The future we were really promised
One of the newsletters I subscribe to is James Pethokoukis’ Faster, Please!, described by its author as “about creating a better America and world by accelerating scientific discovery, technological progress, and commercial innovation. (And creating a pro-progress culture.)” James’ politics differs greatly from mine – he’s a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – but his newsletter is always an interesting, informative, and thoughtful read, and recommended for anyone interested in technology, innovation, and indeed the future.
Like me, James has a book out (mine is published next month), in his case titled The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. It encapsulates what he calls ‘Up Wing’ thinking, namely:
“Up Wing is my shorthand for a solution-oriented future optimism, for the notion that rapid economic growth driven by technological progress can solve big problems and create a better world of more prosperity, opportunity, and flourishing. The most crucial divide for the future of America isn’t left wing versus right wing. It’s Up Wing versus Down Wing.”
That said, it is, as his title suggests, still fundamentally an economically conservative argument (in short, broadly anti-regulation, but pro-government investment in basic science and research). Fair enough. But what I want to question here is James’ (and quite some others’) critique of the role that popular culture might have played in altering our view of the future - for the worse.
As James writes in a recent newsletter, a change in culture contributed to the ‘Great Downshift’ (declining productivity and growth since the early 1970s). To James and many others, starting around 1970 America became a less future-oriented, less future-optimistic society. The growing environmental movement, rather than just working to create a cleaner environment, became (in James’ view) “utterly hostile to technological progress, economic growth, and market capitalism.” This included presenting a dystopian picture of the future and our ability to make it better. And this was reflected in – promoted by, some might say – popular culture as well. From James’ book:
As James notes, recurringly dark fictionalised futures reflect many people’s current concerns and anxieties. But the simple point I’d make is that it’s not the job of creators of popular culture to promote positive visions of the future absent the really existing factors that could help to make these visions come true (I’m not suggesting that James is suggesting it is as such, but there is his lament that we lack more positive tomorrows). The only ‘job’ of creators is to tell the truth – the truth, for example, that the climate emergency, long predicted by often-dismissed and derided environmental ‘doomists’, has truly and surely undeniably begun. If only we’d really listened to them!
Dystopias, or dark visions of the future, are typically regarded as warnings about what could happen. But one of the arguments I make in my book is that we’re somewhat stuck, culturally, in Blade Runner-type cyberpunk futures of environmental collapse and corporate domination, amongst other things, because they remain our most likely real-world future, if not increasingly and alarmingly our present.
In other words, their predictions (often decades old, and often informed by the environmental movement James criticises) have turned more into descriptions as we’ve failed to heed their concerns - not because we followed them, but because we didn’t. And so, as I put it in the book, The Future hasn’t changed, because the conceivable future hasn’t changed.
The actual future we were promised
This, really, is the world that sci-fi ‘promised’ us, not a future of jet packs and flying cars. Nonetheless, why not read both books for two very different visions of what’s to come.
Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out in November from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.