State Futurism vs. Critical Futurism

State futurism (what the catalog sometimes calls “corporate” or “anticipatory” futurism) is the top-down version: national Vision plans (Saudi 2030, Qatar National Vision 2030, UAE Centennial 2071, Oman 2040, Kuwait 2035) that market the Gulf’s future as glass towers, AI cities, and seamless modernity, arriving pre-solved and depoliticized. It treats the future as a branding exercise and a governance tool, engineered from above to project stability and inevitability, with the state as sole author. The Al-Noaimi/Cramerotti dialogue frames this explicitly as “anticipatory governance,” where imagining the future becomes a mechanism of control in the present.

Critical futurism, the position most of the artists and writers in the volume argue for, treats “futurism” instead as a site of contestation. It asks who gets erased from the glossy render (migrant labor, pre-oil histories, indigenous and Bedouin knowledge, Palestine), insists on friction, glitch, and unresolved temporality rather than smooth progress, and reclaims the future as something artists and communities can author from below rather than receive from a ministry. Several essays position Hassan Sharif’s 1970s cartoons as an early example of this critical mode, decades before “Gulf Futurism” had a name.