What Happened To The Future? · 2:53am Aug 8th, 2017
This sounds like a weird question, but follow me for a bit.
There was a time, boys and girls, when the future, at least as we imagined it, was freakin' dope. We imagined it having flying cars, and robot friends, and jetpacks, and little cubes of food that turned into massive banquets if you just added water. We had the Jetsons, where the family of the future lived in, if not a utopia, at least an awesome looking place to live. We had the original Star Trek, where man had learned how to travel the stars so that they could plow sexy green alien babes and punch alien lizard men in the face. Walt Disney's Tomorrowland ride depicted a vision of the future that filled people with hope.
That's the key word, right there. Hope. People used to believe that tomorrow was going to be better than today.
And let's be honest, on average, it has been. Back when people watched shows like the Jetsons and the original Star Trek, computers were massive things that filled an entire room. They still were in those shows. People couldn't imagine them getting any smaller than that. But now? If you're reading this on a tablet, you're holding in your hand a device that, fifty years ago, took millions of dollars to build, took up more space than your living room, and took millions of dollars to maintain. We live in a future so awesome that your grandparent's generation couldn't even imagine anything that approaches it. We may not have flying cars, but we do have cars that are faster, safer, and a lot cooler than any depicted in the science fiction of yesteryear. Right now, the device you're reading these words on can access the entirety of human scientific and historical knowledge (Wikipedia, anyone?) in seconds, or stream cat videos. Thousands upon thousands of cat videos. In your grandparents' day, you had to own a cat to get cat based entertainment. Now, you can get all the entertainment without ever having to scoop a litterbox.
But in spite of all this, our current vision of the future is... kinda butt. The current vision of the future really sucks.
Don't believe men? Here's a couple of examples.
Fallout. The entire series takes place in an alternate timeline's bad future. But, even two centuries after the end of the world, people can't seem to improve worth a crap. Sure, there's some hopeful moments, but after two centuries, there's still people in Fallout who fight with swords and spears, instead of guns. People almost seem to be going backwards, instead of forward. Even the NCR, the closest thing the Fallout world has to a government, is falling apart at the seems. The overall message seems to be 'The apocalypse is inevitable. All you can do is make the best of a bad situation, and hope things don't get worse.'
Idiocracy. What's terrifying about that particular movie is that it seems to be more and more like a documentary every year. And no, I'm not referring to Trump getting elected, forget politics for a moment, here. I'm talking about the fact that stupid people are having tons of kids who are dumber than they are, while intelligent people seem to have fewer children (Because being smarter means being more responsible, and having kids when you can't provide for them is irresponsible, and thus stupid). At the end of Idiocracy, we're treated to a vision of the future that is bleak, and honestly isn't going to improve: Yes, Not Sure keeps everyone from starving, but he can't do anything to stop mankind's intellectual downward spiral into oblivion, given that the very trends that caused the bad future he's stuck in are still going strong.
Firefly. Yes, man has journeyed across the stars. However, the core planets more or less dominate the system, to the detriment of the further outlying planets. Likewise, the core systems pretend that the cannibalistic space pirates that they created aren't there, and expect those outlying planets to do the same, even when said cannibalistic space pirates are murdering and eating their family. There has already been one war in Firefly, and while it ended in the core planets' favor, it isn't a question of if there will be another war, but when.Nothing is going to get better, at least not any time soon In short, it's a vision of the future that is ultimately very bleak, with no real signs of hope to be found.
I could go on, but let's be honest, we can all name a dozen examples of 'pessimistic science fiction' shows. They seem to be the trend lately. The point is, we as a culture have stopped looking forward to tomorrow with hope, but instead of a kind of grim resignation. Life sucks, and will always suck. The future is going to be just awful. Why bother?
Quit it. Seriously. Right f***ing now.
Quit believing that tomorrow is going to be worse than today. It won't be. At least, it won't be as long as you believe it won't be. The movie Tomorrowland may have been a box office flop, but it was on point with its message: Our perception of the future is ultimately what is going to shape it. If we believe we are going to fail, we will fail. If we believe that tomorrow is going to be worse than today, it will be. But if you believe, in your heart, that the best has yet to come, that the future will be a brighter place, if we just work harder towards achieving it, then you know something? Then, just like the future our grandparents' generation envisioned, our future will be a brighter place than we ever imagined possible.
One cause for the change in public perception of the future is the massive change in the information we have about the present. Governments have always been corrupt and stupid, but we used to trust them because they took care of the ugly stuff quietly. Now all of their dumb mistakes and harmful and selfish actions are publicly visible. We can no longer pretend.
The result is that a hopeful vision of the future simply doesn't fly. TV and movie execs will push back against any attempt to depict the future in a positive light, calling it 'unrealistic'.
You seem to be rather insightful. I have a question that I would like your answer to: are you willing to live with the cost of the future, the cost of change?
The future was never what it used to be. Tomorrow land was a scheme for developing Florida swampland. The Jetson was the alternative to mammoth vacuum cleaners and foot peddled rock carts. Idiotocracy is a modern gloss on Kornbluth's "the Marching Morons", written in the early Fifties at the height of postwar optimism. And the incredibly pessimistic Time Machine was written by a Fabian socialist in between attempts to convince the electorate that man was wise enough to centralize all economic decision making in the hands of the professorate.
In short, the future has always been a mixed bag at best. Because the future is never about itself, but rather, is a dream of us. Bad dreams, hopeful dreams, dreams of celebration and dreams of despair.
What you're asking is for a better dream of us. But you can't yell a depressive out of his funk, or a culture out of its malaise
While there has been a lot of fear mongering in regards to technology and the idea of transhumanism, I have to give credit to the Marketing Team behind Mankind Divided, they went the extra mile to not only make the game relevant but also incorporate real life Bionics.
4:14 "We want to show limb different people the products and devices that they're seeing in science fiction, gaming and in movies can become reality, and can become reality very soon."
There is negativity and pessimism of the future if you look for it, but it's also just one side of the coin. For me, no matter what the future has in store for us, it's going to be one heck of a ride.
Speaking of the future, how goes the air conditioning problem you've been having? Cause I and others want to see more of The King of Equestria as well as The Horror-DM Grogar building better futures for Equestria :)