The future isn't like it used to be

[mdlbear]

Salon.com Books | Back to the future

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.

(From this post by folkmew.)

I wrote this song [mp3] in late 1998 while my father, who introduced me to science fiction, was dying of cancer, and the new millennium was looking more like a nightmare than a fantasy. Grump -- I think I need to go out for a walk.

Comments

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

Someone from, say, 1947 visiting 2007 might be disappointed in the major stuff at first glance, but once they start to notice little things that disappointment might lift.

Go into a bar or restaurant, sit down, light a cigarette. Compare reactions of the staff and other customers in 2007 to those in a similar place in 1947. It may vary by state or locality, but in many places there will be a noticeable difference.

And who let all those colored people in? Don't they know their place any more?

Back out on the street, there are racks of free newspapers. This one looks odd. It appears to be some kind of faggot paper. Isn't that illegal?

Look at the ads. Phone numbers have more digits, but that's not too surprising given how the country has grown. But what's this other line at the bottom, the one that has all the funny punctuation and some nonsense word followed by ".com"?

There's a bank. What are those things out front labeled "ATM"?

Wander around in a department store, noticing how much higher prices on stuff like clothes and furniture are now. Here's the TV department. All the sets are color. That wasn't available in 1947. They had color TV in 1957, but it was expensive. Most of these are actually cheaper now.

Phonograph records are a lot smaller now, and instead of black they're this silvery color with rainbow effects.

... and so on ...

The future and all that

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

You've got a point. Here are two more 'nothing chages' observations:

Concrete hasn't changed for about two millenia now. It was high-tech in Roman times, but now it's strictly ho-hum.

Bricks are at least twice as old. There are a few stylistic differences between what's found in North America at the dawn of the Information Age and what's found in Babylon at the dawn of the city-states, but change in bricktech has been mostly in production techniques.

On on the other hand, this is "the future" that I read about, only stranger.

Many of those pedestrians have pacemakers or other implants that keep them alive, talk on cellphones, and occasionally surf the Web: and those are the old-fashioned ones.

Speaking of the Web, I spent several hours this week in Japan: mostly in the sky over Kyoto. Not all of me, of course. My body stayed here in Minnesota while I project part of my awareness through this digital medium to areas that I'm studying.

The point? The World Of The Future, as pictured in theme parks, comics, and futurologists (futurists?) imaginations, will only exist where a catastrophe wiped out most existing structures.

Where we can, people tend to use existing structures and materials: even when using the latest techniques. For example, one of the wireless hot spots on Main Street is in a refurbished mid-20th-century gas station, the other is in a house that's probably a hundred years old.

Both businesses could have build a mylar-wrapped fullerdome, or whatever the lastest cool technology is: but who has that kind of money?

Thank for your observation: it's good to see that there are other folks who have the 'so this is the future' feeling.

Re: The future and all that

[mdlbear]

In another direction, it's fascinating to see how much of today's world was totally missed by science fiction up until, say, the mid-1990's. I'm typing on a desktop computer that far outperforms the roomful of IBM big iron my university had in 1970; behind me my future son-in-law is sitting at an even more powerful machine and building things in what might as well be Gibson's cyberspace.

But we stopped going to the moon a quarter century ago. Weird.

By the way, I have no idea how you found me. I see you have a friend in San Jose, but I'm assuming it was more likely our shared interest in science fiction or web design. Anyway, hi! Feel free to ask questions.

Re: The future and all that

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

Our common interest in Web design led me to your account. Also, I was interested in your use of a Mandelbrot set as a default graphic - and impressed that your username indicated that you knew it was a Mandelbrot set.

Re: The future and all that

[mdlbear]

It's actually positively-imaginary half of the the cubic variant, of course. I'm a lapsed mathematician.

There are a couple of other Minnesota residents on my flist; gmcdavid is a fellow Carleton grad. Many of the rest are people I run into at science fiction conventions, but it's always interesting to find out how people find me; sometimes there's an interesting story there.

Re: The future and all that - positively-imaginary halves

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

'Positively-imaginary half of the the cubic variant.' One of my regrets is that I didn't make it through Calculus. This may encourage me to do a little digging, and pick up more of the vocabulary, and perhaps some of the ideas involved in that sort of math.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I think it just goes to show how limited our ability to predict the future is. Someone from 1947 would be looking for crazy huge architecture and transportation systems because that is what had already been changing in their life. Same way I can't help looking forward to computer tech improvements, when biotech is probably going to be a much bigger force in my life.