The Future We Didn't Get

[ecosophia]

There are times when I wonder why so many people seem so freaky these days, and then I remember this. 

This is the future we were supposed to get.  Two generations of Americans grew up being told that this was what they could expect, in newspaper ads like this one and in countless other venues. Next time you go for a walk or even look out the window, compare what you see to the image above, and measure the gap between them. The cognitive dissonance between the future we were told we were going to get and the one that's actually arrived is, I think, the single largest cause of the collective nervous breakdown unfolding around us right now. 

Comments

[drhooves]

Setting false expectations like the electric advertisement above was certainly self-serving fifty or sixty years ago, but mild in the intensity versus the incredible level of propaganda and subliminal content of today's media. I'm astounded by the "low information" citizens around me who let others do their thinking.

It's my opinion that another aspect to the collective nervous breakdown we're experiencing is that the future has not only turned out to be less pleasant than forecast, it's also a reality where .gov has dramatically increased the interference and negative impact in people's lives. I'm constantly reading in online posts or hearing in conversations the phrases "I just want to be left alone" or "I wish things would go back to the way they used to be."

Yeah, me too.

[ecosophia]

That rising tide of "I just wish things would go back to the way they used to be" is far more explosive than mere dynamite. If people in large numbers are beginning to notice that the past really was better than the present, brace yourself; we are in a revolutionary situation.

Wrestling With It

[goatgodschild]

Mr. Greer --

In a way, I am glad I grew up being told that the world is futureless and horrible, that I will never have a house with a yard, that technology and medicine and fancy treats are going away any day now. There is no future coming for us, no impossible dross pretties like the ad describes, this is what we have.

When I was in high school, my best friend was captain of the wrestling team, and she gave me some advice I think may be applicable here:
"Once you know you're going to fail, it frees up a whole world of possibilities".
Our wrestling team was famously terrible, but since they never needed to worry about if they were going to win or not, they could focus on trying to improve.

Re: Wrestling With It

[ecosophia]

Your friend was a wise person. Thanks for this!

[robertmathiesen]

As the old General Electric advertisements said repeatedly, "Progress is our most important product!"

Which inspired Al Capp to draw General Bullmoose, who was always saying, "What's good for General Bullmose is good for the country!

[ecosophia]

Now there's a blast from the past! And of course trust Capp to skate close to the edge with, er, "Bullmoose." (I hereby authorize anyone on my blogs to use that as a euphemism.)

Post-war America

[cs2]

My grandfathers fought in WW2, and I think part of the mass disappointment is their general feel of "I fought so that my kids and grandkids could have a better life than I did."

Instead, at least in our case, we had a brief bump into the lower-middle class with the GI Bill, but it then involved an aggressive downshift back into economic struggle.

My grandparents at least still knew how to live humbly. Both sets had itty-bitty houses that were only one step up from drive-and-plop mobile homes. I grew up with them telling me you shouldn't trust the banks and you should have a good set of silver hidden in case cash stops working and you need something to barter with. They kept victory gardens and pickled beets in the cellar past when that was fashionable.

The good times didn't even last for one generation. My grandfather broke his son's leg to keep him from getting drafted to Vietnam.

Those who were left out of the prosperity gospel from the beginning or who got dropped from it decades ago are able to see the facade more clearly.

I'm sure the resentment of Millennials toward their Boomer parents among the salary class is along the lines of wanting the same prosperity their parents enjoyed. My father made pizzas at minimum wage for twenty hours a week and put himself through college that way...in 1969. I went to the same college and working 200 hours a week (lol) at minimum wage still wouldn't accomplish the same thing.

But Millennials who remember their WW2 grandparents have a different beef with their Boomer parents. My mother complains about having to downgrade from a 2000 square foot house to a 1000 square foot house. She lives alone. My thoughts are not "I want the same prosperity" but "You're being absurd."

Re: Post-war America

[ecosophia]

I got to see this from a somewhat different angle. Things really were better for my parents' generation; my dad was born in 1938, my biological mother in 1941. Both of them came from working class backgrounds -- my paternal grandfather was a firefighter, my maternal grandfather a shipyard worker -- and both rose into the middle class with the postwar boom. I was born in 1962, as the Boomer generation was trickling away, and got to see the boom peak, slump, and start shedding people like your grandparents, while people like my parents stayed comfortable.

[1wanderer]

I was born soon after the end of WW2, and grew up with this kind of narrative. What's important to understand though, is that it was primarily a symbolic narrative, not necessarily a serious set of predictions. It was the mythology, if you like, of a time when science was manifestly being used to improve the lives of ordinary people, and when it was seen as a force for good, if properly controlled. (Note the word "you" in the headline of your story.) For a generation after WW2, science and technology was, indeed, responsible for an unparalleled improvement in the conditions of life for ordinary westerners. Mundane technologies like hot running water, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines freed people from domestic drudgery: when I was small my mother and grandmother spent all day every Monday washing and drying the family's clothes by hand. In those days, monsters called Smallpox and Polio still stalked the land, but they were conquered by vaccination and improved health-care and sanitation. In Europe, at least, public transport, power distribution and other infrastructure was rebuilt and modernised, technical and scientific training was heavily promoted, and the scientists became popular heroes because they were seen as working to improve the lives of ordinary people. Even nuclear power was essentially part of the same argument. It promised an end to the pollution-filled air, filthy coal fires in houses, deadly urban fogs, and dangerous and unpleasant jobs in mining. The future would be as much clean power as you could want, effectively free, provided by a highly-trained specialists. Television when it started had an enormous educational impact on ordinary peoples' lives. I still remember the shock of watching David Attenborough's Zoo Quest programmes on a black and white TV. Even something as mundane as the record player and the 33rpm long-player brought previously unreachable cultural goods to ordinary people. Flying cars, to the extent that they were ever taken seriously, were a symbol of the idea that technology would continue to be developed and employed for the good of ordinary people.
What changed, of course, was not technology but politics. In most western countries, utilities passed into private hands, spending on R and D was cut, and technology companies were sold off or just closed down. Rent-seeking, through looking around for ways of making a quick profit from the inventions of the past, became the order of the day. Technology was only interesting as a way of making a quick fortune or for purposes of surveillance and marketing. Technology companies, with a few exceptions, gave up trying to improve the lives of ordinary people decades ago, and now only seek to exploit them. The Internet - born in the last days of optimism about the possible uses of technology - turned into a nightmare of surveillance and exploitation, because that was where the money was. (Indeed, the open technologies of the Internet simply could not be developed today). As a result, and for the first time since perhaps the eighteenth century, people now increasingly assume that the future will be worse than the past. (I would suspect that, for anyone born after about 1970, this is simply the story of their life). The result is a kind of cultural pessimism - the "end of the future" discussed by critics like Franco Berardi and Mark Fisher, where there is nothing to look forward to, except for the ironic recycling of the history, culture and technology of the past to make money.
The facile explanation - technology over-promised and didn't deliver - is, like all such explanations, partly true. But it's only a small part of the answer. The political cancellation of the future at the expense of strip-mining the past is at the heart of it. I don't know that my generation ever really thought there would be flying cars, but we did have a fundamentally optimistic view of the continued political will to use technology to make our lives better.

[ecosophia]

That was certainly a factor, but I think you're underestimating the extent to which technology really didn't deliver. Electricity too cheap to meter from nuclear plants wasn't just mythology -- our whole society spent a couple of decades gearing up for that only to find that it wasn't going to happen. There are many other examples, right down to the parking garage in downtown Seattle I saw in my twenties which had a heliport on top, complete with mini-control tower, for all the people who were supposed to start commuting by copter and never did.

Nor was it just a lack of R&D -- check out the billions that have been funneled into fusion research sometime. The thing that our whole society has been desperately trying not to learn for decades now is that technological progress is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

[stcathalexandria]

The Jetson’s cartoon was a regular part of my childhood TV viewing and we are nowhere close. Even Disney moved Future World part of the park away from “the future” to more a space themed rides place.

Did you see Elon Musk called for a carbon tax yesterday? People are freaking out it calling it a betrayal. He now probably wants to get into carbon capture technologies and the government told him no.

Working class people don’t seem as affected by this societal mental breakdown.

[ecosophia]

Working class people know there's no rosy future ahead; their standard of living has been plunging since the 1970s. It's only among the comfortable classes, who have been able to maintain their lifestyles by means of the policies that impoverished the working classes, who have been able to cling to the delusion this long.

[troyjonesiii]

Funny stuff. "The time isn't too far off..." Yeah, okay. Seventy or eighty years later we are still waiting, and the prospects of electric-powered flying saucers seem a lot farther off in 2021 than they did in the mid-1950s. And what struck me is that a lot of this stuff doesn't even pass the common sense test even if we accept the fanciful premises. For example, the photo caption that talks about how you'll be able to land your flying saucer "anywhere; no parking problems." Even if cars could fly, it doesn't follow from that that parking restrictions would not exist any more. Or will private property not exist in the Shiny Future? The photo of the single-family home suggests that it will. Hmm.

Oh well. At least we can dial books, lectures, and classroom demonstrations into our homes-- with sound! I take it from the way that's worded that they were not envisioning video on demand ala YouTube or Netflix, but something more like audiobooks on demand (and that only for educational purposes, not entertainment, because of course the denizens of the Shiny Future have a puritanical disdain for such frivolities as mere entertainment). It is quite humorous to me that whoever wrote this ad thought electric-powered flying saucers were right around the corner, but video entertainment on demand-- now that would just be a silly pipe-dream.

[ecosophia]

It really is hilarious in retrospect. As for video entertainment on demand, I suspect they didn't want to field nasty letters from the movie theater industry, which was still a significant force in those days.

Do you have the date for that advertisement?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm thinking it was about 1970, just put a man on the moon. By the year 2000 we would have our Jetson's future.

Bob

Re: Do you have the date for that advertisement?

[ecosophia]

I don't, but from the hairstyles, clothing, and type face it's early to middle 1950s. By the 1970s the future was supposed to look like this.

[isabelcooper]

I myself am deeply disappointed by not travelling in giant flying donuts. :P

Actually, I'm more disappointed that I can't make my hair look like that. Although I would like a donut.

[ecosophia]

There's got to be a good guide to early 1950s women's hairstyles somewhere!

[(Anonymous)]

Now, now it’s just been...delayed...for 30 years...again...yeah, that’s the ticket!

[ecosophia]

"Just think, in another thirty years we'll have fusion power!"

[(Anonymous)]

The image frankly evokes a nightmare world for me; people flying over your house anytime they like? I for one am glad it never happened.

[ecosophia]

Think of what they'd do if the dog decided it needed to, er, let something drop...

[(Anonymous)]

*sigh* After sixty-six years of hearing all this, I'm not holding my breath. About the only thing we've gotten so far is a crude little household robot that does your vacuuming for you.

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-vacuums

I don't have one by the way, just an ancient vacuum cleaner I push around when the mood strikes me. As for the rest of it, well....

https://www.flightglobal.com/flight-international/is-personal-jet-pack-set-for-thrust-into-mass-market/141124.article

https://www.techradar.com/news/elon-musk-wants-to-make-the-tesla-roadster-a-hover-car-but-reality-may-get-in-the-way

The reality is that we still have to do our own driving and vacuuming. The Covid vaccine is starting to look only vaguely effective before all the surge of new strains popping up. Violence is beginning to explode in the Middle East again. The gaunt face of famine is hovering over many parts of Africa. The only beings who will inhabit Mars will be all the little robots we send there along with whatever adaptable earth bugs they carry along.

But my daffodils are blooming. My cucumber peat pots are starting to sprout and I have seen birds flying about scouting for nesting sites. Life goes on, thank goodness.

JLfromNH/Emerald Shabby Bat

[(Anonymous)]

"But my daffodils are blooming. My cucumber peat pots are starting to sprout and I have seen birds flying about scouting for nesting sites."

I'd make the case that the last 100 years (at minimum) of advertising have been relentlessly directed at making sure that's not enough, and to entice addiction to more complex activities. Like you, I can be fairly content with simpler things. But I fear most denizens of the "over-developed" nations know longer know how to be content with less. Not even necessarily because they're somehow inherently greedy or materialistic - just because they literally DON'T KNOW how to garden, or cook, or make music, or read for pleasure, or enjoy a hike in the local woods, or entertain themselves without electronic devices. That ability has been lost.

Sources of Power

[(Anonymous)]

It’s off-topic, but I thought you might like to know that the TV news in this state recently aired a story about “Eat Anything You Want Day” sponsored by cookie, ice cream, and candy manufacturers. How sweet! I wonder where they got that idea?

As for suburban saucers landing on the manicured lawn in California weather conditions, families with the Regulation 2.5 kids, a dog, and a lawnmower—who could have predicted in 1955 that Mom would be a closeted ex-Marine, Sis would sport nose-rings, purple spandex butt-huggies and green hair, while Junior wallows in mountains of porn as he wavers among pot, crack, and oxycontin and Dad found his Good Steady Job disappearing or his wages staying the same while every buyable object jumped in price by several orders of magnitude and he had to compete not just among other White Men of His Class who Follow the Rules but all the sexes, colors, and cultures of humanity, hungry for a juicy piece of the American Pie? The Nuclear Family and the Nuclear Power Plant were meant to go hand in glowing hand to the Glorious Future of Republican World Mastery! How could they possibly fail? The Dollar was King of the World and always would be! Hurrah! (waves flag and salutes towards the Mecca of Hahvard Yahd)

Empires run on fuel. Those founded on bonanza deposits of coal and oil and rapacious money mongering must necessarily burn bright and fast and be over soon. Those founded on food and fertile soil as fuel for armies burn dimmer and slower and last longer. So, maybe, Eat What You Want Day is not entirely off-topic after all….

Re: Sources of Power

[ecosophia]

Good heavens. It's always a source of amused interest to me to watch the ideas I set in motion pop up in odd places. No, it's not off topic at all, because the whole point of the imaginary future of perpetual progress these days is to get you to ignore the dismal aspects of the present, including the things you might want to eat but can't get...

Utopias die hard

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, those were the days, JMG. Reminds me of the “Merry Melodies” and “Loonie Toons” cartoons such as the slick Daffy Duck demonstrating the ‘push button home of the future’ to the hapless Elmer Fudd and the classic ‘singing frog’ with the final scene in the 21st century.

I couldn’t agree with you more, JMG. Whether people are consciously aware of it or not, Western society is suffering from an acute case of ‘this isn’t the future we ordered’! The dream merchants of the mid-20th century really poisoned the pool of the collective mind. But at that time, it seemed patently obvious to everyone that humanity was on a phenomenal trajectory of technological progress. By some miracle, an illustrated chronology of the future that I penned in Grade 5 (that would have been in 1973) had manned missions to Mars in 1984 – and OF COURSE the automobile was going to be replaced by a vehicle remarkably similar to the one in your posted advertisement by then!

With the horrifying chasm between dreams and reality in the early 21st century, people have modified the fantasy to focus on cell phones, the Internet and IT. Meanwhile trade wars imperil our supply of rechargeable batteries and rare earth metals for said phones and the ‘smart’ components in all the incomplete shiny new cars that are quickly occupying every square inch of vacant land. And don’t forget the experimental ‘star ships’ that regularly blow up spectacularly on the launchpad while plans for trips to the Moon and Mars are being made. Meanwhile in December 2022 a full five decades will have passed since humanity last left low Earth orbit. Oh my, what a pretty pickle we’ve got ourselves into!

Re: Utopias die hard

[ecosophia]

It seems to me that one of the most useful things anyone can do right now is to force the contrast between the future we were promised and the one we got into public discourse...

[(Anonymous)]

John--

Given that fame and fortune (and getting elected) still depends very much on catering to that increasingly threadbare illusion, how long do you think it will take before we have leadership who can actually speak to the reality of the situation and our need for practical action within the limits of our actual choices? I'm guessing we're a ways off yet...

--David BTL

[ecosophia]

I don't expect that to happen within the current system at all, ever. All the way down the long descent of the Roman world, emperors and their courts acted as though nothing had changed and the latest round of decline was just a temporary crisis that would pass off someday. It's not the leadership who will speak to our situation, but individuals outside expsting power structures.

Delusions of Techno-Progress

[brenainn]

A few months ago, I tried to make a bet with my best friend. He's one of those "thank the non-existent God for Almighty Science" types. The bet was long term, and simple enough: that within the next thirty years, none of the fabled new sources of energy, like nuclear fusion, would actually emerge. He bet otherwise. I quickly found out that every news article mentioning the latest bit of research into nuclear fusion meant he would message me, claiming victory in the bet. I couldn't help but laugh at it but also be puzzled, as he's a fairly intelligent fellow. I think, however, it is an indication that he, along with a lot of other folks, are in intense denial and seizing on anything that will hold together their crumbling narrative of unlimited technological progress. I finally had to tell him that the bet was off, since flipping a few switches at ITER doesn't equal nuclear fusion.

Re: Delusions of Techno-Progress

[ecosophia]

If you do a similar bet in the future, always specify a hard and fast decision point. "There must be at least one commercial fusion reactor putting power into the grid" is one I've used. That way they can't weasel out of it by claiming that pouring money down a rathole amounts to serious progress.

[(Anonymous)]

I really wanted this future in the 1980's.

New Urbanism in space!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society#/media/File:Stanford_Torus_interior.jpg

[ecosophia]

I remember it well, though I was much more into Bernal spheres:

In the year 2000 and Man after Man

[neptunesdolphins]

I remember how 2000 seemed so far away as if it was a magical future......

I remember watching TV at a friend's house when I was teenager. (We had no TV or stereo or any other modern gizmos.) (do people still use the word "gizmo"?) We had an ancient tube radio that someone won in a raffle. (Do they still do raffles?)

Anyway, the two programs I saw about the future scared the socks off of me. (Do people still day that?) One was how overpopulation in the cities was going to destroy humanity. They had the rats living in smaller and smaller spaces. I suppose it was to promote the new idea of suburbia - the single family detached house with a small plot of land surrounded by other people with the same thing. I was living in an apartment at the time with various relatives.

The other program featured how people were going to evolve to be just heads floating around in little bubble cars. I didn't want to be just a head. That was frightening.

Yes later, I picked up a book called "Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future (1990) is a speculative book written by Scottish geologist Dougal Dixon and illustrated by Philip Hood. "
The theme of the book is the future evolution of humanity in the next millions of years. Unlike the previous books, the story is told through different periods of time and adding different individual characters in the first chapters, following many events in a timeline, that starting from the final days of modern civilization and its decline, the emergence of species created by genetic engineering, its diversification, evolution and extinction of these ones, and ending with a complete mass extinction caused by the distant descendants of humanity that colonized other planets."

Read more at https://speculativeevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Man_After_Man:_An_Anthropology_of_the_Future

That book made me depressed more than anything.

Re: In the year 2000 and Man after Man

[ecosophia]

I remember those as well.

Re: the image posted above

[(Anonymous)]

It's the law of diminishing returns at play here...

In India, you will still find a lot of people among the middle and upper classes who subscribe to such dreams. Their ultimate aim in life is to live the life of a US suburbanite. The media, academia, education system, pop culture etc. here keep telling us both directly as well as indirectly that the image posted above IS the future, and India can 'leap-frog' ahead of the First World towards this future, if only it gives up its ancient traditions and embraces some sort of Scandinavian neo-liberalism ('look how amazing Sweden is!') coupled with scientism. A close friend of mine (from school) did her MS in the US and is working there now (she researches Life Cycle Analysis, but has sadly become an SJW, who virtue signals about the environment, but genuinely believes that one can live a US suburbanite lifestyle on renewable energy alone. Sigh), and my mother held her up as an example for me saying, "Look, she's working in the US. What more could one ask for? You too should follow her example".

Speaking of diminishing returns, I was thinking about how predictions by climate scientists have repeatedly flopped, and I realized that it could possibly be because all these predictions came from over-detailed models. Given that the law of diminishing returns applies to every material aspect of human endeavour (excluding perhaps spiritual development of a soul and occultism), and definitely to modern mathematical modeling, I think that a strong case could be made that the most useful models are those with intermediate level of complexity, as complexity is also subject to this law. Say, if we held up a spectrum of complexity from 0 - 10, with 0 - 1 being too simple and 9 - 10 being too complex, the most useful models would be in the region between 1 and 9. I do not mean to say here that only those models with a complexity level of 5.0 would be useful, 3.4 and 6.6 would also be useful, as intermediate =/= exactly in the centre. Models that are too simple do not capture enough detail, and models that are too complex are intractable as far as qualitative mathematical analysis is concerned, and involve too much heavy-duty number-crunching, which has its own problems (as anyone who has studied numerical methods will agree too). IMO, if climate scientists want to recover whatever is left of their discipline's reputation, they would do well to use models of intermediate complexity and avoid making minute and detailed predictions, in order to save themselves from becoming a laughing stock. The same could apply to other fields as well, IMO.

I want to thank you, JMG, for explaining in a 'no - BS' sense about this law. It makes a lot of sense, and helps explain things much better than the conventional wisdom does.

Re: the image posted above

[(Anonymous)]

And then the alive winds and clouds decide to go another direction just because, and the models flounder.

Even considering a pure dead matter universe, chaotic processes make long term climate prediction impossible.

[(Anonymous)]

After driving through the parking lots where I live, which are made up more of pot holes than parking spaces now, I've been asking myself how people can just ignore the reality which is around them. I think a lot of that cognitive dissonance is exacerbated by their being able to go from one bubble reality, into their bubble reality car, to another bubble reality house, etc..

Prizm

[ecosophia]

That's a large part of it. Add in the effect of spending hours a day staring at glass screens showing them fake images, and that's most of it.

[(Anonymous)]

Not only do we not get flying cars, but if you rent you don't even get to keep your dog! Property values Uber Alles, you know.

Fulvous Ponderous Beaver

aka Jon from Virginia

[ecosophia]

True enough.

And for an absolutely perfect example -

[(Anonymous)]

I give you the ever-reliable Dana Blankenhorn, selling the same stuff as gospel truth:

https://www.danablankenhorn.com/

And when his readers face the next day, and next year, and the next 10 years.....? Or for that matter, when he does?

Re: And for an absolutely perfect example -

[ecosophia]

They never will. Seriously, they never will. Blankenhorn is the exact equivalent of the kind of fundamentalist minister for whom the Second Coming of Jesus is always about to happen; the mere fact that it never does, and that day after week after month after year after decade after century rolls by untroubled by the predicted events, never gets through the yard-thick layer of willful thinking. A belief like that is so convenient and comfortable, especially if you want to avoid noticing what's actually happening, that people can quite easily live out their entire lives in a state of serene detachment from everything that contradicts their belief.

[mollari]

If you ever really want to see a meltdown, wait until something goes horribly wrong in a way that it wouldn't have in 1991, 1981, 1971, 1961, 1951, etc, and then say "Welcome to the 21st Century!". In my experience a lot of people laugh, a few give glares, a few cry, but the largest group consists of people who just start shrieking....

[ecosophia]

Oh my. I'm going to have fun with that.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep. All those elements of Progress promised many things. And the result of all the technology and progress is that everyone would have it all and we would be happy, and shiny, and fresh, and always young. That’s what they told us. That’s what they sold us. Technology and Progress would take away all the bad stuff – the boredom, the drudgery, the sweat, the tears, the aches and pains, the sickness, and worst of all the aging and the death. We would only have good stuff, excitement, and fun, fun, fun. There would be no sadness, no depression, no anxiety, no complications, . . . no consequences, just believe. If one did not achieve the shiny happiness and the eternal freshness, then one did not believe hard enough, one was a failure, a loser. Don’t be a loser.

People are very angry at all those who did not join in and get onboard the Progress Super Spaceliner. Advanced technology, Feminism, Black rights, Gay rights, universal education – achieving all these was supposed to usher in the New Queendom, a new era in Herstory and happy times. The failure of this Happy Wonderful Era to emerge must be blamed on someone.

Sigh.

[ecosophia]

Oh, granted, but after a while the pretense starts to crack, and at that point a quiet comment -- "It's not your fault" -- can start movement in a new direction.

[cutekitten]

I think the c. d. may come from finding out that a society based on 6 of the 7 deadly sins will soon collapse.

[ecosophia]

I'm trying to think of which one of the seven we neglect, and can't find it. Pride? We've got it. Envy? We've got it. Gluttony, sloth, lust? In spades. Avarice and wrath? Ditto. Or do I have the list wrong?