Want to Experience the Future? Travel to a $#^*hole Country.
We tend to think that the future is far out and that we need digital simulations and VR glasses to transport us into expected realities in order to experience them proactively.
In reality, versions of the future are already happening at the edges and you just need to be able to draw parallels between what is taking place in other contexts and translate that to your own.
I started experiencing the future back in 2008 in, what Donald Trump so infamously called, a “$#^*hole country” (Wintour, Burke, Livsey 2018). Trump’s use of the phrase was racist and bigoted, mostly intended to describe continents, or countries, where the majority of people are non-white. The Urban Dictionary entry for ‘$#^*hole countries’ offers a more nuanced description:
“A country endowed with all kinds of natural resources but as a result of bad leadership and enshrined systemic corruption fails to provide basic amenities (electricity, road/rail, water etc.), basic education, basic health care, security, food, job and improved standard of living for her citizens, thereby leading to economic migration of the inhabitants to the discomfort of a foreign country (Urban Dictionary 2018)”
South Africa, for instance, is not as hopeless as this entry makes a $#^*hole country sound, but it is undeniable that for the last 14 years, from 2008, South Africa has lived through on-off periods of what is known locally as “loadshedding” — deliberately managed blackouts to try and balance supply and demand to avoid a complete collapse of the electrical grid. Depending on severity, you might be without power for anything from 2,5 - 8+ hours per day. It operates according to a schedule where neighbourhoods take turns on different days and in different time slots to switch the lights off in the short-term, to try and keep them on in the long-term.
In South Africa’s case there’s a mixed bag of reasons why loadshedding is happening. The country possesses an aging fleet of coal-fired power plants, which did not receive adequate maintenance for many years; skill shortages and a brain drain have made it difficult to retain tacit and explicit knowledge, and then there’s corruption, theft and vandalism also taking place (Wroughton 2022). Bouts of loadshedding have also been attributed to striking workers of Eskom, the national power utility, downing their tools. Arrests for sabotage have also been made.
So, while South Africa’s electricity problems can be ascribed to issues that typically plague $#^*hole countries, we know from current events that power generation in the world will likely be challenging in the future for various other reasons. However, South Africa’s reality since 2008 means we could have “told you so” in advance.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought energy dependency issues to the forefront. Germany is a country that has long relied on Russian energy—in 2020, Russia supplied more than half of Germany’s natural gas and about half of its coal imports (Wintour 2022). France, a country that’s heavily dependent on nuclear energy, has had to take many of its aging reactors offline for maintenance in 2022 and is at risk of power outages as the European winter takes hold (Reuters, 2022). South Africa’s overt dependence on mainly one type of energy generation (coal power) could have helped to stress test future scenarios that have become real for many nations in the last couple of months. Let’s not forget that we also have to get rid of our dependency on fossil fuels if we are to have some semblance of habitable life on earth in the coming decades. But this transition does not happen overnight and people need power to go about their lives. In South Africa, those who are in the financial position to install solar panels or inverter battery systems, do it to dramatically or wholly decrease their reliance on the national grid—loadshedding definitely accelerated the uptake of renewable energy and other power solutions for many businesses and households.
An increase in natural disasters is already plaguing countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan (e.g. hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, tsunamis) and with the climate crisis, this won’t be stopping anytime soon. When natural disasters hit, power supply is immediately impacted. If governments sent delegations to South Africa in the last decade, we could have shown them and their citizens what matters when you cannot guarantee that there will be an uninterrupted supply of electricity: gas stoves are preferable to electrical stoves and/or people barbeque more, there’s more food waste as food spoils when fridges are off, laptop battery capacity becomes crucial, people buy Uninterrupted Power Supply devices to keep their Internet on, (and access to resources become a primary consideration when nurturing relationships with friends and family, ha!). Remote work and digital-only learning offerings become hard, even impossible, when there’s no physical, central place to go to and 400 employees do not all have access to backup power systems. Loadshedding has changed South Africans’ behaviour and it factors into almost all of their daily life decision-making on a near-permanent basis. Small talk has even changed—the weather is no longer the entry point to a conversation!
Oh, and Capetonians can also tell you what it’s like to live with water restrictions to try and ward off Day Zero (when municipal taps are expected to run dry— in fact, parts of Gauteng have experienced watershedding recently), how politically instigated violence and/or strikes have impacted / are impacting supply chains and what runaway inflation and declining standards of living look like. We’ve already seen it all long before. So, while the causes of many of South Africa’s challenges are different than what many Western nations face, the end result is often the same.
Preparing for the future does not necessarily require reinventing the wheel. You only need to know where to look to find the weak signals and see where a version of ‘the future’ is already bubbling up and what that could mean for you.
So, the next time you want to futureproof a strategy or product innovation, it might be worth your while to visit a $#^*hole country…or you can send HFS anthropologists who will do it for you.
References
Reuters. 2022. “Explainer: Why nuclear-powered France faces power outage risks”. Accessed December 12, 2022. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/why-nuclear-powered-france-faces-power-outage-risks-2022-12-09/
Urban Dictionary. 2018. “Shithole Country”. Accessed October 11, 2022.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shithole%20country
Wintour, Patrick, Jason Burke, and Anna Livsey. 2018. “'There's no other word but racist': Trump's global rebuke for 'shithole' remark.” The Guardian, Jan 18, 2018.
Wintour, Patrick. 2022. “‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy.” The Guardian, June 2, 2022.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-dependence-russian-energy-gas-oil-nord-stream
Wroughton, Lesley. 2022. ”South Africa plunged into darkness during power crisis.” The Washington Post, July 8, 2022.
Marizanne Knoesen