Trees on Mars: Our Obsession with the Future [Paperback]

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? Hal Niedzviecki’s urgent, eye-opening Trees on Mars exposes our mania for the future as exactly what it is: an ideology as narrow and dangerous as any we’ve known from history. Read this book and be the first on your block to recall the rebel thrill of living in the present.
—J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could BeOne of North America's smartest and most explosive contrarians, HAL NIEDZVIECKI is a writer, speaker, and culture commentator known for challenging preconceptions and exploring the new patterns of tech-infused everyday life. He is the author of three previous books of nonfiction, including 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. The Peep Diaries was made into a television documentary entitled Peep Culture, produced for the CBC and shown at festivals and on television in sl3+