Posts Tagged ‘futurism’

In Search of My Optimism for the Future

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Michael Brotherton and I had a bit of a con­ver­sa­tion on the phone the other day—I don’t remem­ber the exact sub­ject, but we talked a bit about opti­mism for the eco­nomic and cli­matic future.  I expressed the usual dour pes­simism (“Paolo Bacigalupi is too upbeat for you,” I seem to recall him say­ing.)  Mike has an inter­est­ing post up recently about this whole issue of opti­mism as it relates to writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion and dystopias in par­tic­u­lar.

Mike calls bull­shit on Paolo’s state­ment that teenagers pre­fer dystopias because they sense the lie in opti­mism and “…our chil­dren will inherit a world sig­nif­i­cantly depleted and dam­aged in com­par­i­son to the one our par­ents handed down to us. And they know it…”  He makes some state­ments which I don’t find entirely con­vinc­ing regard­ing his own life—just because your life has improved doesn’t mean every­one has, nec­es­sar­ily.  The lives of my fam­ily have declined con­sid­er­ably in the last decade due to the econ­omy in par­tic­u­lar, and I think there are a few peo­ple out there whose lives are start­ing to see seri­ous effects from global warm­ing.  I can under­stand why some look at the future and they feel like we’re on a roller coaster about to make the big drop.  But then there’s a fas­ci­nat­ing link to a video in his com­ments that paints a very opti­mistic pic­ture about the qual­ity of life glob­ally over time.   So maybe ulti­mately things are con­sis­tently get­ting bet­ter for peo­ple, when taken as a whole (even if it does seem to suck pretty badly to be in Africa).

Personally, I think dystopias are pop­u­lar with teens because they fit that world view that EVERYTHING SUCKS that seems to come with the brain chem­istry of puberty.  And today, with all the news about dire eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal pre­dic­tions, maybe they buy into it even more heav­ily.   But I think teens just have a nat­ural pes­simism that comes along with being squeezed out of child­hood and into adult­hood, pos­si­bly not very will­ingly.  I know becom­ing a teenager pissed me off any­way.  I spent 4 years angry or depressed all the time for no good reason.

But to the mat­ter of adult opti­mism for our real futures…

The rea­son I have a hard time being opti­mistic about the envi­ron­ment in par­tic­u­lar is that I’ve watched our planet lose habi­tat after habi­tat and species after species for 20 years.  The Amazon will likely be a fairy tale today’s con­ser­va­tion biol­o­gists tell their grand kids.   Habitat destruc­tion in search of resources so our species can grow and build and extend is some­thing I can’t be opti­mistic about.  There’s lit­tle evi­dence to me that this trend will reverse any time soon, if ever.  Until devel­op­ing nations climb up out of poverty entirely, they’re going to slash and burn their resources to do it.   The planet becomes poorer for it in terms of bio­di­ver­sity which is some­thing I can’t explain the value of in the same way I can explain the value of a bar­rel of oil or hard­wood lum­ber.    So I won’t go into it here.  Another post, perhaps. 

Ultimately, it all comes down to the finite­ness of resources in my mind. Constant growth as demanded by cap­i­tal­ism is a phys­i­cal impos­si­bil­ity, as far as I can tell.  The world will run out of any num­ber of resources. Shit, helium may run out any day now.  Any num­ber of pre­cious met­als are becom­ing dif­fi­cult to find, met­als cru­cial in the man­u­fac­tur­ing of high tech devices.  Why is now any less likely than some time in the dis­tant future for resource deple­tion?   We hear news about peak oil, how we may have even already passed peak oil and begun our decline. 

And if you’re a mem­ber of the mid­dle or lower mid­dle class in the United States?  You have lit­tle to be opti­mistic about eco­nom­i­cally.  I defy any­one to give me evi­dence that my gen­er­a­tion will enjoy the same level of com­fort and sta­bil­ity that our par­ents did (or grand­par­ents in the case of my young par­ents who are hit very hard by this econ­omy as well).  Employer sta­bil­ity, this notion that you would have one excel­lent job for 35 years and then retire com­fort­ably?  Not for us.   Look at unem­ploy­ment rates among gen Y as well.    There’s an entire gen­er­a­tion grow­ing up to reach for the American dream only to find it miss­ing.  Can you fault them for won­der­ing if it were ever really there?

And yet, times have never been bet­ter for the megarich!  I sup­pose for them, the future has never looked brighter.  You’ll excuse me if I don’t share their opti­mism.  I wasn’t born with a plat­inum spoon in my mouth.

Our entire polit­i­cal sys­tem seems rigged in favor of the wealthy and their cor­po­ra­tions.  Do you think I as a small busi­ness can get away with pay­ing no or min­i­mal taxes like many mega­cor­po­ra­tions?  Of course not.   Did the wealthy really need a tax cut that increased our deficit by some­thing like 25%?  Of course they didn’t;  but they got it any­way.    And it just makes the future for us lower in the eco­nomic strata look even bleaker.  Our wages go down or stag­nate in real terms, and their net wealth con­tin­ues to sky­rocket into the stratos­phere.   I loathe the Tea Party and what they stand for, but I know where those peo­ple are com­ing from.  They see a world that increas­ingly is leav­ing them behind.  For both good and bad reasons.

For a good chunk of the peo­ple I know back home, their only hope of not strug­gling their entire lives for just enough income to get by is to win the lot­tery.   Or go on a game show run by the mega-​​rich which taunts them with the pos­si­bil­ity of win­ning money and then records their anguish when they lose it, and then they sell that fuck­ing anguish to you and I on net­work televisions. 

Seriously, is there any­thing more fuck­ing evil on tele­vi­sion today than shows like “Money Drop”?

Hell, I used to believe in the power of sci­ence to make the world bet­ter.  And I’ve spent my entire life watch­ing peo­ple in power reduce the public’s opin­ion of sci­ence to the point where more peo­ple in the U.S. ques­tion evo­lu­tion than believe in it, which to me is basi­cally on par with dis­be­liev­ing grav­ity.  The wealthy have attacked the public’s faith in sci­ence because it would have cost them money for us to believe that the planet’s cli­mate is being changed by their indus­tries.  An entire polit­i­cal arm of this coun­try dis­trusts the notion of experts.  The only sci­ence they care about is that which allows them to wring more money from the world.

And don’t fuck­ing get me started on the trav­esty that is our health care sys­tem in the U.S..  We are ALL one seri­ous ill­ness away from com­plete finan­cial oblit­er­a­tion.  Anyone who doesn’t believe that is a deluded fool or wealthy enough that noth­ing I have said here applies to them anyway.

Where’s my opti­mism?  Where’s my abil­ity to write sci­ence fic­tion like “The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad?”  Where did I leave it?  And would it be delu­sional of me to even try and adopt it again?  That’s the thing, isn’t it? If you’re a pes­simist and your pes­simism doesn’t come true, you get to be happy along with the opti­mists.  But if you’re an opti­mist whose pre­dic­tions prove false, then there’s lit­tle to be happy about.  The pes­simist at least gets the grim sat­is­fac­tion of being right. Even if they’re no hap­pier about the out­come than the optimist. 

Now, by being a pes­simist, did they some­how help ensure that the opti­mistic vision would never come true? Possibly.  But as far as pre­serv­ing one’s own sense of ego, the pes­simistic belief sys­tem is a bet­ter bet.   At least I can rec­og­nize that in addi­tion to every­thing else.

I feel like Mulder on this sub­ject.  I want to believe that the world will only get bet­ter.  But some part of my intel­lect rebels at the notion.   Maybe when I’m not send­ing money back to Kansas to help my fam­ily out reg­u­larly, maybe then I will start to believe that things can improve.  But right now, I feel like we’ve begun an unprece­dented decline, and I’m not sure for my fam­ily this decline will reverse.   And maybe we were spoiled in the first place, and it shouldn’t mat­ter so much? People in Africa are starv­ing, right? 

Yes, most every­thing I say here is self-​​interested.  No need to point that out.  Life may be improv­ing leaps and bounds for the Chinese, but when it comes down to it, I don’t really care except in a very gen­eral sense. And if their life’s improve­ments have to come at the cost of our qual­ity of life, all that’s going to do is make folks even more angry and dis­il­lu­sioned with the future

I’m going to keep  look­ing for my opti­mism.  Things like that video give me a broader per­spec­tive and make me feel bet­ter about where we’ve come from.  It’s hard to see the bat­tle­field when you’re in the trenches.  Maybe we really are win­ning the war.  I’ll be as happy as any opti­mistic soul if it turns out to be the case.

Maybe even happier.

A response to “a radi­cial pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years”

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The Globe and Mail recently ran an inter­est­ing arti­cle of pre­dic­tions by Douglas Coupland.  I both agree and dis­agree with what he has to say.  Here are my thoughts on a selected num­ber of his predictions.

1) It’s going to get worse

Well, okay.  If you’re call­ing your arti­cle a pessimist’s guide, then you pretty much have to lead off with some­thing like this, eh?   I’m not con­vinced there’s any evi­dence that this eco­nomic cycle is any more likely to go down­ward than it is to trend upward.  And I’m pretty pes­simistic.  It’s a broad state­ment, and thus dif­fi­cult to really react to pos­i­tively or negatively.

2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic

The future never feels futur­is­tic because it’s the present when you’re expe­ri­enc­ing it.  It takes dis­con­nect­ing your­self from the daily grind and con­ciously think­ing about the dif­fer­ence between today and yes­ter­day to really evoke the sense of futur­is­tic.  If you mean it’s not a Gernsback future, well, we all fig­ured that out some time around 1999.  Your fly­ing car is never going to hap­pen. Time to accept that.

6) The mid­dle class is over. It’s not com­ing back

This, I agree with, as things stand now.  The mid­dle class as we knew it was built on an indus­trial econ­omy, one where sta­bil­ity was derived from repet­i­tive, lightly skilled jobs pro­duc­ing prod­ucts with a con­stant or ris­ing demand.  It’s a pre-​​globalist phe­nom­e­non, and as far as I can tell, one of the pri­mary effects of glob­al­ism has been a return to global poverty.  It seems through most of his­tory, wealth has been con­sol­i­dated in the hands of the few.  Sometimes it seems like the mid­dle class was just a blip that came along with the ride of var­i­ous forms of democ­racy, and as democ­racy begins to fal­ter as a result of trans­form­ing into de facto oli­garchies, we’ll head back to the pre-​​Enlightenment sys­tems of peas­ants, peons, an wealthy aris­to­crats.  As soon as money==speech, the mid­dle class was doomed. 

Of course, none of that means we have to like it.  When the for­mer mid­dle class finally catches on, things are going to get bloody, and I wouldn’t ven­ture a guess.  The Tea Party move­ment at that point will look like the voice of rea­son.  Might be a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions of declin­ing stan­dards of liv­ing before they’re finally shocked out of complacency.

Or one win­ter of food shortages—that would do the trick.

9) The sub­urbs are doomed, espe­cially those E.T. , California-​​style suburbs

They’re not doomed.  They’ll just adapt and trans­form.  I expect that all those idi­otic rules against sub­ur­ban farm­ing will get struck down out of neces­sity.  The sub­urbs are the future small towns and rural areas.  You may end up with whole­sale aban­don­ment in some places, but I have a feel­ing that they’re going to trans­form them­selves into vil­lages, not become pseudo-​​ghost towns.

17) You may well burn out on the effort of being an individual

I agree that we’re headed back to com­mu­ni­ties that are more inter­con­nected.  But my gen­er­a­tion isn’t going to burn out on indi­vid­u­al­ity.  For much of us, “being our indi­vid­ual selves” is a fun­da­men­tal cor­ner­stone of our self-​​identity.  maybe we’ll raise our kids to be more community-​​minded though.  But in 10 years? Not remotely likely to me.

20) North America can eas­ily frag­ment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989

I go back and forth on this notion.  I think it will very much depend, at least in the United States, on the exec­u­tive branch at the time.  We’ve kinda been through this already, and we fought the most bloody war in our nation’s his­tory to keep frag­men­ta­tion from hap­pen­ing.    I’m going to have to say “no way” on this hap­pen­ing in 10 years in the U.S.  In Mexico, though, that’s another story.

22) Your sense of time will con­tinue to shred. Years will feel like hours

I’m just mak­ing a wild guess here, but is Douglas Copland going through a midlife crisis?

28) It will become harder to view your life as “a story”

Narrative struc­ture didn’t invent itself, you know.  We’ve been struc­tur­ing our expe­ri­ences as story since we could paint on cave walls, or even before.  The idea that our life will instead be how­ever many friends we have online, I just don’t buy it.  It sounds like some­thing Facebook would pitch to ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, not a real futur­ist pre­dic­tion.  Yes, your social net­work will be impor­tant.  But we’ll define our sense of self by it?  Is there going to be a fun­da­men­tal alter­ation of our brain chem­istry at the same time?

32) Musical appre­ci­a­tion will shed all age barriers

This may be the most inter­est­ing pre­dic­tion I’ve read.  I think it says some­thing about the gen­er­a­tion of new modes of music—what is the next rock n’ roll?  Is it rap?  Okay, then what’s com­ing after that?  The death of a musi­cal main­stream cul­ture caused by a frag­men­ta­tion of taste means gen­er­a­tions to come will have a harder time self-​​identifying with a spe­cific genre.  They’ll like bands com­posed of indi­vid­u­als their own age, but as far as age being linked to types of music?  I can buy this totally.

34) You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought

I don’t know, I already miss them pretty badly.  Then again, I was in high school and col­lege, and who doesn’t miss those years of their lives to some extent? A time of less respon­si­bil­ity always looks good from real adulthood.

37) People will stop car­ing how they appear to others

The num­ber of tribal cat­e­gories one can belong to will become infi­nite. To use a high-​​school anal­ogy, 40 years ago you had jocks and nerds. Nowadays, there are Goths, emos, punks, metal-​​heads, geeks and so forth.

Two social group/​tribes 40 years ago?  It’s not quite 40 years ago, but let me quote to you from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Oh, he’s very pop­u­lar Ed. The sportos, the motor­heads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dwee­bies, dick­heads — they all adore him. They think he’s a right­eous dude.

Are you telling me in 1970, there weren’t hip­pies or greasers?  Stoners or preps?

The num­ber of tribal cat­e­gories have always neigh-​​infinite.  It seems that we just care more now than we used to. With other forms of iden­tity, we put more weight on this one.

41) The future of pol­i­tics is the care­ful and effec­tive implant­ing into the minds of vot­ers images that can never be removed

Yeah, we all saw Inception  this sum­mer too.

45) We will accept the obvi­ous truth that we brought this upon ourselves

I thought this was sup­posed to be a pessimist’s guide?  That’s the most opti­mistic pre­dic­tion about a fun­da­men­tal change in human nature I’ve read yet!

So what do you think?  Do you agree or dis­agree with any of his 45 predictions? 

Nine Reasons I Read Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Nine Reasons I Read Science Fiction

1. Neophilia.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea intro­duced the idea of neophilia to me in their great con­spir­acy the­ory mag­num opus, The Illuminatus Trilogy. Hagbard Celine, the half-​​Atlantian Discordian sub­ma­rine cap­tain describes the world as being divided into two types of peo­ple– neophiles and neo­phobes; those who are attracted by the new, and those who are repelled by it. I read this book when I was six­teen. I imme­di­ately rec­og­nized myself as a neophile. Science fic­tion writ­ers gen­er­ally attempt to show things that have never been seen before in their work. There is a tra­di­tion of the orig­i­nal within it. If there is a genre of fic­tion that can be described as neophillic, it is sci­ence fic­tion.

2. To chal­lenge my preconceptions.

I grew up in Kansas, which if you read the news at all, is a state where peo­ple are gen­er­ally very con­ser­v­a­tive. Racism is ram­pant. Homophobia was, at least when I was a child, the gen­eral rule. And if you weren’t Christian, then you were going to Hell. It is easy to accept all of these beliefs as fact when you are immersed in them. Even if you don’t agree with them, they find a way to seep into your mind. In that envi­ron­ment, sci­ence fic­tion, with it’s unusual and pro­gres­sive views about gen­der, race, sex, and reli­gion pro­vides an escape, and an alter­nate view point. Ursula K. LeGuin alone chal­lenged much of my pre­con­cep­tions in her work. Whether it was the peo­ple of color in the Earthsea books, or chal­leng­ing the idea of gen­der in The Left Hand of Darkness, her work opened up my mind to a world where cul­tural ideas are not hegemonic.

3. To travel to exotic places with­out leav­ing the house.

Science fic­tion is often set in places that no human being has ever vis­ited before. I love to travel, and with enough time, I could one day see much of what Earth has to offer. And I don’t think there is any sub­sti­tute for get­ting up and actu­ally going to the places. But some places are beyond the reach of a jet plane. Without sci­ence fic­tion, I would never know or imag­ine what the skies of Venus are like, never feel the breeze of an alien wind across my skin, or feel the dread as a small alien space­craft full of humans slips over the event hori­zon of a black hole. Science fic­tion inspires us to push this bound­ary of the lim­its of travel. I know more now about the sur­face of Mars than I could have expected to, ten years ago. I would bet that it was partly sci­ence fic­tion that inspired the NASA sci­en­tists to build the Mars rovers that gave me this knowledge.

4. To be pre­pared for pos­si­ble future.

1984. Fahrenheit 451. These are no longer fic­tion, they’re prac­ti­cally mod­ern day sur­vival guides. Science fic­tion pre­pares us for the “what ifs” of the future. Science fic­tion read­ers as a group are more pre­pared for what comes. We’ve been con­sid­er­ing the chal­lenges and moral dilem­mas of stem cells and cloning long before any­one else. The Singularity may be com­ing, and if any­one will be pre­pared for it, it will be the read­ers and writ­ers of sci­ence fiction.

5. To escape the mundane.

Because I need adven­ture and excite­ment and stim­u­la­tion! I work a desk job. I spend 48+ weeks a year in the same 100 mile square area. I see the same peo­ple, do the same tasks, and walk or drive the same streets day in, day out. Life is repet­i­tive. Science fic­tion allows me to escape that. I don’t want to read about peo­ple who have bor­ing jobs and rela­tion­ship prob­lems with their spouses. I want to read about things that stir sur­prise and amaze­ment in me–what we call sen­sawunda. I don’t get sen­sawunda from my day to day life very often. When I do, it’s a bless­ing. But I know that if I turn to my book shelf, I can get a hefty dose of it any time I want.

6. Because I care about plot.

Science fic­tion sto­ries often deal with Big Things. Saving the world. Saving the uni­verse, even. Plot seems to be more empha­sized in sci­ence fic­tion than it is in other gen­res, and it tends to have a larger scope. The stakes are higher. In the pro­to­typ­i­cal lit­er­ary story, the stakes are a col­lege professor’s mar­riage. Yawn. I want some­thing big on the line. I want schemes from my vil­lains, where the stake is noth­ing less than every­thing the pro­tag­o­nists hold dear. Little sto­ries are nice, from time to time, but its the big sto­ries that hold my atten­tion the best. And sci­ence fic­tion offers those.

7. To learn science.

Reading isn’t just about fun. I like it best when I read fic­tion that teaches me some­thing use­ful along with enter­tain­ing me. I find two gen­res par­tic­u­larly excel at this; his­tor­i­cal fic­tion and sci­ence fic­tion. I love sci­ence for the way it makes sense of the world in a log­i­cal man­ner. And you could argue that some sci­ence fic­tion is really just his­tor­i­cal fic­tion about the future. Both can occa­sion­ally pro­vide life lessons. One is from pre­vi­ous exam­ples and the other from theoretical.

8. Because it’s dan­ger­ous to like it.

Everybody has their way of being dif­fer­ent. For me, it’s being a SF nut. This got me picked on more than a few times in my child­hood. It gets me sneered upon by lit­er­ary writ­ers who hang out at the cof­fee shops around town. To some peo­ple, being a sci­ence fic­tion writer means I am lower on the totem pole than a garbage man. I like that. I don’t have much rebel in me, but I like tak­ing plea­sure in things that those kinds of peo­ple hate.

9. Because it offers hope.

Not all sci­ence fic­tion, but a great deal of it, has offered hope. Hope that the future can be bet­ter than the present. At times, it has fetishized the idea of progress, but when it is at its best, it can give hope to the lowli­est soul that their life, or their children’s lives could be bet­ter than it is today. Yes, there is a great tra­di­tion of dystopia fic­tion in the genre, but I would argue that dystopias are writ­ten from a posi­tion of optimism–that per­haps, if the author lays out their dystopian vision, the world can avoid it. Dystopian writ­ers see some­thing that could go wrong and warn against it. Even this is opti­mistic to me and offers hope.

I am not usu­ally a cheer­leader for sci­ence fic­tion. I think there can be some very bad things about it and its fan­dom. I do not believe that sci­ence fic­tion fans are bet­ter than any­one else. That is not what this post is about. It is about why I per­son­ally con­tinue to read sci­ence fic­tion today, twenty years after I dis­cov­ered my first Anne McCaffery book. I encour­age you to think about why you read sci­ence fic­tion too. Sometimes, we all need a reminder. I know that I did.