I was talking to a futurologist the other day who was staying with us.
She advises large companies on how to look far far ahead into the future.
I showed her my collection of dead technologies and we discussed the futures we expected. A Sixties kid and an Eighties kid.
Being much older and a baby boomer I explained that my expected future had been of steel and glass needle-pointed cities piercing a domed sky bristling with gleaming rockets and jet cars.
Clearly this dream future never came and I realised whilst describing it that I felt a strong sense of disappointment. Maybe even betrayal.
I wonder if any of you feel like this readers, that the future we thought would emerge from Thunderbirds, Star Trek, TV21, the moonshot and a million B-movies has simply not materialised.
Smart phones just don't cut it.
What do you think? Am I misguided?
Welcome back Woodsy.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have the flying cars of the future but when I revisit London these days the very changed skyline of tall glass building is a whole new city from the one I grew up in.
Other infrastructure improvements to rail travel are evident but the human scale is missing.
New development in locations that retain something old and historic just point out the lack of human scale.
When it comes to human advancement in living conditions and medicine Britain shows a back ward slide. Politics look to returning to Victorian conditions rather than a brighter future.
WE WAS CHEATED. You are not misguided!
I know what you mean about London Terran. I suppose my vision of it is essentially a Victorian City with Saint Pauls and Big Ben to biggest kids on the block. I stayed near the Gherkin a few years back, on Pudding Lane and stared up at the big pickle and thought hmmmm, this could be the start of the steel and glass tomorrow. All it needed was a jetpack landing pad at each window!
DeleteAs a child, or adult if it comes to that I remember climbing the many steps of the spiral staircase that is The Monument. A Tower built close to the site of the start of the Great Fire of London, 1666. From here you could look down on the City of London.
DeleteOn my last visit to London we went to the public viewing gallery of 20 Fenchurch Street known as the Walkie-Talkie due to it's strange shape. Looking down at The Monument which looked so insignificant was quite surprising.
The Walkie-Talkie had it's own problems when built in that the curved glass front reflected and concentrated the sun's rays burning nearby buildings and 'warming' pedestrians. So here you have it, anti-social buildings are the future!
Glad to have you back Woodsy. Thanks to Bill and Scoop for the June Moonbase helm and refreshing new blog angles.
ReplyDeleteI fully share your sentiments Woodsy, but in time I have come to accept a stance that Terranova so well described. Basically, much of the vintage utopian technology is already here. What has not changed is the human nature, thence the disappointment.
Yes, Bill and |Scoop have done a really ace job. I should clear off more often! ha ha
DeleteIt will be interested to see how the internal combustion engine is wrestled from the oil-stained hands of virtually everyone on the planet and exchanged for an electric motor. Jaguar have just announced that all future XJ's will be electric.
Not sure what this means for my bright gleaming tomorrow but the word Giga will feature a lot more as the world becomes one big battery.
Gigacity 1.
A Futurologist? Now theres a job. If you're wrong, nobody will be able to pull you up about it! Society could be a lot more utopian and advanced than it currently is, but unfortunately capitalism and greed will ensure that old systems and trends are kept in place as they will generate cash. Nobody wants free energy for the people as theres no money in producing it, to be extracted from the users. Its a consumer society and so long as people will pay for stuff, business will make sure that prices will make a profit. Look at smartphones, every 12 months a bright shiny new version arrives, that everyone must have and the previous version goes in a drawer. Its like the Encom board meeting in Tron Legacy, " Whats new about this version of the operating system?" - "We put a 10 on the box"
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean Wote. I'm also getting plastic guilt. David Attenborough showed us all the plastic at the bottom of the deepest seas. Baby boomers like me love plastic. We were born into a plastic world. Is this something else our generation screwed up for the next?
DeleteBeing a January child, I am very much like the roman god Janus, whose dual faces looked into the past and future simultaneously, never on the present moment. As such, I really appreciate history and the past, but also enjoy the future and change. But should future development erase the work of previoys generations? Should new buildings sweep away the old like so much Lego? I went back to Liverpool the other day and saw the last remaining example of a victorian terrace and the frontage of a famous jewish butchers preserved in a museum. This was nestled next to a vast steel and glass laboratory complex, built fairly recently, on top of old sixties buildings. The city changes and sloughs its skin every year, so the streets I knew as a child appear to have moved and changed like so many staircases in Hogwarts. Some of the buildings have been preserved and repurposed, like the old dock warehouses, but others have been razed and uncomfortably modern edifices placed in their stead.
ReplyDeleteThe two faces of experience Wote, beautifully written, and surely in that double take lies the central dilemma of both nostalgia and our hope for the rocket-peppered future that we want. Is this what they call retro-futurism? I love the idea that city's 'slough' their skins. Makes them feel like living creatures in which we simply reside.
DeleteI beg to partly disagree. That future mostly materialized, but WE were the ones that wrongly assumend that it would had been FOR US "normal" people. If you are a 0.001 percenter, you TODAY have control (relatively to the objective limitation of our species complessive Tech level) to the same level of resources of a an High-Tech person in Vernor Vinge "Marooned in Realtime". Or, to go more back, to one of the Florinians in Asimov's "Currents of Space", and so on, and so one. My point is that that future wouldn't had been of everyone was already in those SF book FROM THE BEGINNING (Eloi vs Morlocks anyone?), but today us old farts that grew on those books see them trough the rosy lens of childhood memories, (to recaputure the innocence of which we collect the stuff we collect), and illude ourselves the it wasn't so.
ReplyDeleteGrim and sad, I know, but IMO nontheless true... :-/
SR
Apologies: Sarkites, not Florinians.
DeleteAnother one of the reasons we are so fond of that "Old Future", it is that when we firstly read those books, we were young enough to not be conscious of the underling sociopolitical, etc. issue, but only of the "wonder factor" in them. This is very clear if one re-read today one of those books. And that is one of reasons I personally almost NEVER do it.
SR
Thought provoking SR. Yes, our future lies in the contents of those sci-fi books too. Its true we view the future through rose-tinted lenses as no doubt we do our pasts. I only remember the good bits now I'm nearly 60! I still feel that the space race and its ultimate Moon Landing was a species-defining moment and its glorious promise of even greater things has not come to pass.
DeleteYes Woodsy: if this civilization don't destroy itself is a way or another, many of that promises WILL concretize, but NOT for the like of us (socioeconomically-wise), but ONLY for the 0.001%. And, again, that was already clear in the SF writers of the Golden Age: compare, e.g., the plot of Asimov's "Caves of Steel" with the one of the movie "Elysium".
DeleteSR
I've not read the Caves of Steel SR but would like to. I enjoyed Elysium. A Brave New World with a space station!
DeleteI'm from the U.S., and while I loved watching Thunderbirds as a kid of the 70s I also loved horror movies and was reading a steady diet of 'dystopian' scifi and comics (especially so-called 'underground comics'). The future I expected was always a mix of 2001 A Space Odyssey and Soylent Green... kind of shiny and hopeful until you got a closer look.
ReplyDeleteNowadays Soylent Green still feels prescient, 2001... not so much.
An interesting balance Knobgobbler. I was just like you, digesting monsters and the space race in equal measure as a kid. I too have become more pessimistic as I've got older and may also lean towards a Solyent Green where everyone becomes a biscuit! I often wonder if I was younger and the mission was closer whether I would sign up as a Mars colonist. It maybe a one way trip!
DeleteWelcome back, Woodsy. Hopefully you're fully recharged after a well deserved break :)
ReplyDeleteThank you to Bill, Scoop, and the contributing readers, for a rich variety of topics.
I sometimes take a drive around the area I grew up in as a kid. It's a futile exercise I find myself doing perhaps once or twice a year. I suspect I'm hoping to see a reassuring glimpse of the past. The safe and stable neighbourhood that was my childhood spiritual home has long since degenerated into a crime and drug infested dystopia. Things and places that were once familiar, are now unfamiliar, distorted, and decayed. Familiar faces no longer exist there. Driving around in memory mode, I always find the ghostly replays from the rewind-function of my mind are at odds with what I look at. For me at least, the physical, and visual decay, of my childhood spiritual home, symbolizes a future which didn't go quite as I would've innocently imagined possible, back then.
Thanks for the welcome back Tone. I agree that Wote and Scoop did us proud and I will struggle to follow them! Your thoughts about driving through your hometown are insightful - I love the phrase 'memory-mode' and I imagine such feelings are universal. When I revisit Preston, which I left in 1980, it always feels like a ghost town. The ghosts of my youth are still walking the cobbled streets and I find myself wandering round looking for signs that my 'time' still exists there, a sort of steppenwolf skulking in the shadows reaching out to touch a memory that isn't reality anymore. Its at once an invigorating and saddening experience being 'home' and I'm unsure if I can actually see the town for what it really is now because of all my baggage. I'm not sure I could live there anymore.
DeleteThere must be some era who got a BETTER future than they were expecting... not just personally but culturally.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that was my dad's generation... born during the great depression, even now things must seem to be looking up.
Fascinating thought KnobG.Yes, coming out of the Depression must have been heaven. Then theres the two generations who suffered two world wars. Their futures must have seemed glorious. I hope they were.
DeleteAh, The Future!
ReplyDeleteIt promised so much.
But what have we, the Children of the Space Race, actually got ?
Well, we've travelled forward in time some 50 years or so and here's the upshot.
Space stations orbiting the Earth ... 1
Moonbases ... 0 (No humans there since 1972!)
Mars bases ... 0 (Not even a man, or woman, on the bloody planet!)
Jet Packs (common and practical) ... 0
Hover Cars ... 0
Monorails (common and practical) ... 0
Lazer Guns (Phasers e.t.c.) ... 0
Starships (faster than light travel) ... 0
Matter transporters ... 0
Invisibility Devices ... 0
Time Machines ... 0
Sure, we've got fantastic computers (though no real Artificial Intelligence, thank God ) and billions of 'Star Trek' Communicators, in the form of mobile phones. But they haven't sorted out the failures to achieve the things in the above list, and indeed, seem to have screwed us up completely in social and psychological respects.
Overall, a dismal failure to achieve the things my generation of kids were 'promised' in 'The Future'.
Mish.
That is the best assessment of the retro-future Ive ever seen Mish. Bang on! The baby boomer balance sheet is in deficit!
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