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The purpose of this paper is to outline the contours of futures studies that override the ethnocentric epistemological limitations of present studies, which are mono‐civilizational and extrapolations from Western experience.

The paper shows by empirical and conceptual means the inadequacy of present futures studies – based partly on alleged American exceptionalism – which limit the imagination of futurists. The paper then uses a different philosophical base, namely Buddhist process philosophy, which puts change at its inner core to develop a new perspective.

The paper finds that the alleged American exceptionalism is based on founding myths and ground realities not necessarily present in other countries. Huntington and others evoked the role of civilizations before the rise of Asia was being fully noticed. Current US dominance is illustrated to some extent by “everywhere is America”, but in a reverse direction “everywhere is in America” as the world implodes back on the USA through migration and through globalization.

The approach suggested in the paper will provide a more penetrating epistemology for future studies than hitherto ad hoc approaches.

The purpose of this LOEX‐of‐the‐West keynote is to discuss ways to think about the future and the future of libraries.

Bringing in poems and meaningful paragraphs from other authors to illustrate his message, the author adopts the structure of a musical symphony to organize his presentation.

While the future may be impossible to predict accurately, the paper considers several possible futures for libraries.

The paper provides a futurist perspective on the potential role of libraries in the society of the future.

Maturana and Varela (1980, p. 78f) provided the following definition of autopoiesis: “An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.” This definition shows that for Maturana and Varela, autopoietic systems are systems that define, maintain, and reproduce themselves. The notion of machine that they employ in the definition might seem a bit misleading because we tend to think of machines as mechanistic and nonliving, but Maturana and Varela (e.g., 1987) in later publications have preferred to speak of autopoietic organizations.