The Future... It Ain't What It Used To Be

[oblique strategies]

"By now, most of America has woken up to the fact that, in our lifetimes, the most cutting-edge technology that we see every day is typically deployed by our "superiors" -- in business or in government -- to manage and control us. Monitor our performance, spy on us for security reasons, restrict access to our accounts, and so on. Ultimately, to defend property and privilege against the masses.

That feeling that somebody else owns the tech, instead of it empowering the average person, is the likely reason why much of American sci-fi (since Star Trek TOS stopped filming), tends to be grittier and more dystopian than it was before. (A good crystallization: One of the best names I've heard for a rock group recently is, "We Were Promised Jetpacks". Or, as they say, the future ain't what it used to be.)"

"But I wonder if Mexicans have not yet been completely disillusioned by the future the way that Americans have. From Flash Gordon, Isaac Asimov up to the original Star Trek, American science-fiction once portrayed technology as mankind's tool; and a key to boundless prosperity, bold discoveries and exotic journeys. However well or badly those discoveries and journeys turned out, the technology itself was always "neat-O!"


From a review of the Mexican sci-fi film 'Sleep Dealer' (2010)
onion pi, from the blog Americana
http://americancrackpot.blogspot.com/20 ... sleep.html

[supamonsta]

I was attracted by the thread's title,

I thought it would be about how the future is now imagined in science fiction as compared to older visions of the future,

my bad, It's too late for me to get into politics and I actually can't read your post, sorry ^^

[Angstrom]

reminds me of The Gernsback Continuum

"The Gernsback Continuum" is a short story by William Gibson about a photographer who has been given the assignment of photographing old futuristic architecture. This architecture, although largely forgotten at the time of the story, embodied for the generation that built it their concept of the future. The titular "Gernsback" alludes to Hugo Gernsback, a Pulp magazine science fiction publisher during the early 20th century. By using this title Gibson contrasts the future envisaged during Gernsback's style of science fiction and the present, "cyberpunk" era that Gibson was establishing. The story was published in Gibson's Burning Chrome anthology.

The future of the 1920s to the 1960s was a liberation from work through technology, the hope that all food would be delivered as processed pills, and work would be done by robots. We would escape our primitive past into a chrome future unhindered by gravity. Techno-future Government would be empathetic and collective.

The future of the 1970s to now is enslavement through technology, the fear that fast food is killing us. We work like robots. We fear that we are killing our natural selves and planet. Techno-future Government will be totalitarian and plutocratic.

This is why we now look backwards, backwards to trends of the past, backwards to music of the past. To Safety.

[Forge.]

Funny enough, Futurology is my new passtime. I am reading about this stuff every day, and there aren't enough hours in the day to read all the articles out there. If you believe the likes of Ray Kurzweil, the future really is bright, for many of us.

Sadly, yes, it is always going to be a few elites who will be likely to benefit most, usually at the expense of everyone else. But that's not new. What is new is that we are now telling each other all about it over the internet, and that's the reason we are feeling all this intense cynicism and dystopianism.

Or as Michio Kaku put it, the internet is a Type 1 communication system, but the rest of our civilization is still Type 0. What we're experiencing now is the same kind of shock children discover when they become teenagers: "Oh shit, the world doesn't actually revolve around me, and in fact I'm pretty low down the food chain."

Then we get the massive shock of having our tax money spent on crazy wars and keeping the bankers in porsches and yachts, while the actual taxpayers have to go without. That's pretty incredible really, and we just shrug and carry on. It's a massive: "You are worthless, we own you, we can do what we like and there is nothing you can do about it!"

If this had happened 200 years ago there would be revolution. We would have the guillotines out. But what's different now is that our lives are actually pretty comfortable in relative terms. 200 years ago women used to have an average of around 8 children because 5 of them were expected to die before age 5. Our average life expectancy was around 40. We had filthy water, poor hygene, and life was generally shit. In fact even my parents generation had it pretty tough growing up compared to now. Now we are chatting about this on our own personal laptops on a music software forum. Hard to complain really, so we don't. In fact, the elites have never had it so good, we're much more co-operative when we have iPads to play with. "Yeah, knock yourselves out, loot the treasury if you like, I'm playing angry birds"

Maybe in the "west" we were starting to feel a bit of a false sense of hope in the 90s after the cold war ended. In an ideal world military spending would have been drastically cut and we could look forward to a new era of peace and prosperity. What instead happened was the military beast carried on being fed but is now being turned on it's own people, building a proto-fascist national security state as hundreds of billions are fed to this unaccountable civil-liberty munching monster. But don't expect any of those tax dollars to actually go to helping anyone, there's killing to be done!

The mistake we all make is thinking that the military is there to protect "us". It's not. It's a private protection racket for the elites. More soldiers coming back from Iraq an Afghanistan have died from suicide than battle, and many of those who haven't have become anti-war protesters because they discovered this ugly truth. They were lied to. They weren't on any noble mission of liberation, they are a gang of mob heavies sent to shake down the Iraqis for their lunch money.

Yes, a lot of the world is total shit. But believe it or not it's actually getting better. The fact that we're becoming aware of it is a good thing. The only danger is that we don't become so numbed by fiddling with gadgets that we don't do anything about it.

[SuburbanThug]

reminds me of The Gernsback Continuum

One of my favorite short stories. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it. The punchline is great.

We are going to reach the post-cyberpunk age. I'm kind of a hypermodernist. I think we'll get there but we are going to see some pain (edit: we are seeing some pain) in the meantime. I'm proud that dystopian speculative fiction has become mainstream in the U.S. Now it's up to well-intentioned hackers and influential people to help the majority realize our potential.

Neon Phusion & Sector Movements, "The Future Ain't the Same As It Used To Be" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMiCQOWLRZM

[Forge.]

..
The future of the 1920s to the 1960s was a liberation from work through technology, the hope that all food would be delivered as processed pills, and work would be done by robots. We would escape our primitive past into a chrome future unhindered by gravity. .

I read an article recently from 1950 about the world in 2000. What amazed me was how communist and utilitarian this guy's vision seemed. It was in Popular mechanics or something like that. He was proposing that the housewife of the future wouldn't need to clean because the house would be solid plastic and she'd just hose it down. The idea of taste or comfort never seemed to occur to him.

And yes I think he did even mention the meal in a pill thing. Maybe he has no taste buds? I kind of thought eating good food was one of the good things about life.

Techno-future Government would be empathetic and collective.

well I still haven't given up on the idea that maybe the kids born post 2000 will actually come up with some kind of participatory democracy by the time they are running things. I'm not sure they'll have the patience for this ridiculous corrupt dated system we have now. They are growing up with a new found sense of registering their opinions on everything and feeling like they matter. Our generation only got the seeing what's wrong with the world bit combined with a total sense of impotence to do anything about it.

Not only that, there's a very real chance technology will morph them into more of a collective hive mind thing in a way.. Google glass is the next step - I am reading every day about all the research companies like Samsung are putting into thought operated technology, it's really just a matter of time before people don't even bother sending text messages, they just think->send. Combined with instant access to all the knowledge of anything ever available instantly online, plus singularity grade computing, you would have to hope we will move forward at some point.

[Forge.]

In an abundant world where the very idea of "work" may become optional, in which technology can meet our basic needs and robots can care for us, SU's role, Diamandis says, is to be "a front end" to all such emerging innovations.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive ... tial-curve

[H20nly]

reminds me of The Gernsback Continuum

"The Gernsback Continuum" is a short story by William Gibson about a photographer who has been given the assignment of photographing old futuristic architecture. This architecture, although largely forgotten at the time of the story, embodied for the generation that built it their concept of the future. The titular "Gernsback" alludes to Hugo Gernsback, a Pulp magazine science fiction publisher during the early 20th century. By using this title Gibson contrasts the future envisaged during Gernsback's style of science fiction and the present, "cyberpunk" era that Gibson was establishing. The story was published in Gibson's Burning Chrome anthology.

The future of the 1920s to the 1960s was a liberation from work through technology, the hope that all food would be delivered as processed pills, and work would be done by robots. We would escape our primitive past into a chrome future unhindered by gravity. Techno-future Government would be empathetic and collective.

The future of the 1970s to now is enslavement through technology, the fear that fast food is killing us. We work like robots. We fear that we are killing our natural selves and planet. Techno-future Government will be totalitarian and plutocratic.

This is why we now look backwards, backwards to trends of the past, backwards to music of the past. To Safety.

Amen.




the roots seep into us like a tree taking over a side walk. do they still sell a phone without Facebook pre-loaded?
among other things...

[H20nly]

@ Forge...

too much to quote... i'll just say -> Word Brother!

i can loose my shit thinking about the world my son will grow up in. a lady at work was talking about one of her kid's classmates, about 14 i think... she went down on one of the boys at a party (nothing futuristic or past-centric about that), but someone recorded it and posted it on the web. so the old deny deny deny strategy is out the window. does this have a positive effect in the future generations? do they suddenly start to rethink this new found freedom?? do they become more humble? do they embrace it and just stop giving a fuck?

or...

D. All of the above.

any way you slice it... there are too many slices... watching it unfold will be interesting indeed.

[SuburbanThug]

You work with a pedophile?

[regretfullySaid]

i can loose my shit thinking about the world my son will grow up in. a lady at work was talking about one of her kid's classmates, about 14 i think... she went down on one of the boys at a party (nothing futuristic or past-centric about that), but someone recorded it and posted it on the web. so the old deny deny deny strategy is out the window. does this have a positive effect in the future generations? do they suddenly start to rethink this new found freedom?? do they become more humble? do they embrace it and just stop giving a fuck?

or...

D. All of the above.

any way you slice it... there are too many slices... watching it unfold will be interesting indeed.

Can we back up here and get some clarification?

[Forge.]

he said the kid's classmate! jeez you guys!

just watched this: Trancendent man - Ray Kurzweil

I think he's very optimistic in his timing, but regardless a lot of the technologies are actually in development now, so at least some of it will be there.

I think what we are seeing now is the erosion of privacy. On the sexual example given above - it reminds me of how totally acceptable in the mainstream it is to becoming to be gay compared to how it used to be. The next generations will be way more accepting and tolerant of anything. Nobody will care about the videoed blowjob, they will have moved on to the next thing too quickly. And everything is so sexualized now they're all up to it already, they just don't tell anyone. I'm not sure the kids would actually care. Everything they do now is public.

Eventually people will get so used to the lack of privacy they just won't do things they don't want people to know about in public, or they will totally accept everything and anything.

I watched a truly bizarre documentary the other night called "I think I am an animal" about these groups of fetishists who believe they are really a certain animal in a human body. These 3 young 18-20 year olds were in a "polyamourous" gay 'animal' relationship. It was truly weird, but they seemed happy and I just liked the fact that we live in a society that accepts it and lets them get on with it. Not all do of course, but the world we live in is all out in the open now, so we are just getting used to the fact that anything goes really.

We will virtually be a new species within the next 50-100 years, if the planet doesn't die first.

[oblique strategies]

I was attracted by the thread's title,

I thought it would be about how the future is now imagined in science fiction as compared to older visions of the future,

my bad, It's too late for me to get into politics and I actually can't read your post, sorry ^^

That's exactly what the quote is about!

@ Forge...

too much to quote... i'll just say -> Word Brother!

Ditto! Well said Forge.

The future of the 1920s to the 1960s was a liberation from work through technology, the hope that all food would be delivered as processed pills, and work would be done by robots. We would escape our primitive past into a chrome future unhindered by gravity. Techno-future Government would be empathetic and collective.

However, one of the earliest sci-fi visions of a future dystopia of extreme social inequity & an elite-dominated work force is 1927's Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang. Naturally this was not produced in the USA, but in Germany.

[Forge.]

^I think that time, late 20s into the 30s (obviously the depression) has a lot of parallels to our times. The bankers were right up to their tricks then in peacetime.

WW2 probably had a bit of a levelling effect, like the plague in europe in the 14th C. When a lot of people die the ones left suddenly become a lot more valuable as workers.

[beats me]

The problem with technology and the internet isn’t corporations or governments monitoring us. It’s that it has killed our attention span and our brain’s ability to maintain information to the point that nobody is an expert on anything other than conspiracy theories. Spend a couple weeks without tech or the internet and you’ll realize you don’t know shit about shit without the ability to instantly look it up. At best you’ll be able to paraphrase something you vaguely recall.