the Future, The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, and Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. He is the publisher and founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts (www.brokenpencil.com). Hal’s writing has appeared in newspapers, periodicals and journals across the world including the New York Times Magazine, Playboy, The Utne Reader, The Globe and Mail, the National Post, Toronto Life, Walrus, Geist, and This Magazine. Niedzviecki is committed to exploring the human condition through provocative fiction and non-fiction that charts the media saturated terrain of ever shifting multiple identities at the heart of our fragmenting age. He lives in Toronto.

hal niedzviecki, and our obsession with the future, november 12, 2015