Back to the future

Sometimes it feels as if progress itself has actually slowed down, with the 1960s as the climax of a 20th century surge of innovation, and the decades that followed consisting of a weird mix of consolidation, stagnation and rollback. Certainly change in the first half of the 20th century seemed to manifest itself in the most dramatic and hubristic manner. It was an era of massive feats of centralized planning and public investment: huge dams; five-year plans of accelerated industrialization; gigantic state-administered projects of rural electrification, freeway construction and poverty banishment. Science fiction writers who grew up with this kind of thing (including the darker side of "public works" -- the mobilization of entire populations and economies for war, the Soviet collectivization of peasant farms that resulted in massive famine, genocide) naturally imagined that change would continue to unfold in this dynamic and grandiose fashion. So they foresaw things like the emergence of cities enclosed inside giant skyscrapers and grain harvested by combines the size of small ships voyaging across vast prairies.

It's no coincidence, too, that sci-fi's nonfiction cousin, futurology -- or future studies, as it is now more commonly known -- emerged as a discipline during this era of the activist nation-state. World War II ratcheted up popular belief and trust in the exercise of judiciously applied might by centralized government, and the post-1946 world offered plenty of opportunities for benevolent state power to be flexed, from the challenges of postwar reconstruction to the development of the newly independent third-world nations that emerged out of the British Empire.

The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by future-mindedness, an ethos of foresight that attempted not just to identify probable outcomes but to steer reality toward preferred ones. It's no coincidence that those decades were the boom years for both sci-fi and a spirit of neophilia in the culture generally -- the streamlined and shiny aesthetic of modernity that embraced plastics, man-made fabrics and glistening chrome as the true materials of the New Frontier. It's the era that produced "The Jetsons," probably the single prime source of many of the tomorrowland clichés that haunt the collective memory -- personal rocket cars parked in the front drive, food pills, videophones, robo-dogs -- and that subsequently became a cue for retrofuturist camp.

Today we seem to have trouble picturing the future, except in cataclysmic terms or as the present gone worse ("Children of Men"). Our inability to generate positive and alluring images of tomorrow's world has been accompanied by the fading prominence of futurology as a form of popular nonfiction. It carries on as an academic discipline, as research and speculation conducted by think tanks and government-funded bodies. But there are no modern equivalents of Buckminster Fuller or Alvin Toffler. The latter, probably still the most famous futurologist in the world, warned in his 1970 bestseller "Future Shock" that change was moving too fast for ordinary citizens' nervous systems and adaptive mechanisms to cope with; 1980's "The Third Wave" sounded a more positive note about the democratic possibilities of technology. But Toffler was just the most visible exponent of a bustling paperback subgenre of "popular thought." I recall getting one such fat paperback for my 16th birthday, a book predicting all kinds of marvels, such as the resurgence of lighter-than-air travel, which would fill the skies with giant freight-carrying balloons and the aerial equivalent of ocean cruise liners transporting people across the seas and continents in leisurely fashion.

Some of the 1950s and 1960s anticipation and confidence in the future had worn off by the '70s: Ecological anxieties manifested in everything from Neil Young's "After the Goldrush" to the movie "Silent Running," while science fiction writers like John Brunner and Harry Harrison imagined grim and gritty realistic early 21st century scenarios of overpopulation, pollution and fuel crises in novels like "Stand on Zanzibar" and "Make Room! Make Room!" (the latter adapted into the far inferior movie "Soylent Green"). But the 1970s still contained a strong current of popular futurism, reflected in the success of magazines like Omni and in the popular music of the day, the pioneering electronic sounds of Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Donna Summer producer Giorgio Moroder. It was a conflicted decade, though, with nostalgia gradually becoming a more dominant force ("Happy Days," "Grease," '20s chic). Even science fiction itself began to regress, following the lead of "Star Wars" by abandoning the sophistication of the 1960s "New Wave" of sci-fi (with its explorations of "inner space") and reverting to the swashbuckling space fantasies of the genre's pulpy early days.

In the '80s, thinking about the future in nonnegative terms seemed to become almost impossible. Yesteryear seemed more attractive: Postmodernism and retro recycling ruled popular culture, while politically the presiding spirits of the era, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were dedicated to restoration of an older order, to rolling back the gains of the abhorred '60s. Futurology's profile waned (can you name anything Toffler wrote after 1980?) and the bestsellers in the "popular thought" tended to be jeremiads and "Where did we go wrong?" investigations like Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985) and Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987).

The '90s, however, saw a slight resurgence of futurism, driven by the information technology boom, theorized by magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000, soundtracked by another wave of electronic music (the techno-tronica rave-olution). While some of the new breed of futurologists were classic gee-whiz technology types like Kevin Kelly, others were "zippies," hippies sans any Luddite technophobia or back-to-the-land nostalgia, people like Jaron Lanier and Ray Kurzweil. All panaceas and marvels, the talk could get pretty wacky: nanotechnology, virtual reality, trans-humanism. Kurzweil preached the notion that the law of accelerating returns was propelling us at breakneck speed toward a singularity: Fueled by cross-catalyzing innovations, the exponential curve of progress will inevitably, sooner rather than later, hit vertical, resulting in a rupture in human history, most likely entailing sentient machines, the dis-incarnation of human intelligence, immortality. Basically the rapture, with technological accouterments. Some of Kurzweil's predictions were more prosaic: By the middle of the 21st century he imagined computers becoming so intelligent they could be genuinely musical, which for him translated as being able to jam with human guitarists, Jerry Garcia/Carlos Santana-style.

After the info-tech boom's bust and 9/11, we haven't heard as much from these digi-prophets. All that Dow Jones-indexed mania has sagged to a sour calm. Futurology as a popular nonfiction genre has been largely reduced to short-term trend watching, cool hunting in the service of marketing people and brand makers. Take the recently published "The Next Now: Trends for the Future" by Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia. Even taking into consideration the authors' modest ambition to look a mere five years ahead, this book's bundle of predictions is frankly feeble. Almost without exception, everything Salzman and Matathia "prophesy" is already a highly visible and well-established trend: wikis, blogging, celebrity chefs, gastro-porn, branding, the privatization of space, overwork/sleep deprivation, the prolongation of adolescence into the '30s and beyond, online dating, an aging population ... The near future, apparently, will just consist of more of the exact same.

Then again, perhaps sociocultural and political prediction is simply a mug's game. In the 1970s, no one would or could have imagined that the dominant form of pop music of the last two decades of the 20th century would be rhythmatized boasts and threats delivered over beats; few would have foreseen the emergence of reality TV as the most popular entertainment format. On the political front, the annals of sci-fi are littered with dystopian soothsayings that now look laughably off-base, from Anthony Burgess' "1985," a 1978 novel about a trade-union-dominated U.K. of the near future in which the country is brought to a standstill on a weekly basis by general strikes, to Kingsley Amis' 1980 novel "Russian Hide-and-Seek," a vision of Britain 50 years after its conquest by the Soviets. "Where's My Jetpack?" shrewdly sticks to science and technology. But this relentless focus on machines, gadgets and life-enhancing innovations means that Wilson never touches on that whole other aspect of the "unrequited future" -- the dismay and disbelief felt by many who came of age in the '60s and '70s only to witness a drastic deceleration in the rate of social and cultural progress.

Perhaps the expectations of the 1960s, that era of rampant radicalisms, were hopelessly unrealistic. Still, if you grew up, like me, reading radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone (who argued in "The Dialectic of Sex" that female liberation would come only with the invention of an artificial womb that could unshackle women from the procreative function) or New Wave of science fiction authors like Thomas M. Disch (who in his novel "334" imagined men being able to get mammary implants and breast-feed their offspring), scanning contemporary popular culture with its supermodel competitions, desperate housewives and scantily clad pop divas is acutely disheartening. And these are about gender, just one zone of stalled progress or outright regression. Race, gay rights, drugs, socioeconomic equality, religion -- on just about every front, things either are not nearly as advanced as we'd have once expected or have actually gone into reverse. Forget the goddamn jetpack: It's the sociocultural version of the "amazing future that never arrived" that really warrants our anguish.

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