X-Message-Number: 29509
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Salon article on "nostalgia for the future"
Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 18:27:59 -0700
I've just finished reading "Where's My Jetpack"? Its chapter on cryonics
could have benefitted from professional review, but on the whole I recommend
it. I happen to sympathize with the reviewer's description of "the dismay
and disbelief felt by many who came of age in the '60s and '70s only to
witness a drastic deceleration in the rate of social and cultural progress."
Mark Plus
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/05/12/jetpack/print.html
Back to the future
Science fiction promised us a tomorrowland of jetpacks, Smell-O-Vision and
male mammary implants. So what happened?
By Simon Reynolds
May. 12, 2007 | Staring out of my window in Manhattan's East Village the
other day, it struck me suddenly that the street scene below did not differ
in any significant way from how it would have looked in 1967. Maybe even
1947. Oh, the design of automobiles has changed a bit, but
combustion-engine-propelled ground-level vehicles are still how we get
around, as opposed to flying cars or teleportation. Pedestrians trudge along
sidewalks rather than swooshing along high-speed moving travelators. And
even in hipster-friendly New York, most people's clothes and hair don't look
especially outlandish. From the trusty traffic meters and sturdy blue
mailboxes to the iconic yellow taxis and occasional cop on horseback, 21st
century New York looks distressingly nonfuturistic. For a former science
science fiction fanatic like me, this is brutally disappointing.
I'm not the only one who yearns for the future that never showed up. The
frustration is widely felt and has been mounting for some time, gathering
serious speed in the late '90s when the really-ought-to-be-momentous new
millennium loomed. Dates like "1999," "2000" and "2001" set off special
reverberations -- not just for the science fiction fans among us but for
plenty of regular folk too. Even now, when we should have grown blas about
living in the 21st century, the dates still have a faint futuroid tang, a
poignant trace of what should have been. The obvious landmarks of tomorrow's
world never materialized: vacations to the moon, 900 miles per hour
transatlantic trains hurtling through vacuum tunnels. But the absence is
felt equally in the fabric of daily life, the way that the experience of
cooking an egg or taking a shower hasn't changed in our lifetime.
Nostalgia for the future, neostalgia -- whatever you wanna call this
peculiar unrequited feeling -- is widespread enough to constitute a market.
Enter Daniel H. Wilson's "Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science
Fiction Future That Never Arrived." This paperback sometimes strikes a
melancholy note: A passage on moon colonies, which the New York Times in
1969 predicted were a mere 20 years away, notes that "the centerpiece of
Disney's Tomorrowland attraction was the luxurious Moonliner spaceship. But
a future that included giant glass moon domes never appeared. Tomorrowland
was torn down." Mostly, though, the book's tone is petulant and impatient.
The title itself, "Where's My Jetpack?" makes you picture a science fiction
nerd stamping his feet in a tantrum. Wilson strives to speak directly to
your inner 12-year-old: hence the high-fructose corn-syrup-laced prose
("crazy-ass mad science" and, in a section on an underwater city,
"sea-tastic"), the groan-inducing puns (in the chapter on lighter-than-air
transport, "blimpin' ain't easy"), the puerile fantasy of using an
invisibility suit to sneak into the women's changing room.
A glib and flippant tone dominates "Where's My Jetpack?" but I get the
feeling a more serious book is struggling to extricate itself from Wilson's
arch and camp approach (something compounded by Richard Horne's kitschy
retrofuturist illustrations). The research is top-notch and fascinating.
Some of the best material here entails a sort of archaeology of stillborn or
prematurely abandoned futures. In the 1960s, for instance, concerted
attempts were made to build living environments at the bottom of the ocean,
in the form of the U.S. Navy's Sealab program. But instead of aquadome
cities nestling on the ocean floor and a massive exodus of pioneers
emigrating to settle the briny depths, all that remains today of the dream
is a solitary subaquatic hotel, the Jules Undersea Lodge, located just off
Key Largo, Fla. Other science fiction staples that made a tantalizingly
brief appearance decades ago but never caught on, for reasons either
practical or cultural, include the jetpack (the energy required for
blast-off generates dangerous levels of heat) and Smell-O-Vision. The latter
idea was mooted fictionally in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, "Brave New
World," in which the "feelies" stimulated one's tactile and olfactory sense
as well as sight and sound. The idea was actually attempted a couple of
times in the early '60s, but both times tanked in the marketplace.
Another classic futuristic idea made real is "cultured meat," i.e., animal
protein grown in the laboratory, where, Wilson reports, it is repeatedly
stretched as a surrogate for physical exercise, in order to give it the
texture of a living, active organism. This grotesque technology was
memorably anticipated in Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1952 novel "The
Space Merchants," a corporate dystopia of the 21st century in which peon
workers hack slices off a gigantic blob of animate but nonsentient poultry
breast called Chicken Little. But in our nonfictional 21st century, the idea
languishes in the laboratory thanks to consumer resistance. Our cultural
biases reject cultured meat as gross, unnatural, an abomination. Indeed,
popular taste is trending the opposite way, toward the organic, the uncaged,
the nonprocessed.
In "Where's My Jetpack?" Wilson frequently adopts a reassuring tone when
examining a particular promised breakthrough that failed to materialize.
Everything from the robot butler to 3-D television to the dinner-in-a-pill
is presented as reasonably imminent (albeit likely to be way out of most
folks' price range). Coming down the pipeline real soon is the anti-sleeping
pill: not a central nervous system stimulant like amphetamine, and therefore
avoiding all the associated problems to do with abuse and paranoia,
modafinil simply turns off the need for sleep (although you can bet that in
itself this will generate side effects and mental disorders). Also on the
horizon is the smart home, as imagined in another Pohl and Kornbluth novel,
"Gladiator-at-Law" (1955). Disappointingly, though, rather than anticipating
your moods with d cor changes and keeping the fridge stocked with all your
favorite delicacies, the intelligent domiciles of the near future will be
extensions of the assisted-living facility: apartments kitted out with
movement sensors that develop a feeling for their elderly inhabitants'
routines and send out alarm signals when, say, that regular hourly visit to
the toilet isn't made.
According to Wilson, NASA is working toward establishing a moon colony
(though a rather minuscule one) within the next 13 years. Better still, the
classic science fiction fantasy of the space elevator that carries us from
the Earth's surface 300 miles up to the threshold of outer space is already
perfectly feasible, just prohibitively expensive. I would imagine the
billion-dollar price tag for the miraculously strong cable the elevator
glides up and down would pay for itself rather quickly, given that
journeying into space (and as result the commercial exploitation of
nonterrestrial mineral resources) would become approximately 100 times
cheaper than the existing alternative, the space shuttle.
Wilson's talk of space elevators and other grandiose inventions like solar
mirrors or the fully enclosed city indicates how our expectations of the
"futuristic" have undergone an insidious scaling down in recent decades.
Mostly, "the future" seems to infiltrate our lives in a low-key, subtle
fashion. In their own way, the miniaturization of communications technology
(cellphones, BlackBerrys, etc.) and the compression of information (iPods,
MP3s, YouTube, downloadable movies, etc.) are just as mind-blowing as the
space stations and robots once pictured as the everyday scenery of 21st
century life. Macro simply looks way more impressive than micro.
Sometimes it feels as if progress itself has actually slowed down, with the
1960s as the climax of a 20th century surge of innovation, and the decades
that followed consisting of a weird mix of consolidation, stagnation and
rollback. Certainly change in the first half of the 20th century seemed to
manifest itself in the most dramatic and hubristic manner. It was an era of
massive feats of centralized planning and public investment: huge dams;
five-year plans of accelerated industrialization; gigantic
state-administered projects of rural electrification, freeway construction
and poverty banishment. Science fiction writers who grew up with this kind
of thing (including the darker side of "public works" -- the mobilization of
entire populations and economies for war, the Soviet collectivization of
peasant farms that resulted in massive famine, genocide) naturally imagined
that change would continue to unfold in this dynamic and grandiose fashion.
So they foresaw things like the emergence of cities enclosed inside giant
skyscrapers and grain harvested by combines the size of small ships voyaging
across vast prairies.
It's no coincidence, too, that sci-fi's nonfiction cousin, futurology -- or
future studies, as it is now more commonly known -- emerged as a discipline
during this era of the activist nation-state. World War II ratcheted up
popular belief and trust in the exercise of judiciously applied might by
centralized government, and the post-1946 world offered plenty of
opportunities for benevolent state power to be flexed, from the challenges
of postwar reconstruction to the development of the newly independent
third-world nations that emerged out of the British Empire.
The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by future-mindedness, an ethos of
foresight that attempted not just to identify probable outcomes but to steer
reality toward preferred ones. It's no coincidence that those decades were
the boom years for both sci-fi and a spirit of neophilia in the culture
generally -- the streamlined and shiny aesthetic of modernity that embraced
plastics, man-made fabrics and glistening chrome as the true materials of
the New Frontier. It's the era that produced "The Jetsons," probably the
single prime source of many of the tomorrowland clich s that haunt the
collective memory -- personal rocket cars parked in the front drive, food
pills, videophones, robo-dogs -- and that subsequently became a cue for
retrofuturist camp.
Today we seem to have trouble picturing the future, except in cataclysmic
terms or as the present gone worse ("Children of Men"). Our inability to
generate positive and alluring images of tomorrow's world has been
accompanied by the fading prominence of futurology as a form of popular
nonfiction. It carries on as an academic discipline, as research and
speculation conducted by think tanks and government-funded bodies. But there
are no modern equivalents of Buckminster Fuller or Alvin Toffler. The
latter, probably still the most famous futurologist in the world, warned in
his 1970 bestseller "Future Shock" that change was moving too fast for
ordinary citizens' nervous systems and adaptive mechanisms to cope with;
1980's "The Third Wave" sounded a more positive note about the democratic
possibilities of technology. But Toffler was just the most visible exponent
of a bustling paperback subgenre of "popular thought." I recall getting one
such fat paperback for my 16th birthday, a book predicting all kinds of
marvels, such as the resurgence of lighter-than-air travel, which would fill
the skies with giant freight-carrying balloons and the aerial equivalent of
ocean cruise liners transporting people across the seas and continents in
leisurely fashion.
Some of the 1950s and 1960s anticipation and confidence in the future had
worn off by the '70s: Ecological anxieties manifested in everything from
Neil Young's "After the Goldrush" to the movie "Silent Running," while
science fiction writers like John Brunner and Harry Harrison imagined grim
and gritty realistic early 21st century scenarios of overpopulation,
pollution and fuel crises in novels like "Stand on Zanzibar" and "Make Room!
Make Room!" (the latter adapted into the far inferior movie "Soylent
Green"). But the 1970s still contained a strong current of popular futurism,
reflected in the success of magazines like Omni and in the popular music of
the day, the pioneering electronic sounds of Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre
and Donna Summer producer Giorgio Moroder. It was a conflicted decade,
though, with nostalgia gradually becoming a more dominant force ("Happy
Days," "Grease," '20s chic). Even science fiction itself began to regress,
following the lead of "Star Wars" by abandoning the sophistication of the
1960s "New Wave" of sci-fi (with its explorations of "inner space") and
reverting to the swashbuckling space fantasies of the genre's pulpy early
days.
In the '80s, thinking about the future in nonnegative terms seemed to become
almost impossible. Yesteryear seemed more attractive: Postmodernism and
retro recycling ruled popular culture, while politically the presiding
spirits of the era, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were dedicated to
restoration of an older order, to rolling back the gains of the abhorred
'60s. Futurology's profile waned (can you name anything Toffler wrote after
1980?) and the bestsellers in the "popular thought" tended to be jeremiads
and "Where did we go wrong?" investigations like Neil Postman's "Amusing
Ourselves to Death" (1985) and Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American
Mind" (1987).
The '90s, however, saw a slight resurgence of futurism, driven by the
information technology boom, theorized by magazines like Wired and Mondo
2000, soundtracked by another wave of electronic music (the techno-tronica
rave-olution). While some of the new breed of futurologists were classic
gee-whiz technology types like Kevin Kelly, others were "zippies," hippies
sans any Luddite technophobia or back-to-the-land nostalgia, people like
Jaron Lanier and Ray Kurzweil. All panaceas and marvels, the talk could get
pretty wacky: nanotechnology, virtual reality, trans-humanism. Kurzweil
preached the notion that the law of accelerating returns was propelling us
at breakneck speed toward a singularity: Fueled by cross-catalyzing
innovations, the exponential curve of progress will inevitably, sooner
rather than later, hit vertical, resulting in a rupture in human history,
most likely entailing sentient machines, the dis-incarnation of human
intelligence, immortality. Basically the rapture, with technological
accouterments. Some of Kurzweil's predictions were more prosaic: By the
middle of the 21st century he imagined computers becoming so intelligent
they could be genuinely musical, which for him translated as being able to
jam with human guitarists, Jerry Garcia/Carlos Santana-style.
After the info-tech boom's bust and 9/11, we haven't heard as much from
these digi-prophets. All that Dow Jones-indexed mania has sagged to a sour
calm. Futurology as a popular nonfiction genre has been largely reduced to
short-term trend watching, cool hunting in the service of marketing people
and brand makers. Take the recently published "The Next Now: Trends for the
Future" by Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia. Even taking into consideration
the authors' modest ambition to look a mere five years ahead, this book's
bundle of predictions is frankly feeble. Almost without exception,
everything Salzman and Matathia "prophesy" is already a highly visible and
well-established trend: wikis, blogging, celebrity chefs, gastro-porn,
branding, the privatization of space, overwork/sleep deprivation, the
prolongation of adolescence into the '30s and beyond, online dating, an
aging population ... The near future, apparently, will just consist of more
of the exact same.
Then again, perhaps sociocultural and political prediction is simply a mug's
game. In the 1970s, no one would or could have imagined that the dominant
form of pop music of the last two decades of the 20th century would be
rhythmatized boasts and threats delivered over beats; few would have
foreseen the emergence of reality TV as the most popular entertainment
format. On the political front, the annals of sci-fi are littered with
dystopian soothsayings that now look laughably off-base, from Anthony
Burgess' "1985," a 1978 novel about a trade-union-dominated U.K. of the near
future in which the country is brought to a standstill on a weekly basis by
general strikes, to Kingsley Amis' 1980 novel "Russian Hide-and-Seek," a
vision of Britain 50 years after its conquest by the Soviets. "Where's My
Jetpack?" shrewdly sticks to science and technology. But this relentless
focus on machines, gadgets and life-enhancing innovations means that Wilson
never touches on that whole other aspect of the "unrequited future" -- the
dismay and disbelief felt by many who came of age in the '60s and '70s only
to witness a drastic deceleration in the rate of social and cultural
progress.
Perhaps the expectations of the 1960s, that era of rampant radicalisms, were
hopelessly unrealistic. Still, if you grew up, like me, reading radical
feminists like Shulamith Firestone (who argued in "The Dialectic of Sex"
that female liberation would come only with the invention of an artificial
womb that could unshackle women from the procreative function) or New Wave
of science fiction authors like Thomas M. Disch (who in his novel "334"
imagined men being able to get mammary implants and breast-feed their
offspring), scanning contemporary popular culture with its supermodel
competitions, desperate housewives and scantily clad pop divas is acutely
disheartening. And these are about gender, just one zone of stalled progress
or outright regression. Race, gay rights, drugs, socioeconomic equality,
religion -- on just about every front, things either are not nearly as
advanced as we'd have once expected or have actually gone into reverse.
Forget the goddamn jetpack: It's the sociocultural version of the "amazing
future that never arrived" that really warrants our anguish.
-- By Simon Reynolds
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