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Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot
- astazangasta 11y agoA few non sequiturs: 1) 'Futurism' is the early twentieth century philosophy created by Marinetti, launched with this enchanting essay: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti.html 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.
- detaro 11y agore 2) 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)
- astazangasta 11y agoThe innovation that allowed this was really faster wireless networks with internet. My first cell (2005) was a feature phone, had a camera, I used it, but transferring it over the network was slow and painful, so sharing of any kind was impossible. Once it was, it of course required no great leap of imagination to start moving things to the cloud.
- TorKlingberg 11y agoAlso phones with WiFi, and everyone having WiFi in their home.
- mrec 11y agoIf you haven't already read it, G.K. Chesterton's response[1] to the original Futurist manifesto is an absolute joy. I completely lose it every time I get to his Futurist drinking song. [1] http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20439/ http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20439/
- curious_slinky 11y agoBeware: The more you understand about how inaccurate futuristic predictions are, the harder modern sci-fis get to watch. Especially so if you've seen a lot of older sci-fis about our present time.
- mojuba 11y agoOr not necessarily about the present time. For example a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away they had very advanced AIs but no computers or mobile communication (in any practical form) :)
- VLM 11y agoAnother example, the universe of Dune had pretty impressive engineering for a universe without computation. Yeah yeah I read the series, don't correct me about the pre Butlerian Jihad era, etc. Dune was mostly a fantasy not sci fi anyway. 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".
- dalke 11y agoThere was mobile communication. Skywalker and C-3PO used a 'comlink' to communicate when Skywalker, etc. were in the garbage mashers. And the Storm Troopers use a comlink, which has a transmitter that breaks down often enough that the Command Office wasn't suspicious when TX-four-one-two couldn't respond. 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.
- mojuba 11y agoHonestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and dull and not only in terms of cultural changes. Take any prediction from the 1960s for example and there will be a lot of food for ridicule. A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this? "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.
- beobab 11y agoTo be fair, newspapers are still around...
- coldtea 11y ago>A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this? 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.
- VLM 11y agoAlso the temporary nature of some cultural/lifestyle issues. 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.
- jkot 11y ago> One futurist noted that a 1960s film of the “office of the future” made on-par technological predictions (fax machines and the like), but had a glaring omission: The office had no women. 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.
- Spooky23 11y agoI work in IT, in an office with about 60 people. Two women. That prediction came true.
- danharaj 11y agoIt's a prediction in the sense that they didn't even consider the fact that women are capable of working in an office. It was a lack of prediction, an unspoken assumption that an aspect of the status quo would never be upended. But it's ok, feminism won the fight for equality 30 years ago /s
- cgh 11y agoThe video game Metro 2033 (recently remastered for modern consoles, so it's still around and relevant) envisions a typical post-apocalyptic future. People live underground, in subway (metro) tunnels under the cities, which are hellish radioactive wastelands. 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.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> The video game Metro 2033 (recently remastered for modern consoles, so it's still around and relevant) envisions a typical post-apocalyptic future. People live underground, in subway (metro) tunnels under the cities, which are hellish radioactive wastelands. > 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.
- mastazi 11y agoFuturism is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism And the article is not related at all, despite the (misleading) title.
- TheEzEzz 11y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation) 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&hl=en&client=safari#hl=en&q=futurism+science https://www.google.com/search?q=futurism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&h...
- adregan 11y agoI too was expecting an article on Marinetti and his cohorts and their love of violence, speed, and strange dinner parties.
- SRasch 11y agoI feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict. 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 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/2013/08/60s.jpg http://vintageindustrialstyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08...
- RodericDay 11y agoI really enjoy Iain Banks but I don't think he's particularly popular with Reddit-style futurists. Passages like this one usually make em balk: 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. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoWell then "reddit-style futurists" can take a running jump. There's not much point thinking about past and future history if you're going to consider only the toys (technology) and not the games (social systems).
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- notahacker 11y ago
- Fede_V 11y agoA bit of a pet peeve, but futurism already has a meaningful definition - it refers to an art movement at the start of the 20th century. Just because you like how the word sounds, it's pretty poor form to recycle it to indicate a particular trend you've 'identified'.
- mcguire 11y agoUnfortunately, that ship sailed[1] in the early 1980s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Naisbitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Naisbitt
- scorchio 11y agoCulture is made up of many abstract ideas ranging from values and customs that combine to make an interdependent complex system, prediction is impossible. And as the norms and values were shaped by situations that were random and or completely different to the situation we currently experience, we get another layer of complexity.
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- stillsut 11y agoDystopian anticipations have been 180 degrees wrong: 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.
- happyscrappy 11y agoIt is much more exciting to discuss strife and chaos. Doom sells. Continual progress is boring but more accurate.
- onion2k 11y agoGATTACA is about genetic design rather than genetic testing.
- stillsut 11y agoThe protagonist doesn't wish his brother was born with his same gene for heart failure, he wishes companies would stop using genetic tests to filter out candidates. Most of the movie deals with bad guys trying to find trace hair and DNA from imposters. Genetic testing.
- caskance 11y agoHe wishes it the way modern antivaxxers wish big pharma would stop giving kids autism.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWhat? In the movie he wishes for the companies to stop doing something they are actually doing. They are overzealously testing for any possible problem and marking people as unclean. 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoOne problem is what demographics futurists tend to be. White men are less likely to imagine a future with full gender equality and black liberation than black women are, I would imagine. People living in the West will think less about the rise of the rest of the world.
- m0v_eax 11y agoUnnecessary generalizations..
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoUnnecessary? This is not a novel suggestion about the problems with futurists. It may be a generalisation, but it's pretty accurate generally. People privileged in some way aren't going to think much about that privilege. The rich won't envision a future with less (or more) poverty.
- stillsut 11y agoCheck out "The Other Foot" [0] by Ray Bradbury. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illustrated_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illustrated_Man
- m0v_eax 11y agoWhat data or study do you have to backup your baseless generalizations? 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]
- klagermkii 11y agoOr perhaps it's the reverse. If you ask "white men" about the liberation status of women/minorities, you're probably going to find them MORE likely to say that equality has already been achieved. So when they write stories, they'll write them as if everyone is equal and living the same utopian dream they are. 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.
- gambler 11y agoThe thing about futurology is that there are tons of people engaged in "predicting". Most of them are notoriously bad at it. Most tech journalists, for example, are so bad that they can't even "predict" the present - their descriptions of cutting-edge technologies used today often have glaring mistakes. 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.
- andyidsinga 11y ago"The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items “dumb.”" 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_dime
- legulere 11y agoI wonder if it's not more that we're ignoring the cultural aspects because many of them didn't turn out as good as the predictions (less working hours, more equality for instance)