Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot (2015)
nautil.us
nautil.us
I'll also add if you haven't seen Black Panther, go and see it. Most science fiction reminds me of Kowloon by day, Tokyo by night. It is so refreshing to see a different, Africa-centric view of the future. Think Nairobi 2080.
Black Panther, I hope, will help people to be inspired by other ideas of what the future can be - from different cultural lenses, changes in view of technology, changes in ways of doing etc.
It's about decolonizing the future and opening the door to other ways of being.
Here's one of my favorite piece of futures work that I like to talk about. It's about the future of human relationships: https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of-marriage/
Yes, it's still techno-driven and still very San Francisco, but at least its not about flying cars or fancy tech, just different ways of being.
Haha, someone should let this author know about dating.
Sounds more like pre-marital cohabitation (which is also already common), but perhaps with a more explicit and formalised sense that this is a time-limited 'trial phase'.
I wonder why this goes together with reduced expectations; I can imagine it leading to a resurgance in the belief that marriage is for life, by reducing the number of impulsive and semi-informed marriages. But maybe that goes hand in hand with the rejection of some less-realistic romantic ideals we have about the role of a life partner?
That already exists, at least in Belgium (legal cohabitation) and in France (PACS).
What does this mean?
> "and I'm continually frustrated by the future as being techno-solutionist-driven and mostly Western or some Hong Kong/Tokyo future."
The future as it is and has been coming to pass? How we, today and recently, culturally portray the idea of the future?
In academic circles, we're called foresight or futures studies field but no one knows what that is.
It legitimately sounds like you belong working at the Ministry of Magic.
There are some govts, like in Finland or Singapore, that invest heavily in futures studies. Singapore Gov't has multiple foresight teams within the prime minister's office, ministry of trade etc. UAE has a quasi-Ministery of the Future: https://www.mocaf.gov.ae/en
I'd rather be working at the Ministry of Magic though. :p
Just the name cracked me up. :)
I have a Masters in Foresight and I'm a member of the Association of Professional Futurists. The field is commonly referred to as foresight and futures studies. We're sort of an awkward field, so at some universities, future studies program can be found under the school of design, political science, and technology.
In terms of careers, academically-trained futurists can be found in a few industries: defense, energy, and pharmaceuticals. My schoolmates from my program work at Disney, CPGs, and governments (defense, prime minsters office). In tech, I think Facebook and Mozilla also have foresight people.
Our field is by definition multi-disciplinary, so we had to learn a bit of everything: systems thinking, scenario planning, social change, business strategy, etc.
> "The future as it is and has been coming to pass? How we, today and recently, culturally portray the idea of the future?"
More so how we culturally portray the future. There are a lot of cultural preconceptions that are incorporated in visions of the future.
I grew up with Star Trek (TOS) and my dad is ex-NASA, so I'm well acquainted with the traditional American view of the future, but I'm also a strong supporter of the need for a diverse range of alternatives.
For example, Sohail Inayatullah of UNESCO writes a lot about alternative Muslim futures. They're not tech-based at all but thinking about political, economic, and social changes.
Something similar probably needs to occur for Nairobi to find its strong footing in the western futurism.
I think one reason for that could be that the Wakanda city in Black Panther looks and feels like a city dressed in cultural heritage or a theme park, with regular "western looking" high tech insides. Look at the lab for instance. Your generic villain/Star Trek/Super Hero/Industrial lab. The whole city looks very Star Trek, very bland. I don't dislike it, but it's been done in countless STTNG episodes.
I think a depiction of an African sci-fi where the tech and the soft is reversed, would be very interesting.
In Wakanda you have cultural theme park on the outside, hard tech on the inside.
I'd rather see the opposite - hard generic tech on the outside, commandeered by a creamy, cultural inside.
Background:
Maybe the African continent was mostly spared in some kind of cataclysmic event, now some African countries are super rich from trading food and skilled labor (management and security detail mostly?) to the rest of the world for tech and tech know how in return. Refugees line its border and only people with strong know how and good teaching skills are let in.
The opening scene could get some inspiration from Chappy and District 9, but with an even stronger emphasis on tech as super advanced but casual - make the connection as well to advanced tech and magic. Skip the step where people stop believing in magic.
This sounds a bit like the tech/culture mix of the predator species of the series of the same name. Particularly in Predator 2, with the crashed tech ship and its ceremonial displays internally.
But for all we know, the Predators may have developed their tech themselves and the ship just represents a linear normal progression of their tech. In that case, this is not what I'm after.
If on the other hand, the Predators initially acquired their tech from some other culture (like IIRC the Klingons did theirs) this might be exactly what I'm after.
1. When they're in the market, people are still walking around in sandals and even barefoot.
This is counter to either ultra-sleek hygienic futures or the film noir/cyberpunk look where everything is dirty and wet. In this area, it's a bit more like Star Wars.
2. One of the elder advisors is wearing a giant lip ring (sorry, don't know what its called): https://media.comicbook.com/2017/06/black-panther-green-suit...
Basically, it means you can be "modern" but on your own terms (that is, have your ethnic identity still represented).
3. I like the idea that an African country being the most technologically advanced nation on earth, not Japan, China, or the US...but an African country!
I think #4 is very subversive (for unfortunate reasons). It really made me think what would it take for an African country - be it Nigerian, Botswana, South Africa etc - to compete with the likes of Singapore or California.
4. Lastly, I like the idea of the weapon that look organic rather than looks "hi-tech": https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/3e274163-f36d-4b79-bff7-...
I am okay with the kingdom part. Part of future studies is also the idea that the past can be revisited. In our academically training, one of the things we talk about is that the future is not exponentially changing in a linear direction (like Singularity folks), it can be circular, stagnant, and go "backwards", etc.
For me, the bigger issue is that despite being technologically advanced they're basically a vibranium-based economy, which makes me assume that they would have the same problems as petro-states. Perhaps that explains why they're a monarchy?
Part of the conceptual difficulty, I think, is the Western vision of Africa as being one place with one peoples. It's a bit like how Western nations view their own indigenous groups, only worse: with a broad, homogeneous, inaccurate portrayal.
The futures of Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa are likely to lack homogeneity.
If we like to think that we're far more advanced than our predecessors, the conclusion is that our descendants will leave us in the dust. Maybe misplaced faith in the former encourages our hope for the latter over a dystopia where everything is as bad as it already is, only worse.
The predominant culture of the developed world is catastrophically infertile. The more progressive parts of these cultures are often the least fertile, while the more conservative and traditional parts are more fertile. But the offspring of these traditional subcultures often convert into the progressive culture, at least where that culture is more prosperous and holds higher perceived status.
Part of what makes religions so persistent is their evolutionary fitness from a memetic perspective. “Tell everyone you know to worship $DEITY, have lots of babies, and also kill/shun anyone who tries to stop worshipping $DEITY” is a great algorithm for maximizing the number of $DEITY-worshippers. “Never have sex or try to convert anyone” is a shitty algorithm, which is why the Shakers are practically extinct while Islam is on course to become the world’s largest religion (and may already be, if you subtract the plurality of western Christians who are behaviorally secular anyway).
I suspect some memetic program that survives contact with science, prosperity, and progressivism without turning infertile, if it ever evolves, will be the foundation of the future of human culture.
I read that more as "have defused the population bomb". Cultures that have less children have more wealth to pass on to their children, making each one more likely to survive. The rest of the world having tons of children is likely to face shortages of land, water, food, health care... etc. This leads to all sorts of instability, which I'm sure you can imagine.
The thing is, liberalism has a lot of memetic fitness too. Classical liberalism has been devouring the world for the past few centuries, and while it occasionally suffers setbacks, it's done very very well against kings, dictators, popes, shoguns, and the like trying to hold it back. Just because liberalism is in a decline now doesn't mean that it's lost its power.
Rich liberal societies consistently reproduce at less than replacement. This is obviously unsustainable; a population that doesn’t reproduce fast enough to replace itself will go extinct. Obviously unsustainable growth isn’t a great thing either, but as long as the rate of growth is low enough for technology to keep up, the earth can actually sustain a surprisingly high population in comfortable conditions. The limiting factor turns out to be energy.
Why on earth do people equate negative population growth with extinction? Populations of most species rise and fall all the time with availability of resources and amount of predation. This is Ecology 101 stuff. I feel like most of the people who argue this have some sort of deep-seated fear that the world with run out of white people and God forbid non-Caucasians take over the world. But societies reproduce memetically, not genetically, so it doesn't really matter about local reproduction levels -- as long as you have immigration, a society survives.
Agreed that energy removes a lot of barriers, but not all of the limits. Earth is still a constant size, and having an ecosystem is helpful to us. But with enough energy, other planets start looking attractive.
It’s also abundantly clear that human population decline has absolutely nothing to do with availability of resources, because human populations with more resources are paradoxically less fertile.
Speaking to global warming in particular—once a single technologically advanced country figures out how to cheaply extract CO2 from the atmosphere, either through a more efficient means of doing that or through a breakthrough in energy production, that country can unilaterally solve the problem forever, even with continued use of hydrocarbons (since they can operate a closed loop of reextracting used hydrocarbons from the atmosphere). The fact that we aren’t there yet means that population growth outstripped technological growth for a long while, but in the long term, it’s a solvable bottleneck, just as the low agricultural output of much of the world was a bottleneck solved by Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution.
I feel like you're borrowing trouble, though. Populations with more resources are less fertile, for now. But unless and until global population falls below two billion humans, it's not really our problem to solve. Any number of things could change socially by that time. In the meantime though, dropping below replacement rate increases our odds of survival as a species, as we can avoid the potential Malthusian catastrophe.
Our current falling birthrate has to be socially constructed. Having children used to an economic advantage, but this is no longer the case. Anything that changes that equation can reverse the trend, be it a social safety net, more technology, cheaper education, or more housing availability.
My basic point is that, insofar as the more liberalized and secular cultures of the present developed world can't sustainably maintain their current populations, there's a limited amount of runway for these cultures to persist. Eventually, we will either run out of immigrants and turn the entire world into one with a fertility rate below replacement, or some other, more fertile culture will out-reproduce or convert us faster than we can convert them, and that will be the culture of the future.
Perhaps it's possible that improvements in economic circumstances will allow fertility to rebound in secular cultures, but they've had the opposite effect so far. It's also worth pointing out that, by necessity, we're going to need some lead time to get the fertility rate back up. A fertility rate of 1.4 means that each generation is 70% the size of their parents' generation, and half the size of their grandparents' generation, and we're already having a hard time affording pensions as it is.
China, in particular, may have a massive self-inflicted demographic crisis on their hands due to the one-child policy. If Chinese parents during the one-child era had a strong preference for girls, maybe it would have worked out, but as it happened, they had a strong preference for boys. They might be able to handle the problem of caring for larger elder generations with smaller younger generations by offsetting the population decline with strong per capita economic growth, but the demographic issues involved with having large numbers of excess men will persist.
I'm also curious about the math that leads you to the two billion number. A Kardashev I civilization on Earth could sustainably support much more than that, and a civilization that advanced beyond Kardashev I, even more. By the time we run into the long term sustainability issues of our current population, or even of a population of 9-12 billion, it's entirely likely that we will be at such a level of technology that we can solve those issues anyway.
If there's an "obviously" here, it's that this is the direction in which current trends are heading.
The peasant class can reproduce all it wants. Managed Malthusian resource limitations will keep it from being a political or - eventually - even an ecological threat.
We are already seeing a growing appreciation for practices like ethical polyamory, open marriage, etc today, coupled with the growing depreciation for things like real estate while the divorce rate tells us traditional marriage is becoming untenable.
The polyamorous communes of our progressive descendants may be more robust emotionally and economically, as they assume those functions of the nuclear family without the constraints of "traditional" two-adult family units (cheating, disinterest, work/life balance, max 2 earners, etc). The traditional perspective believes it has a monopoly on social harmony and fertility because it adheres to strict, heteronormative, and patriarchal rules that appear to have "always worked"; the wager our this collective polyamorous future is to recreate those "village" conditions, even more primordial than the nuclear family
While you’re right in that nuclear families aren’t ideal, the more fertile subcultures are those where extended families are valued. And these cultures are, by and large, religious and culturally conservative. The only issue there is the tendency for the children of those cultures to assimilate into the progressive mainstream; after all, that’s what happened to us.
We've created a society where people who recklessly reproduce with no concern for the consequences or anything except for themselves, will not starve and will mostly go unpunished for their awful decisions. At the same time those in the middle who are more educated and socially conscious tend to be much more cautious and judicious with reproduction. Even those on the top who are capable of 'responsibly' reproducing are increasingly choosing not to. This is going to lead to an interesting future...
A Radcliffe outreach symposium about genetics research included a sketch of the history of the field. Someone asked where the dramatic innovation was coming from. It was clear they really wanted an answer of Kuhn-revolution changes in perspective leading to better questions. They were notably unhappy with the answer that, no, it was mostly technological economics. Advancing tech (sequencing, PCR), dropping costs by orders of magnitude, changed the questions we could afford to pursue.
I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World. It’s a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150 years.
That’s one reason I mention the Disney ride. When did we get electricity, refrigerated food, inter-continental communications? It was earlier than people assume.
I just say: "Internet".
You could still run most of the modern world without the internet, replacing it with fax and telephone (century old technology at this point). It would be painful but doable. Without refrigerators society as currently structured would collapse.
More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a button. People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a pound item.
The fact we can easily have a calculator, GPS system, access to most information in the world, have an audio and video conference with people from all around the world thanks to some small item we carry in our pockets is now taken for granted but it was missed by most scifi writers until the 90s.
Not like they can afford that advice. Or that it would do them much without treatment. Outside of special upper class cases this just doesn't happen.
>People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a pound item
Which they mainly use to settle BS quarrels about who did what, and to serve as a replacement from actually studying something...
Business people may use phone calls over video conferencing, but I am willing to bet that they schedule those calls with computers, with telephone numbers they get through a computer system, which also keeps track of their notes, documents, needs and other information.
Video calls are probably simply not a good idea, but I have been in many online many-to-many meetings. Not only is it far more flexible, but it is plain easier to see shared documents and presentations when you can see it on your own screen than on some projector partly obscured by some coworkers head.
As for Netflix, it is fundamentally different compared to TV in that it puts you in control of what you want to see and when. I realize there are cable boxes now that allow you to do the same in a limited fashion, but those wouldn't have been developed without netflix, and most of them require the internet to deliver those features.
I was thinking about this the other day. I take streaming 4K video completely for granted, but I marvel at the system of pipes that delivers natural gas and fresh drinking water to my house.
Consider that in the 80s people didn't have internet and yet the life was not that different from today.
Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or comedy with fantastical sets and props. But even something as soft as Doctor Who (let alone the likes of Asimov, AC Clarke) often looks at culture (either how radically different it is, or how age-old problems remain). Then there's works like 1984 and Brave New World which were almost entirely about culture.
And it's not like The Jetsons ignored culture. It was deliberately a 1950s sit-com set in the far future, and was a follow-up to The Flintstones which was a 1950s sit-com set in the distant past. The fact that the original was a little conservative in its portrayal of culture might have had something to do with political environment (the Cuban missile crisis was just before it was written). I don't think it entirely ignored the possibility of social change, but was possibly trying to make some kind of statement about which economic system was really on the right side of history.
Or even modeled after age old stories. Like most writing recycles and reinterprets old material. I started to wonder what historic metaphors the Expanse relies on, what with ship travel taking months, pirates, colonies, the plague - but the opposite of slavery, with unconditional basic income. The gang "the Golden Bough" is a hint at Virgil's Aeneid, I learned today by coincident. It's not hard sci-fi at all. The sci-fi is kept to a minimum as much as the fantasy. That is, the fantastic elements should be kept to a minimum. Now I wonder what that thing (not to spoiler) represents. Just a deus ex machina for sake of the story or a ring of ancient overlords?
Interpreting sci-fi stories as just normal stories with fantasy props robs them of half of their value.
If you don't consider object-level descriptions as valuable in itself, then I don't think you'll find much enjoyment in science fiction (especially of works on the harder end of the scale).
The article also argues many things are the same (like drinking water). Well, I know how much life has changed in the last 40 years. These concepts were unknown by the public or not-yet-popular a short 20-25 years ago: internet, smart phone, social media, wearables, electric cars, autopilot, laptops, machine learning, online learning & working... We're going through exponential change, and the author still argues not much has changed in the last 100 years. We're still drinking water etc :) Laughable.
If you think think change is only at the top (of economic ladder), see also "The Better Angels of Our Nature" or "It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 years".
"Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today." Dec 1900 [1]
I enjoy reading commentary about this set of predictions... to see how people misunderstand the past. Or why something didn't happen.
Take horses. One commentary says, 'no, wrong, horses were cheaper than cars are today'... and compares only purchase price, being unfamiliar with stabling. Another claims horses were more environmentally friendly than cars... forgetting that horse fodder was once a primary import of cities, their waste a primary export, and that it and carcasses once decorated streets. A major use of horses was... shipping fodder for horses. And I fuzzily recall an SV person giving a talk at Stanford, arguing you can't predict the future (sigh), and dissing the article in general, and the horse prediction as 'they thought horses will become extinct - silly them'. When they didn't say extinct; and some commercial breeds are; and given the change of urban horse populations (from like cars, to like giraffes), a non-technical "extinct" wouldn't have been wrong.
Unfamiliar with the past; inattentive to the present; and lackadaisical in thought; we watch the future arrive, and find it unexpected. There's a surprise.
Perhaps VR ("so this is what it was like... oh, that's weird"), and AR ("overlay the past on the present"[2]) will help.
[1] "What may happen in the next hundred years" (Watkins; 1900; The Ladies Home Journal) as jpeg: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elf... ; as text: http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/190... [2] Old photos overlaid on new: Zoltán https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/7215762614911821... ; assorted https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=i...