In 1909, a poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow travelers, sending his car into a ditch and completely destroying the vehicle. Here’s how Marinetti described the encounter:

The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming toward me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch! ... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air …

You can already tell from this account that Marinetti was a bit of an eccentric. He was a poet, after all. And while he positions the cyclists as the issue, it’s likely that Marinetti wasn’t the safest driver. The lines that lead up to this retelling of the crash recount just how fast they were going in their car, “hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron.” (In case you’re wondering, yes, there was drinking that night.)

Rose Eveleth is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

But this account of a poet’s chaotic, life-threatening drive isn’t just some strange remnant from his personal files. The crash—to him a symbol of how the old ways (bicycles) must give way to the new ones (his car)—is what propelled Marinetti to put into writing a theory of progress that he’d been ruminating on for years. The words above are actually the beginning of The Futurist Manifesto, a document that Marinetti published in 1909 with the help of a small handful of fellow Italian artists who had dubbed themselves Futurists. What follows the car crash story is a list of 11 declarations—the tenets of Futurism.

Today, when we talk about futurism, we’re not usually talking about sculpture, painting, or poetry. Futurists today are scenario builders, people with advanced degrees in strategic foresight, science fiction writers, consultants to businesses. Futurists focus largely on technology, and the field today is inextricably linked to technologists working on everything from artificial intelligence to Crispr. And today’s Futurists almost never link their work to the existence of Marinetti, and the Italian movement that came before them. This is in part because Marinetti was an artist, and the Italian Futurists worked in paint and bronze and clay, rather than future forecasts. And there is no direct link between Marinetti's group and the strategic foresight consultants working today. But the link is also one that today's futurists would prefer to avoid in part because of another element of the artists behind the Futurist Manifesto of 1909: Marinetti and his cohort embraced and championed fascism. There are lessons to be learned for today’s technologists and futurists in Marinetti’s manifesto, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

Let’s first take a look at the words often used to describe the Italian Futurist movement: invention, modernity, speed, industry, disruption, brash, energetic, combative. Italian Futurists were obsessed with cars and airplanes; they emphasized youth over experience; they believed that the only way to live was by pushing forward and never looking back. The first tenet in the manifesto reads, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.”

Does any of this sound familiar? Disruption? Moving fast (and perhaps breaking things)? The rejection of history? Today’s most vocal voices in tech might not communicate their values with the same aplomb as the Italian poets, but they’re often saying the same kinds of things. Here’s a quote from Anthony Levandowski, cofounder of Waymo, about the value of history: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” Here’s a quote from the 1909 manifesto: “Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?” Where Marinetti declares “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!” today’s technology moguls say “the future is now.” Where the Italian Futurists were hypnotized by cars and planes, today’s technologists are drooling over rocket ships and space travel. Where Marinetti believed that women were too effeminate to bring about the kind of speedy progress he desired, former Google employee James Damore writes about how the gender gap in tech exists because men and women "biologically differ".