Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was a man of inherited wealth, artistic vision, controversial political views, and a well-curled mustache. His “Futurist Manifesto” is an outlandish and entertaining document that would be difficult to parody.
I have been fascinated by Marinetti for a long time. I am not quite sure why. I wrote about him in 2009. I often consider his disruptive argument to unseat the status quo, at the time when the world was looking staid in its colonial reach and industrial umbrage, especially at the close of the first decade of the 1900s. His kind of fearless approach to designing the future was problematic. But perhaps futurists don’t need to be perfect, just daring enough to think the unthinkable and to say what no one else will dare to say.
What will the world think in 100 years of people proposing outlandish ideas to unseat the accepted norms of the day? And in so asking, perhaps what I want to know is, exactly who is today’s incarnation of F.T. Marinetti in the development space? In the philosophical space? Where art though the rebels, the outliers?
Or have we crucified them already?
