Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist. He will discuss “American Futures: How an anthropologist can help spot, track, and predict change.” Grant holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of 14 books including Culturematic, Flock and Flow, and Dark Value. His book A New Honor Code was published by Simon and Schuster last year. And his next book, The Return of the Native, also published by Simon and Schuster, is scheduled to be out at about the time he addresses the DMA. Grant was the founder and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. He has taught at Harvard, University of Cambridge, and MIT. He is a co-founder of the Artisanal Economies Project. He is the inventor of The Griff, an early warning system for social and cultural change (see www.mapping-the-future.com). He consults widely, including with Google, Ford Foundation, Kanye West, Reddit, Netflix, Sony, Boston Book Festival, NBC, Diageo, IBM, Nike, and the Obama White House. He is credited with spotting the rise of Donald Trump, the fall of Second Life (an artificial world that some thought would dominate the Internet), and the disruption of consumer packaged goods sales in the grocery aisle by Alice Waters and others in the artisanal food movement.
Arranged by Ric Grefé