Farsight, Issue 17

Farsight unpacks the most urgent issues shaping tomorrow, fusing analysis and speculation to spotlight emerging change and challenge assumptions about the future. Insights from our resident futurists are included alongside articles and interviews from an international network of journalists and expert contributors, all brought to life through striking illustration and design. Farsight is published by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, a non-profit think-tank (NGO) founded with the principle that many futures are always in play, and that future thinking can help us better make sense of them. Farsight helps readers map out these worlds and understand their own agency in shaping the future that they desire.

In this issue: 

THE FUTURE OF VICE

A vice can take many forms: overindulgence, moral fault, depravity, among others. Many things once considered vices are now widely accepted. In the Western world: premarital sex, usury, and apostasy, to name just a few.

Some vices have been embraced, only to later slide back into questionability. The question of what might be considered a vice in the future matters if we accept that novel vices – as well as shifting definitions of what does or does not count as a vice – are underappreciated indicators of the direction in which society is heading. Coffee rose to prominence in Britain’s Whiggish 17th-century coffee houses, with their excitable atmospheres and free flow of information. Psychedelics are associated with the 1960s and with ideals of expanded consciousness, universal togetherness, and world peace. Cocaine-sniffing yuppies fuelled the highs of financial capitalism in the 1980s, and so on.

But vice is not confined to drugs and inebriants. Habits and behaviours can also assume the role of a vice when deemed overindulgent or morally or ethically questionable. In this issue, we explore the future of vice – and what it reveals about our society and culture.