The future will have to wait (2006)
longnow.org
longnow.org
Many people wake up, pick up their phone/tablet and immediately subject their brain to defensive thought patterns. We get to work, now often in what used to be our relaxing space at home, and we have very little social chit chat opportunities to explore our feelings on topics. When our day is done, how do we relax?
- Watching endless streams of depressing media on TV
- Playing games with conflict loops
- Doom scrolling news
- Rapid-fire bite sized thoughts (tiktok, youtube, twitter, imgur, 90% of reddit)
You can't even escape it doing mundane things like going to the store or restaurants anymore. How many places have either news or sports on the media player? That's never ending conflict being sprayed all over you.
What happens when a person is in a never ending defense mode for years? How does the brain change physically? How does the person engage with their children, and then how do those children engage with each other? I've tried to break out of this, and feel like I've made progress. I ignore the news most of the time and try to focus more on long form analysis. I don't inundate myself with current events anymore. And then when I try to talk to people about how much happier I am, I get the worst response: how can you ignore something that might affect you? I tell them well, I have to for my sanity.
A life of perpetual preparation for the zombie apocalypse is not much better than living through the zombie apocalypse.
As for the information loops you mention, that's why discernment is now more important than access. But I wouldn't blame media/games/the internet entirely for our perception of the state of the world.
I grew up upper-middle-class in the 90s with all the optimism that came with it, school plays about how great the future is going to be, in 6th grade choir they actually made us sing a really cringe song called "We are the people of the 21st century" basically about how awesome the future is going to be, link if you want a listen (https://www.musick8.com/html/current_tune.php?songorder=5&nu...).
Well fast forward 22 years since I was forced to sing that, and at least here in the US, everything you need to live a middle class life (housing, education, healthcare, even food these days) is substantially, sometimes multiple times more expensive than it used to be, and wage growth has been stagnant. Meanwhile we've lived through several "once in a generation" crises. All of which we were not simply unprepared for, we were explicitly told the opposite was going to happen our whole lives. It wasn't really until the GFC that the facade started to crack.
There will be "a future" for us, but it's not guaranteed positive anymore, particularly on an individual level. I'm in the process of spinning up lifestyle businesses I don't particularly like in addition to my 9-5 so my kids to have what my dad could afford with just his 9-to-5. And I'm one of the lucky ones to even have that possibility.
I'm also sticking close to family, for the time being I'm refusing to move anywhere out of the US NorthEast corridor and surrounding regions. I'm lucky to have largely supportive family, and I'd be foolish to abandon that resource for a job I "might" like better 1000 miles away, especially if things are going to get worse before they get better. A recession is basically baked in at this point, although it's impossible to say exactly when.
Maybe things will get better, but don't bet on it. If there's one thing current events do bear out: Complacency kills.
How could a game not have a "conflict loop"?
Even Minecraft in Creative god mode has the "conflict loop" of "am I creative/smart enough to build something cool in this sandbox?"
I mean I get what you’re saying. “Man vs Self” is definitely implemented in some gameplay loops but I’m not sure every implementation of creative mode is equivalent to it.
People can add challenge on top of it, I.e. recreating the shire or an APU in Minecraft, but that’s a layer added by the player.
We might expect the fashion to turn from activism to nihilism and then hedonism. But as the pendulum swings again we could again see increased sense of responsibility, maybe with a twist like the return of small communities instead of global connections, carving out a future for yourself and your loved ones.
Who knows, the motions of the pendulum are chaotic and always reactionary.
Each component in life must be modeled by itself. Societies can and have destroyed themselves. There are real better and worse ways of living.
Depression is not the same as frustration. And self limitation is not the same as confinement. The latter allow more for overcoming, whereas depresssion can be an inescapable existential state for Kirkegaardian reasons.
As discussed in another thread today, on the rise of mental illness connected to technology [1], there is a sense of societal trauma. So many wars, recessions, pandemics and tragedies flow like water under the bridge, never giving us time to grieve, reflect or learn. We are, as Nietzsche said, forever tumbling, "plunging continually" into a future, with nothing to grab hold of [2].
Some years ago I gave a talk at Goldsmiths University in London at a conference "Against the Slow Cancellation of the Future" [3] on the role of technology in paradoxically limiting available futures.
David Graeber and Peter Thiel [4] had more or less the same debate we had at Goldsmiths. Inevitably the much maligned Fukuyama, simplified into a sound-bite about the "End of History" [5] is brought out for a whipping. Part of the issue is the transformed role of capital as a closure around possibility, rather than an enabler of radical possibility. But that's not limited to Capital(ism) as such. Indeed, one possibly apocryphal story was the Chinese CCP banning stories about time travel and alternative futures.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882) http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html
[3] https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/178054/a...
[4] https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
Personally I don't think the Jetsons, Star Trek and other sci-fi fantasies and space operas were really about the future at all. They were reflections of a contemporary culture of blind techno-utopian optimism which was disconnected from the actual future and was perhaps quite detrimental to it. The false image of the future lives on in e.g. techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars instead of solving our problems here on Earth. Younger genres like Solarpunk feel much more connected to humanity's future than these older sci-fi tropes ever did.
Q finally got his ass kicked. Sometimes the only way through is to punch a god.
Duarte tries that in The Expanse and it doesn't go so well.
Or, we've been there, and have a different perspective after having walked through it.
Solarpunk isn't new. It strongly reminds me of the 1960 to early 1970s graphics.
And yes, StarWars is an opera. Also, opera can be fun.
If a younger person said this to me I would find it quite reasonable. As an older person I don't presume to automatically understand the unique problems and circumstances of a different generation from my own. That's why I put effort into engaging younger people in dialogue. What I'm suggesting is that others do the same.
The environmental comparison is very shallow. Climate change is a higher stakes and larger scale environmental issue than we have ever seen and will require radical changes to modern life and modern economies merely to limit the damage. Compare it to a past looming disaster like ozone depletion where the risk was bad sunburns and all we had to do was stop spraying Freon into the air. I remember actually being worried about the ozone layer. Boy does that feel quaint now.
Edit: I’d love to hear why I’m wrong. Are there prominent Solarpunk authors I’m not aware of?
I think this especially stands out with your example of "techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars" as somehow being exclusive from solving problems on Earth, despite both being fairly beneficial to each other.
Perhaps you read "reversing cause and effect" on a blog and assumed it was just a very smart way of saying someone is wrong. In fact it has a specific meaning.
In this case the cause and effect I was positing was that Star Trek et al were a product of techno-utopian optimism. The reverse cause and effect would therefore be sci-fi producing techno-utopian optimism rather than the other way round. This reverse relationship does seem plausible since there is an unmistakable sci-fi influence on the outlooks of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others.
> I think this especially stands out with your example of "techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars" as somehow being exclusive from solving problems on Earth, despite both being fairly beneficial to each other.
No one is saying that Mars dream-chasing won't have any benefit to real problems on Earth. The objections of scientists, economists and environmentalists are instead based on a concept called "opportunity cost" as well as feasibility and priority.
How much work have you done to try to understand the costs and physical quantities involved in terraforming and transporting people to Mars?
Our resource consumption is on trajectory to result in global civilization collapse around 2040: https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vind...
On the other hand, Juergen Schmidhuber (and Eric Schmidt, and Ray Kurzweil) predicts the “Omega point” of technological development (including AGI) to be around 2040: https://youtu.be/pGftUCTqaGg
This race between progress and destruction was destined to happen and it culminates in our lifetime.
This is so sad. It is the purposeful breakdown of obligation and responsibility. After all "Entitlement will thrive where there is a lack of obligation." And entitlement is the antithesis of responsibility.
> If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free.
This is the correct response that correctly recognizes each person's personal responsibility and societal obligation.
We have a future should we choose it.
Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise.
That's called education failure.
It's not like his 8 year old had some unique insights and gave much thought to the situation.
It's 99% imitation speach - like the faux-tweets and messages from kids parroting what their parents think (often with adult-like word choices, speech patterns, and everything).
I don't object to warning about dangers of continuing a current trajectory.
I object to putting ideology over naturalistic reasoning.
I object to not having kids or telling kids they don't have a future.
Also, be careful of Marxians and other Ideologues who would look for any excuse to tear society down so they can try their social experiments again. Be that class, identity, or climate. Solutions, yes. Tear everything down because it isn't perfect, no.
Saying that the current situation is imperfect is like saying that jumping off a bridge puts you in a situation that isn't ideal. We need to pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start investing in alternative energy sources - now, not in 10 or 20 or 50 years.
Our true cultural failure is articulating specific, accessible, and optimistic visions for what the future could actually look like. Our current teenagers and young adults came up in a time period where dystopian stories were prominent. Maybe we need to see a prominent success of an optimistic worldview.
People won’t fight for an idea they can’t imagine.
e.g It is difficult to burn enough trees to extract enough electricity to mine and refine resources needed to build solar panels or even build wire for transport.
You may not, but everyone chooses differently. It's not unreasonable to not want children, they do take resources to take care of after all, resources that could be better used elsewhere.
As in the old Tonto/Lone Ranger joke, who do you mean by "we"?
The Ukranian crisis reminds us that a particular disease of power is that it collapses to "I". It is possible that the man with the power decides there should be no future for you.
> Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise.
Who do you have in mind here?
Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good.
Ideologies that see humans as a parasite upon the earth, where our best option is our own destruction.
Ideologies that see humans as being naturally good, and when confronted with evil, do not confront the possibility of evil in themselves, on in others.
Can you expand on this? I've never heard of that one. I know some people confuse accepting and affirming trans people with this because they've been given twisted ideas about what acceptance means and what happens from media grifters, but I charitably assume that's not what you mean here.
(Infant circumcision is morally wrong, because it is a medically unnecessary surgery done without consent, but it doesn’t make you infertile.)
You could also conclude that, in fact, the world is worse for the kid then it was for the parent, which I believe is occams razor here, and what else is that but the failure of the generations before? You can blame the apps, but you made the apps (quite literally around here); you could blame the schools, but who was responsible for the character of education in a country but the voting generations of the past? But instead, everyone would rather just doubt children, or say they are lazy!
We inherit the world we are born into, yes, but there is no sense or ground to the world, it is flying blind. Older people are saddened by deep pessimism of younger people, because deep down, it is nothing more than an indictment of the world they have left the kids, and it hurts to reckon with that, so this thought rarely passes into consciousness, happy to be deflected onto presumptions about the kid's responsibility.
It's sad to not have a shared future between generations, but like in the article, we need to take seriously the irreality of the Future. At the end of the day, kids do not like your future, the future you have left for them. The trajectory of the world as it stands.
To me, it is heartening that kids, maybe not yet with a sense of agency, manifest profound pessimism, because it is correctly identifying a problem in the grandest, most existential sense: the narrative of history we have been operating on for a long time. Profound pessimism is a seed that can grow into powerful critiques about the most unsaid and damaging assumptions of our time.
If you are so angry that kids would dare question the longevity of the world they find themselves in, you are saying something more about yourself. You take it personally, because deep down you know they have inherited, in part, your own failures.
You can say something like "Well, in fact, the world is doing fine, we are progressing, it is all just appearance, it is an epistemological problem for these kids, brainwashing"; and you might cite some NGO report about decreasing world hunger or the happiness index, or whatever, and say "these kids have nothing to complain about". I see this argument a lot. But I would just ask, OK, if thats true, it simply shifts the problem. If it is just about the kids perceptions, and their dwindling sense of obligation in response to that, we can still ask: why are they being misled in this way? Why do they feel selfish entitlement instead responsible obligation? Surely it is something about the world they find themselves in, the world inherited from their parents. I don't know who else you can blame. You spent many decades voting, consuming, building the apps, creating the culture that kids find themselves in, the very same one where they arrive at the sentiments they do. It is still on you!
You could also accept my initial conclusion and say: "yes the world is worse then when I was a kid, but it isn't my fault." But then, that troubles the conceit that individual obligation/responsibility is the operating variable there. And really, you are just hold the same pessimism as the kid, but through the filter of a lived life grasping for purpose. You are asking the kid to have more faith than yourself!
At the end of the day, a life might just be a lesson in having faith in progress, but that is less a value to impose, less something to punish the kid for not realizing, as it is something we all must come to.
To blame the kids is just not logical. Even if it turns out that the flouride in the water or whatever has caused this rash of irresponsibility in young people, that is still on the generations before them for putting it in the water! If its not on the generations before, if it was going to happen no matter what, then that is just reason to throw out the idea the kids lack anything at all, that something about their sentiments are their fault.
So, either you are guilty (as presumably an older person), or you need to cut the kids some slack.
> When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970 it was in the shadow of The Bomb and we all expected to be dead within a few years. That affects your thinking.
We have climate change and a demographic cliff now.
BTW can recommend "The Pattern on the Stone" by Hillis to anyone interested in computer science principles.
The current year in Long Now parlance would be 02022.
We didn't stay dead.
We were supposed to. That was what I had learned, anyway. Short of magic, nothing was going to resurrect us after we died.
"You're not dead anymore, Mike."
That was the first thing I heard when I was Reawakened. I'd tell you about how I felt all kinds of astonishing tingly sensations and sat up in dazed wonder at the glorious euphoria of my shiny new bionic body, but who hasn't experienced that and heard about it and talked about it a million times already?
No, what was interesting was that I came from a generation that was supposed to stay dead. Before my generation, most people had religious beliefs of one kind or another whereby they would magically be resurrected, with their status afterward depending on various criteria. But my generation had learned that all that religious stuff was nonsense, unscientific magical thinking, so we were just going to stay dead.
"I'm pretty sure that I'm supposed to be dead," I asserted, looking suspiciously at the disappointingly stereotypically futuristically beautiful and androgynous figure before me. "Thus I can only conclude that the experience of my demise was a terribly convincing deception."
"Mike, I'm a doctor, not a simulation engineer," the figure said. "But you've hit the nail on the head. The experience of your life until now was a computationally rendered projection, a terribly convincing deception. You're likely not precisely the same person as the version of you that died in reality, but that Mike wouldn't have been precisely the same as the Mike the day before anyway. What matters is that you and your experiences are as close to those of the Mike who died in reality as everything and everyone can tell us. You're a full person now, full societal presence, participation and rights same as me and everyone else. We do not discriminate between people with simulated experiences and people with real-universe experiences. That would be unscientific magical thinking. It's the same basic hardware architecture for you and me, see," they tapped knuckles to the side of their head lightly. "The people you knew were simulated just as you were, and when they die in that simulation of the past, you'll get to meet them again, too."
This was obviously too good to be true. "What's the catch?"
"You're alive again."
"Damn. No, but really."
"You're alive again, Mike. This ain't heaven, it's more living. And you're not gonna just keel over and die like last time. This new body's more than slightly better put together, and we're more than slightly better at cheating death than we used to be. So the catch is no one waltzes away from consequences via old age anymore. Aaand society and people may have changed from what you're used to. A bit."
My shiny new balls tingled, alert to the mistruthing in that last "A bit." I paused, taking it all in. "So why are you here with that expectant look on your face?"
"Well, Mike. Ten thousand years ago you made a bet. And there's this clock running down, see, and nobody's crying."
Our parents' and grandparents' generations were the people that wrecked the world with their European/Asian/Pacific wars and their plastics and their nucleotides and their freeways and their pesticides and their phosphates and acid rain and their racism and sexism and chauvinism. Rounding up their own children to send them to almost certain death in a foreign land to score brownie points at the country club. Still, we had hope for the future: we could put white men on the moon, we could eradicate many of the more common transmissible causes of death, we could feed the world at least in theory. Then came the Boomers who would change everything with their peace, love, and free thinking. That was reflected in the (non-commercial) music and writing of the time. Then they discovered money and how it could benefit them personally.
Now I listen to the music and every other song seems to be about the medication they've been given is not enough, or how angry they are about what they've been given. The books seems to all be dystopian. The zeitgeist has gone from "Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die" to "Starve yourself we're going to die."
Hey folks, the future is what you make it. Don't expect anything to handed to you.
Expecting that you will be able to make anything particular of the future is also a mistake. The future is mostly just something that happens to you, no matter how hard you may work to shape it.
If the current environment just dictated the future one, there would be never be any change in our culture. In my opinion you are underestimating how voraciously we humans get sick of <current thing> and seek out something new.