The natural American tendency toward crude, binary thinking means we usually choose between techno-hippies in silver unitards or a bands of people dug-into post-apocalyptia, resisting the onslaught of infected alien zombies.
Kevin Kelly recently shared some interesting thoughts about what an actual future would look like. Sure, dystopias (in particular) are appealing enough thought-experiments, but:
The flaw in most dystopian narratives is that they are not sustainable. They flash chaos, but then quickly self-organize. The outlaws and underworlds that seem so exciting at “first demise” are quickly taken over by organized crime and militants, so the lawlessness becomes racketeering, and over very little time, racketeering becomes a type of corrupted government — all to maximize the income of the bandits. In a sense rapid greed rapidly cures dystopias. Real dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union, or Libya, rather than Mad Max or Bladerunner…
…I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict…
…No one wants to move to the future today. We are avoiding it. We don’t have much desire for life one hundred years from now. Many dread it. That makes it hard to take the future seriously. So we don’t take a generational perspective. We’re stuck in the short now. We also adopt the Singularity perspective: that imagining the future in 100 years is technically impossible. So there is no protopia we are reaching for. (The Preceding is by Kevin Kelly; all bolding and in-text links are mine)
The world is getting better, but the snail-like incremental change, at least when compared to a human lifespan, makes it harder to appreciate. But, if I am impatient, how the hell do I pencil in improving the world? Of course, the answer is obvious: Pithy bumper sticker.
It’s overwhelming. Anyway, here’s Steve Lambert providing a call to action that is remarkably lacking in smarm.
I don’t know how I feel about all that preceding stuff, but it’s another vector for thinking about all that life, the universe, and everything that Doug Adams wrote about. Maybe we can consider some odd angles on our protopian journey.
Whatever shape the future takes, the one thing that I’m certain of is that it won’t look the way we predicted. We may get one or two details right, but the zeitgeist will be all wrong. It always is.
So, we’re really bad at imagining the future, but, if we don’t dare to imagine it, it won’t happen. Along the way, a bunch of people die and spasms of social unrest echo through history. This sounds an awful lot like failing forward.
