X-Message-Number: 29545
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: "The Postmodern Paleo-Future"
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 18:59:31 -0700

Also refer to Novak's regularly updated Paleo-Future Blog, 
http://paleo-future.blogspot.com . Cryonics definitely has a "paleo-future" 
feel to it by now, even if the scientists involved in it can point to 
progress in brain vitrification so that the cryonics proposal involves a 
little less hand-waving and faith in uninvented technologies than it used 
to. Cryonics does seem to have outlasted the post-War optimisim about the 
future that provided its original historical context.

Mark Plus

http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_14.html?page=15#1151

The Postmodern Paleo-Future
by Matt Novak

I started the Paleo-Future blog ("a look into the future that never was") in 
January of 2007 to examine the ways that those in the past envisioned the 
future. I have since become well acquainted with the many promises of 
generations past. Clean energy, robotic servants and push-button food were 
the dreams the paleo-future was built on.

However, we've hit a snag of the imagination. It is immensely difficult for 
me to imagine a world before sarcasm and irony were the norm. American 
society no longer seems to grab the future by the horns and proclaim that 
tomorrow holds promise.

In 1966, just a few months before he died, Walt Disney produced a film 
outlining his vision for the futuristic community of EPCOT. Most people 
equate the word "Disney" with watered-down conservatism. However, Disney's 
"Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow" envisioned a world where the 
pedestrian held sway. Personal vehicles were all relegated to underground 
passages and clean-energy mass transit allowed people to travel throughout 
the city efficiently. EPCOT would be a community planned from the ground up 
and the needs of the people living within it were the highest priority.

The future is only a concept. You can't experience the future with any 
tangible basis in reality. For this reason, the future is whatever you want 
it to be.

There is a genuine sense of sadness detectable when you talk with people 
about flying cars and meal pills. Oddly enough, most people don't want 
meals-in-a-pill, they simply want the fanciful. We long for the world where 
anything is possible. We exist in a rather unique age when most American's 
basic necessities are met. You and I have luxuries unseen in human history 
and yet we want more.

I would argue that 1997 was a major tipping point for futurism. American 
consumer culture could no longer get behind the idea of "building a bridge 
to the 21st century." Such sentimentality made one vulnerable to ridicule. 
Even Disney, the definition of sentimentality, had abandoned the sincere 
brand of futurism with it's redesign of Tomorrowland in 1997, replacing the 
promise of tomorrow with Buck Rogers versions of how we used to view 
tomorrow.

Warren Belasco, in his book Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, 
quotes Disney's head Imagineer as saying, "We used to think Tang was 
wonderful, but then there came the sense that Tang was all we got out of a 
multitrillion-dollar space program." The ironic distance from the 
fantastical future is a byproduct of our postmodern age.

Can we return to an era of sincerity and optimism?

Are sincerity and optimism now relegated to the paleo-future?

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