Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot
nautil.us
nautil.us
Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power-structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
In one aspect futurism often looks like an extreme expression of contemporary culture when seen in retrospect is in futuristic architecture and design. E.g. http://vintageindustrialstyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08...
Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.
On the contrary, I'm sure he'd argue that all the emphasis in more modern space operas like Banks' on the extent to which liberal civilisations with few other worries should impose their cultural norms on very different aliens is probably a reflection of contemporary preoccupations[1], much like the softer side of late nineteenth century proto-futurism was preoccupied with eugenics and utopian socialism, and by the early twentieth century it had become preoccupied with war and dystopian socialism.
It's not the most tightly-written article, but it's full of social as well as technological innovations missed by the last generation of futurists. We're a long way from the world of the Culture so it's not really the job of the author to identify exactly what that's missing, but I think it's fair to say that if we ever enter a spacefaring age, we might find even the most thought-provoking late twentieth century space opera to be more a reflection of contemporary liberal foreign policy concerns than a reflection of the biggest changes that have happened and challenges they face.
And I'd say that they're only anarcho-communists in name. Really, they're ant farms, kept by the Minds.
People seem to get really butthurt about this, but it is actually series canon that much more thoroughly "posthuman" lifestyles were "in-fashion" at some previously point, and will be again, at some future point. The author was just focusing on the period of time that happened to be easiest to understand for his readership. And there are always those who make Unusual Life Choices.
Oy.
It's a literary form -- a subcategory of fiction. Yes, some works of SF are set in a plausibly-imagined future. Yes, some of these works may make projections/extrapolations about technologies around us. But the authors are writing in the social context of the present, and what they write about reflects the present day's concerns and perspectives, unless they are really hardcore about their futurism.
Upshot: the vast bulk of SF isn't predictive, and isn't intended to be. As a field we sometimes get something right -- but there's an element of the thousand monkeys eventually emitting a Shakespearean sonnet to this: we also get a whole lot more wrong.
Source: I do this for a living.
Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalties to buy an Apple IIc). His creative vision was more one of social atomization and a particular aesthetic in a multi-national dominated future than it was informed by actual technology. Despite which, his creative vision of "cyberspace" got taken seriously enough as a visual metaphor that I remember sitting in on a debate at the W3C conference in 1996 between folks proposing that VRML should follow a Gibsonian model, and those who thought "Snow Crash" was the way forward. (Neal Stephenson's followers won the day. See also "Second Life", I guess ...)
That's an example of "influencing". "Neuromancer" was very influential, but hardly predictive.
Actual predictive SF is much, much rarer, but if we ever get a space elevator you can probably blame Arthur C. Clarke ("The Fountains of Paradise"), which is an old-school didactic hey-why-don't-we-do-this-the-numbers-check-out work of prediction in fiction drag. Or maybe Andy Weir's "The Martian".
Written SF has traditionally been utter rubbish at predicting developments in the IT/computing sector, with notable exceptions -- for example the novella "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. (I've attempted this too but I'm not going to bang my own drum here.)
In particular, I often find myself citing his depiction in _Friday_ of its titular character using a multimedia hyperlink system which seems analogous to the web and media-rich hypertext generally. (He gets wrong that it's an exclusive closed private system... that is wrong... isn't it...)
It's not the depiction of hypertext research that I find compelling...
...it's his dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap, far afield from the original research topic. And that serendipity and unanticipated (and unsought) correlations will prove both more compelling to users and more illuminating that narrow document retrieval would be.
Whether that same book paints a reasonable depiction of the current devolving global political climate is another question... but one which also continues to come up in idle conversations...
Btw @cstross just finally read Saturn's Children, Neptune's Brood, and the connective-tissue short work whose name escapes me. I greatly enjoyed the winks esp. in SC to _Friday_ etc. Thanks!
You regard Heinlein's 'dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap' as being prescient. I can't say what you mean by prescience, but I can point to "As We May Think" to show the importance Bush placed in associative thinking some 35 years earlier:
> The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. .... Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
> Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. ...
> Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
I can also say that in 1951 Heinlein was well aware that research was much more than 'narrow document retrieval'. Consider "The Puppet Masters" from that year, chapter IV:
> "At the library I went to the catalogue, put on blinkers and started scanning for references. "Flying Saucers" led to "Flying Disks," then to "Project Saucer," then "Lights in the Sky,", "Fireballs," "Cosmic Diffusion Theory of Life Origin," and two dozen blind alleys and screwball branches of literature. I needed a Geiger counter to tell me what was pay dirt, ... Nevertheless, in an hour I had a handful of selector cards. I handed them to the vestal virgin at the desk and waited while she fed them into the hopper."
That's catalogue-assisted associative thinking, followed by document retrieval. I don't think requires prescience in the early 1980s to get a sense for how a Memex-like machine embodied in a modern computer might improve upon a paper catalogue for associative thinking.
To be more concrete, remember too that France was rolling out Minitel across the country the same year Friday was published. While Minitel specifically did not likely influence Heinlein, I bring it up to show that the ideas of online research terminals was no longer pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but something that many people thought about and were implementing. (Another example from two years later is the 'the Bloomberg terminal', which is now a mainstay of business research.)
I'll be honest, when I see "Where are my flying cars?" used seriously, not just as a "ha ha" sort of thing, I dock a lot of points. It's fashionable pseudo-intellectual claptrap.
Real science fiction has discussed all sorts of things, and yes, that actually does include women in a wide variety of roles, including giants of the field like Heinlein and even TV such as the original series Star Trek, and I could keep going for a very boring amount of time.
I don't think anti-gravity is a silly idea.
We're only starting to learn about the quantum world, and who knows what we will discover beyond that?
"Radio has no future." -- Lord Kelvin, physicist, the father of thermodynamics.
Our inability to predict the distant future only says one thing: things that we can imagine are already happening. The gap between an idea and its implementation is narrower compared to hundreds of years ago. With very few exceptions maybe: AI, "eternal" battery cells, easy space travel and a few others. So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time.
I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or internet).
What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes affected by technology etc in the future.
Just to make fun of the headline from the article, "We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.", the failure was thinking giant buildings full of men tightening bolts on a non-automated assembly line was normal, progressive, and eternal. Men and women working side by side has been normal or at least not noteworthy for a couple hundred thousand years... a couple decades of men only manual labor factory buildings was the weird oddity. What I'm getting at is the innovation isn't "allowing" women to stop eating bonbons on the couch and go to work, the "innovation" is all male manual labor assembly line factories died out and blew away, so things are now back to more or less normal with men and women more or less working together more or less most of the time plus or minus geography and climate and individual worksite and individual instantaneous work task. Aside from fixations on imaginary pasts that never or rarely existed in the first place but fit a modern political axe to grind. Men and women not spending time together is really pretty weird on a long enough time scale.
This also shows up in the car predictions. Burning basically all our fossil energy resources in a century or so is really weird behavior, so the results are going to be very weird and very temporary and very dependent at any instant on the trajectory of that very rapid burn rate and very rapid economically viable depletion rate. There's a classic graph that shows fossil fuel use over the history of our species as a flat line around zero with a crazy vertical line blip right about now. You can't make long term trend predictions about a random sized and located momentary blip.
Finally an aspect of naming games. We have reasonably cheap extremely safe 500 mph self driving machines that we sit in while reading legacy newspapers just like we always claimed we'd have, we just call them jet airplanes instead of calling them cars. That doesn't mean the prediction the machines would exist was wrong, or that we don't sit in them and read newspapers today, it just means we insist on marketing them under a different name, not exactly a major miss for the prediction. So predictions of everyone having electric cars will basically be correct in that average peasants like us will use electricity in the daily grind of life, even if some marketing guy insists on calling it the electric minivan or the e-Bus or the Apple iStationWagon, OK whatever its still basically "everyone uses electric cars" in practice.
I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen (at least, not for average people getting around town).
No, I just dismissed it as close enough (the 15 year gap doesn't matter much if you predict in the 50's-60's -- it's just 20-30% off in the date, and they still got the technology right).
Today, besides multiple projects (Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, for self driving cars being demonstrated etc) we have mass market self-parking cars.
>I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen
If it's slowly introduced as a feature to new models, then as soon as people see how convenient it is, they'll enabled it. Some people will resist because they want to "have control" and are afraid, but most will use it. They might start using it 20% of the time or so, when in a traffic jam, when talking on the phone, when tired, etc. Soon they'll just leave it on most of the time. 15 years after they become mass market, small kids will have known them all their life, so even easier for them to adopt.
G.K. Chesterton points out, in reply to the original manifesto:
Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both of Liberal politics and Christian morals; I say gratifying because, however unfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarrelled, they are always united in the feeble hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these. They will "glorify war--the only true hygiene of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of Anarchism, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman." They will "destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice."
The essay fleshes this out in a less combative way, making less assumptions about what Futurists are for, and merely critiquing their blind spots.
The article, and you, fail to make the case that this is anything more than a strawman.
> The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo.
> Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science.
Notice in particular "admired [...] violence", and "however daring, however violent".
The original article cites numerous examples, centrally the one about a futuristic workplace without women, and my post cites a GK Chesterton piece that directly criticizes, with quotes, Marinetti's manifesto.
For HN, just consider that threads dealing with "women in tech" or "minorities in tech" or "gentrification" are routinely flagged down, with a share of the website being very vocal about wanting articles focused on technology and gadgets. Insofar this is hacker "news", about new and upcoming things, many users feel like these human topics do not qualify. They still make the front-page, proving that it's far from a universal opinion, but the contingent is there.
Are there any serious minds trying predictions? When we talk about futurism, in reality it just ends up being weirdos on the internet (hi /r/futurism which is always 10-15 years away from some tech revolution) or whatever sci-fi authors are doing today. Except sci-fi isn't futurism, its literature. These authors aren't trying to divine the future, they're trying to write sellable dramatic stories. There's a reason Star Wars has action-packed dogfighting and not boring over the horizon missile launches. Or up-close-and-personal lightsaber fights instead of drones attacks from miles away.
Maybe getting the future right isn't that tough. Some investors seem to be able to do it. It just doesn't seem that anyone is seriously trying outside of the limited scope or very near future investing. I imagine there's a poor value proposition here. Maybe you can tell us that in 30 years some hot new tech will be common, but if it costs $50m to get to that conclusion, is it worth it? Especially if you can't monopolize that tech?
I also think its a little foolish for the author to conflate technology and society. You can get a car or an iphone in Saudi Arabia with no problem, but if you're a woman, you can't drive the car, but you can use the iphone. Social advances don't propagate out like technological ones do. Or if you're gay you can run a powerful company and be influencial like Tim Cook or Peter Theil, but Tim Cook's equivalent in Russia would have been discriminated away from any position of power.
1) 'Futurism' is the early twentieth century philosophy created by Marinetti, launched with this enchanting essay: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti....
2) "Instagram began life as a Yelp-style app called Burbn, with photos an afterthought (photos on your phone, is that a thing?)."
Is this somehow implying that Instagram invented phones on your camera, or indeed anything at all? This seems a common sort of confusion, along the same category as believing Apple invented smart phones, Google invented search engines or Facebook invented social networking, rather than popularizing a particular form of a preexisting technology.
I'd read it as that the makers of Instagram initially didn't believe in people actually using cameras in their phones, so the opposite of your interpretation.
How many people did have camera feature-phones/early smartphones and did really use the camera? Granted, I was still in high-school, but tons of my peers had phones with cameras, but they were only used very seldomly and not in any phone-specific way (take picture with phone if you didn't have a digital camera with you, send to computer, treat as if it came of a crappy digital camera)
Futurists (from future studies) refer to the field as futurism, futurology, and future study. See usages https://www.google.com/search?q=futurism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&h...
So you have to read the right people. Nearly every time I open a book from Stanislav Lem, I am thinking: "My god, was this really written in the 70s?!". That is predictive power.
1.Genetic Testing -
Anticpated: GATTACA
What we got: A bunch of innocent people freed from jail. Who, today, would want to live in a world without genetic forensics?
2. Pacifying Narcotics -
Anticipated: Brave New World
What we got:War on Drugs, 80's crack epidemic. Huxley foresaw the gov't forcing people to take drugs. The real problem was the gov't trying to stop people from willingly taking drugs.Most of the movie deals with bad guys trying to find trace hair and DNA from imposters. Genetic testing.
It's unsubtle textbook discrimination, removing perfectly good candidates from consideration. The company is hardly affected, there are plenty of candidates, but since these people are shunned by most companies they suffer terribly.
How in the world does that related to people with imaginary causes of autism.
Plus all the circumstances where you must make reasonable accommodations even if it has some impact, as long as they can still do the job.
There is a big difference between picking qualified individuals vs. systematically picking certain groups over others.
He's not imagining the tests. The evidence of tests is not one guy lying in a tiny study.
Basically, Gattaca's problems could be managed by passing a couple of well-designed laws.
http://jaltcoh.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-are-we-doing-when-w...
It's certainly more than "good intentions and well-crafted words", as the $2.25 million award for the GINA lawsuit earlier this year shows. See http://www.nature.com/news/why-the-devious-defecator-case-is... . While that's the first one to get to trial, the article says that the EEOC filed 333 cases last year which cited GINA.
We don't yet have genetic testing as an entry barrier for things, but we have other similarly arbitrary tests. Companies checking your credit ratings and requiring annual health evaluations of their employees. Some companies "encourage" everyone to wear company-provided health monitors 24/7. Claims that you're predisposed towards certain diseases based on various parameters are everywhere.
Brave New World wasn't wrong about drugs. People dope themselves on painkillers, antidepressants and other mood-altering drugs.
The government doesn't force or encourage people to take antidepressants or other "mood-altering drugs", except when they are eg incarcerated. Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.
>Gattaca was specifically about genetic testing.
If that's how you read/watch science fiction, you're wasting your time. Gattaca and Brave New World are dystopian stories. Dystopias are not meant to precisely predict the future. They are mean to show how the future will look like if certain conditions are met. The overall reasoning matters far more than specifics.
The overall reasoning in Gattaca looks solid. And we're nowhere near the level of genetic testing/engineering technology shown in the movie. But we're getting there.
>Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.
Where was this government involvement described?
http://www.huxley.net/soma/somaquote.html
I don't recall the book explicitly speaking about government involvement with Soma at all, aside from the implication that government approved of it. FDA approves all the anti-depressants and painkillers as well. So?
Especially so if you've seen a lot of older sci-fis about our present time.
Note there's hard sci fi and soft sci fi, and a soap opera / action flick which happens to be "in the future" like B5 is not really predictive. I'm just saying that very soft sci fi is indistinguishable from copy and paste style fantasy or historical fiction. Hard sci fi like KSRs Mars Trilogy ages much better than "80s soap opera, on a space ship".
On Hoth, Skywalker on his Tauntaun uses a comlink to talk with Solo. And Solo uses a pocket comlink to talk with Transport to say that he and Leia have been blocked by a collapse of the ice corridor and will be using the Falcon to leave Hoth.
There are other examples of comlinks used as practical mobile communication about equivalent to a compact walkie-talkie.
To be fair, most futurist thought work will be fully automated by now, and there would be NO people needed in the office or factory.
That prediction came true.
But it's ok, feminism won the fight for equality 30 years ago /s
Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.
However, the game isn't Western, it's Russian. I can't help but wonder if the role of women simply reflects the Russian male game creators' view of the world and an expanded role for the women of the future was simply not on their collective horizon.
Otherwise, great game, especially for $10.
> Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.
Reversion to (or, at least, reintroduction of elements of) pre-modern social structures is a pretty common trope of post-apocalyptic fiction; insofar as social structures are adaptive to environmental conditions, its not entirely without a realistic basis.
wow - tough crowd. I would have been interesting just to be there and experience the reaction.
was worth skimming just to learn about the mercury dime : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_dime
It may be a generalisation, but it's pretty accurate generally. — [citation needed]
The rich won't envision a future with less (or more) poverty. — [citation needed]
White men are less likely to imagine a future with full gender equality and black liberation than black women are — [citation needed]
People living in the West will think less about the rise of the rest of the world. — [citation needed]
On the other hand if someone comes from a background where they feel oppressed, they're going to write that into their work.
That's part of the point of the article. People continue to extrapolate from what they view culture currently is, as if it continues indefinitely into the future. I think based on that "white men" are going to view it as being more pleasant and fair (i.e. their own experience) than minorities.
Or, well, pessimistic at all. One of the weird things about the post-war West is most people honestly expect the future to be better.
So "impossible to imagine" strikes me as an uncharitable characterization. I can imagine that vegetarianism becomes a moral norm, and I can imagine how the change could happen, but that's entirely disconnected from my doubt it will happen. I also remember the time in my life when gay rights weren't the foregone conclusion they've been for the last 10 years.
If we look at the distribution of shifting societal attitudes, there is going to be some threshold that turns things from "wishful thinking" to "probably going to happen." Without knowing what the information available at the time, and methodology used was generate the prediction, lying any blame at the feet of white/male/rich strikes me as applying a currently politically fashionable one size fits all explanation.