The Long Bust – Point 10: A social and cultural backlash stops progress dead in its tracks. Human beings need to choice to move forward. They just may not…”
“The Future Is Always About the Present” by Exapno_Mapcase
America’s great game is predicting the future. Hundreds of writers have filled newspapers and magazines and books with depictions of life in the unthinkably distant world of 1984 or 2001 or maybe 2022. When those weren’t sufficiently adventurous, an entire genre of fiction coalesced around fabulous tales of future worlds, dubbed “science” fiction although mostly it concerned engineering. Science provides the foundation, but engineers actually make the machines and Americans love their gadgets, big and powerful and shiny. Science fiction gave them a cornucopia of instantly recognizable impossibilities that flamed imaginations for generations. Domed cities. Flying Cars. Robots. Rocket ships. Ray guns. Jetpacks. Space Travel.
Science fiction was the genre of optimism. Engineers never admit defeat. They are “can do” personified. American folklore is full of ingenious tinkerers who set out with a few tools plus spit and baling wire and present the world with the horseless carriage and the flying machine. Philo Farnsworth looked at horses plowing furrows in a field and dreamed up television. Robert Goddard upgraded the firework into a liquid-fueled rocket ship. Teenagers scavenged surplus parts in a garage and gave us the personal computer and the world. Nothing was impossible. The future would always be better.
WIRED’s 1997 article on a Long Boom belongs to this tradition. Why not? The 1990s were giddy with the fall of the USSR, a balanced budget, and a Dow Jones average that quadrupled thanks to the dot.coms that promised infinity at one’s fingertips. The technologies Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden extolled could have served for an uncountable number of blockbuster science fiction stories set on ever more fabulous future worlds.
Instead, the genre turned dark. Utopias had served as proto-science fiction in the 19th century. Dystopias ruled in the 21st century. Climate catastrophes, alien apocalypses, global pandemics, zombie invasions, nuclear destruction, robot wars, and all other possible imagery of doom and destruction sold blockbuster novels and movies and televisions shows. N. K. Jemison’s highly metaphoric Broken Earth trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel three years in a row. The Hugo is named after Hugo Gernsback , the optimist of all optimists and the Father of Science Fiction. Irony of all ironies.
In 2011, Neil Stephenson, also an award-winning science fiction writer, looked around at the avalanche of dystopian science fiction and resolved to do something. In collaboration with Arizona State University, he launched Project Hieroglyph , its goal to get the general public, whose imaginations would once again be stimulated by optimistic science fiction, “to Get Big Stuff Done – to achieve ambitious, real-life technological breakthroughs that tangibly transform human futures” as its press release stated. A book full of optimistic stories by some of the biggest names in the field appeared in 2014, each a future whose problems were solved by greater and greater technology. The book landed with barely a ripple. Project Hieroglyph quietly folded two years later. Some of the same writers who appeared in the book have now published their own dystopias.
The WIRED article looks silly in hindsight, but that’s always the fate of writers predicting the future. They don’t care. And why should they? The creators sit at the pinnacle of NOW, and NOW is the latest, greatest height to which humanity has risen. All of history had led to this precise minute, the moment the writers’ fingers hit the keys, the moment that their audiences viewed the results. The future is always a long way off, and only historians have memories.
I am a historian, and my hobby is collecting predictions of the future, especially techno-optimistic ones. Think of a philatelist collecting only scented stamps from the Isle of Man. (Real, by the way. One set picturing bees smells like honey.) I have dozens, possibly hundreds depending on the elasticity of the definition. Getting Big Stuff Done was the essence of the Long Boom, an ambition that should fit perfectly into previous predictions like a puzzle piece. Yet no amount of searching or straining can make this multi-sided monstrosity fall into place. Where previous predictions overpromised and exaggerated and look foolish in retrospect, their core principle that technological advancement was not just obvious but must inarguably be celebrated as the one way to meet the needs of tomorrow. In the present pessimistic cycle Big Stuff is exactly what led the public to be wary, to embrace the dystopian visions of the future or challenge the concept of change itself as a positive.
Yet it is a fallacy to think that social and cultural backlash is holding up progress. We are living NOW in a sea of improbable futuristic technology. A phone/camera/computer/database/encyclopedia/instant communicator sits in billions of pockets. Bananas and other tropical fruit are available year-round in American supermarkets for mere pennies. Kitchens contain refrigerators that tell your phone when to restock foods. Organs are grown from cells and houses are extruded like toothpaste. Nor does the United States sit in a bubble of superiority; other nations laugh at our connection speeds. Every country in the world is more technologically advanced than at any previous point in history, the bounty more available to the average person worldwide than pessimists of the past once thought imaginable. The COVID vaccine has been given to more than 5 billion individuals. An estimated 1.4 billion vehicles exist in the world. Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Weixin/WeChat, and TikTok each have more than 1 billion members. Wars are sadly live-streamed for the ultimate in horror flics. The long-predicted Global Era is at last a reality.
To understand why our NOW embraces technology we got yesterday, demands newer and better technology today, and simultaneously rejects bigger stuff tomorrow requires a quick history of the cycles of techno-optimism and backlash pessimism that led up to WIRED’s article, WIRED’s very existence.
Those cycles are hallmarks of the Anthropocene , a recent coinage covering “the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.” Each up cycle signaled the arrival, real or imminent, of a form of human control over the world. In the late 19th century, clean, omnipresent electricity would banish night and cut work, time, and distance to almost nothing for almost everyone. In the mid 20th century, the power of the atom would transform medicine, create new foods, and send rockets throughout the solar system and out to the stars. In the late 20th century, personal computers would strengthen individuals, allowing them to speak out with equal loudness to governments and corporations and elites, a true democracy for the world at long last.
A commonality of the optimists is that each cycle of visions are the dreams not of politicians, sociologists, reformers, philosophers, or even scientists, but of engineers. Technology requires engineers to interpret the principles revealed by science and make them useful and practical in the real world. The first steps in any technology are fumbling and crude, costly, inefficient, cumbersome, often barely superior to the tried and familiar, yet cost older workers their jobs when adopted. Pessimists have piles of evidence that change, progress, and technology are bad for the world, hubris that must be challenged or opted out of. Backlash can be seen in cyclic oppositions like the William Morris-led Arts and Crafts Movement calling for the return of handcrafts, the anti-consumer Beats and hippies, and the modern day off-the-gridders and preppers. Each was influential but overall small in numbers and helpless to counteract the overwhelming acceptance of new gadgets. Yet their mere existence carved handholds into the mountain of technological inevitability for others to follow.
The backlashes faded when the early poor technologies improved or were discarded. Failure is seldom a permanent condition, and early technologies became sleek and ubiquitous. Over time, each failing is conquerable by ingenuity, a smattering of science, and loads of trial and error. As engineering historian Henry Petroski puts it, form doesn’t follow function, “form follows failure.” Everything can be improved, from the proverbial mousetrap to the most advanced atomic power plant. Julius von Voss, in 1810, made the optimistic future explicit. “What we cannot yet see, we dream of,” he wrote.
Dreams are the meat of science fiction and utopias. Thomas Disch captured that with his history The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World . Articles of nonfiction prediction don’t burrow their way into imaginations or collect imitators and acolytes. Fiction does. Fiction created the capital “F” future that once was a consensus vision.
The ur-novel of American futurism, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 , became the bestselling and most influential utopia of the 19th century. Its world of 2000 can be thought of as the 1990s dream for the internet in physical form: egalitarian, peaceful, bountiful, rewarding. Edward Bellamy wrote the novel because, as an upper-middle-class Bostonian, he hated noise, strife, capitalism, strikes, and all the lower classes. To cure these depressing problems, he simply eliminated them from his ideal world. That world was purely socialist, scientifically planned and run by the government with food, housing, and jobs allotted equally to all citizens. (A canny propagandist, Bellamy also eliminated the evil word “socialism” from his proposal so as to make it broadly acceptable to middle-class Americans.)
Millions agreed with this solution. Hundreds of Bellamy Clubs sprang up across the country and a political party almost became a force. His influence lasted decades, with group after group, from upper-class “rosepetal revolutionaries” to labor to science fiction writers taking up his utopian banner in some form. One of the latter, Robert A. Heinlein – deeply involved in second-cycle techno-optimism – would always be enthralled with his version of what one writer called “Bellamy’s Industrial Army. Bellamy hoped to extend military dedication to all aspects of life, so that everyone would live in a spirit of self-sacrifice for the state.” Additionally, in 1941, Heinlein published a chart of the world his “Future History ” stories would be set in. He described the near future as the “Crazy Years.” His acolytes have never failed to hold up his prescience as emblematic. The prosaic truth is that he and his contemporaries knew when the “Crazy Years” were. They had just lived through them. The 1910s, the 1920s, the 1930s, the first years of the 1940s, had been crazy even by historical standards. With another world war waging in Europe, anyone who did not predict a crazy or crazier future thought small.
The apotheosis of societal engineering came from Heinlein’s contemporary, Isaac Asimov, who ballooned the crazy years to their apocalyptic culmination. His future history comprised a galactic civilization collapsing into chaos that was expected to last 30,000 years. A group of thinkers and planners formed an organization, called the Foundation , that would guide and nudge progress so that the new civilization would emerge in a mere thousand years. Every bit of the future was foreseen, possible because large groups of individuals behaved as dependably and predictably as the molecules in a gas and therefore equivalent engineering solutions could be applied even to the vast numbers of humanity. The hope was reminiscent of the Technocracy Movement, which had popped up more than once in the early 20th century crazy years, when rationalists looked at the worldwide failures of politicians and were certain that applying strictly logical, unbiased, engineering solutions could cure the financial and social ills of the world.
Asimov approved of this mode of thought. He didn’t write yarns or tales; he solved problems in his fiction. He intended that his Foundation would flick away every challenge that the chaos could throw. But his editor, John W. Campbell, told him to write a story derailing his plan, just because conflict made for better fiction. Asimov loathed the idea yet had little choice except to comply. His disruptor was a charismatic telepath and emotion controller called the Mule, a mutant, a wild card, unpredictable and overwhelming. A series of stories chronicled first the Mule conquering the galaxy and then his inevitable fall. Asimov never saw the Mule as anything more than a story device, a one-shot menace little different from a breaking dam necessitating a heroic rescue.
Looking back, we can see that Asimov unwittingly created the ultimate metaphor for reality and the reason why his engineering big-thinking problem-solving optimism never has the forecast success. Mules are not one-shots. The world is full of them: disruptive people, ideas, nature, diseases, inventions, ideologies. The future can never be predicted; it’s Mules all the way down.
One hundred fifty years of failed promises of greatness take their toll. At some point those small handholds became ledges large enough to shelter groups with their own ability to disrupt and deny the engineers’ sureness. Though the world is the cumulative result of a gazillion causes, two in particular may help to explain the current pessimism at a NOW featuring the apogee of technology.
Back in 1962, sociologist James C. Davies was studying the history of revolutions and wondering why they so often occurred at moments other than the oppressed lowest points. His concept became familiarly known as the “J-Curve of Rising Expectations.” In a nutshell, cultures force change not when conditions appear hopeless but when the masses are given reason to think that their lives should be getting better but never do. (Graphically, this is shown by the line of objective wellbeing staying steady or rising with a slight incline while the line of expectations suddenly rises sharply, curving away from everyday conditions.) Examples from American history include the well-off colonists revolting against Britain after a war had been fought and won to protect them, and the civil rights movement decrying a lack of progress after a series of government decisions fighting discrimination. Both sets of dissenters saw equality as an immediate right rather than a long-term prospect; excuses and inaction were no longer tolerable. They wanted the future today.
Many do. Snarking memes about the failures of flying cars and food pills are daily reminders of those never-fulfilled promises about the future. The glittering techno-future of 1962’s The Jetson’s has remained stuck in place as a lost utopia, even though we have around us dozens of examples of its then unobtainable technology. Where are our Foodarackacycles and Rosie the Robots and vacation trips to Mars? Worse, why has the all-white middle-class suburban first world problems of George and Jane Jetson remained the default landscape for the increasingly diverse American culture of the 21st century? How could a program that ignored the co-temporaneous days of fire hoses and attack dogs and bombed children be the apotheosis of the dreams of the 1950s?
That exclusionary attitude pervaded science fiction from its beginning. Remember that 37-year-old Edward Bellamy quietly wrote all those who did not look or think like him out of his acclaimed utopia. Similar in outlook was the group fostered by Campbell who, according to Jeannette Ng , winner of an award named for him, was “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonizers, settlers and industrialists.” A generation of young white men formed bonds in computer clubs and spread a mantra of individual freedom that led to the growth of the largest companies in the history of the world, making their founders among the richest ever, and who are increasingly denounced as Tech Bros for the lack of diversity in their hiring.
The capital “F” future can no longer be created by or aimed at any narrow group of humanity. The majority – not white, not men, not Americans, not westerners – cannot be given the cast-offs of our bounty. “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” is a quote often attributed to William Gibson (although he never said that in quite those words, just as Ray Bradbury never quite said “I don’t try to predict the future. I try to prevent it.”). Engineers, themselves predominately men and throughout technological history predominately white, are inherently loyal to their products, not to people. For the last two hundred years they have created technologies for clients who look and think like them. The social and cultural backlash is more about the blinkered engineering mentality than the technologies we greedily embrace.
The Future the engineers gave us is wonderful, a glittering triumph of human endeavor, and full of flaws and holes and defects and weaknesses and bugs, all of them affecting, diminishing, and endangering humans. They must never be given yet another cycle in which to fail. No more articles calling for more technology. No more Big Stuff that the world must place above humanity. The million problems of the world must be addressed by a million small, achievable solutions that help everyone from top to bottom. Equality is not a product that engineers can turn out in a laboratory or by clever manipulation of duct tape or computer code. No one profession can ever be given the burden or the inherent grandeur of being responsible for equality. Equality is a future that needs to be created and shared by everyone or the future utopia will ever be an unreachable nightmare, whatever level of technological wonder is achieved.
I end with my personal favorite from my collection of predictions and one of the oldest, found in a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the scientist Joseph Priestley in 1780:
I always rejoice to hear of your being still employ’d in experimental Researches into Nature, and of the Success you meet with. The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity, and give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labour and double its Produce; all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not even excepting that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity.
Footnotes for Dopers. Looking at the capital “F” Future has always been a favorite past-time here and a number of previous threads are fascinating, especially to me since I’m discovering I’ve been saying all this for more than a decade - to some furious opposition to be sure. The 2014 thread contains links to additional threads on the topic.