Is the Future as Grim as Science Fiction Says It Is?

Looking into the future (Viggo Mortensen in “The Road”)

It’s striking the degree to which our hopes and fears for the future are tied up with technology. It’s as if we all tacitly agree that, for better or for worse, where we’re headed depends on our machines.

Therein, of course, lies the rub. Is the future toward which technology carries us for better, or for worse?

Two writers have weighed in on this question recently, both arguing that the answer should be  “better,” but that far too many people are telling us the answer is “worse.”

One is Michael Solana, who posted an essay on Wired.com a few days ago under the headline, “Stop Writing Dystopian Sci-Fi – It’s Making Us All Fear Technology.” Solana’s views echoed those expressed a few weeks earlier by Kevin Kelly, who posted an essay on Medium entitled, “A Desirable-Future Haiku: The coming hundred years, in one hundred words.”  

Kelly’s essay stemmed from a challenge he’d made on Twitter, offering a $100 prize to the person who best described, in no more than a hundred words, a technological future Kelly would want to live in. In addition to presenting the submissions received and naming a winner, Kelly's Medium essay included his own vision, which pictured a world laden with GMOs, nuclear power, robots, ubiquitous computer tracking, the quantitative monitoring of nature (whatever that means), and “mandatory” techno literacy. 

All of which caused me to appreciate that one man’s utopia is another man’s…you get the idea.

"Metropolis"

Both essays are, in my opinion, pretty silly, but the issues they address are worth responding to. A few points, then, to mention:

1. Kelly and Solana both argue that our visions of the future are being clouded by the relentless gloominess of current science fiction, in novels and in film. You can't deny that the fictional futures we’re getting these days are consistently downbeat. But that’s only in fiction.

What Kelly and Solana fail to acknowledge is that our media regularly expose us to the views of technological enthusiasts who present wildly utopian visions of the future as being completely plausible, in reality. Does the name Ray Kurzweil ring a bell? Other prominent advocates of technological deliverance include Kurzweil’s bosses at Google, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen. 

2. To wish for more optimistic science fiction ignores the fact that fiction thrives on conflict. Utopian visions of a technological Eden aren’t going to be very compelling. Murder stories play a disproportionate role in popular fiction for the same reason. Kelly acknowledges this, as do some of those who commented on Solana’s piece.

"Elysium"

3. Solana errs most egregiously when he fails to acknowledge that the purveyors of dystopia could be right. Here, too, Kelly is more forthcoming. “At the moment we have no shared positive vision of tomorrow,” he writes. 

We are unable to imagine it. I will be quick to add: that includes me. I too have difficulty in describing an exciting future for all of society in 100 years that seems plausible given what is happening today. I can imagine singular threads of the future rolling out positive — massive, continuous, cheap, real time connection between all humans, or total genetic control over crop plants, or synthetic solar fusion energy — but it is hard to see how all these threads weave into the other threads of climate change, population decrease, habitat loss, human attention overload, robot replacement, and accelerating AI.

This is a surprising, even shocking admission from a writer who has long been one of our most prominent technological enthusiasts. This is not to say that Kelly has suddenly reversed himself. The qualifications in his technophilic reveries have been gradually but discernibly increasing for years. Still, for a man who as recently as December, 2012, argued in a Wired cover story that we ought to celebrate rather than fear the replacement of jobs by automation (“Let the robots take the jobs,” he wrote, “and let them help us dream up new work that matters.”), this may well be Kelly’s most frankly ambivalent statement yet.

"The Matrix"

4. Qualifications notwithstanding, from my perspective there’s a strong element of wishful thinking in both Kelly’s and Solana’s pieces, especially given that both admit things aren’t going so great right now.

It’s hard to understand how anyone can recognize our present state of danger and disorder and at the same time fail to recognize the role technology has played in the creation of those conditions. Don’t they realize that enthusiasts have been promising for centuries that technology will save us? Does it make sense to dream of a future in which technology comes to our rescue when to a large extent technology got us where we are in the first place? 

We do our artists a disservice if we discount the futures they envision. Their scenarios aren’t made up out of whole cloth; rather they can be seen as logical extensions of conditions that currently exist. Artists also tend to be attuned to vibrations in the collective unconscious, and despite the fact that most of our fellow citizens appear to retain their faith in progress, there are also reasons to suspect their faith has been shaken. Everybody seems to be on edge, and I don't think an over-abundance of science fiction dystopias is the reason why. 

©Doug Hill, 2014

SXSW as Metaphor

A couple of weeks ago I posted a reflection on the controversies surrounding the techie invasion of San Francisco. It was entitled “San Francisco as Metaphor,” and my basic point was that there’s nothing unique about the migration of money and power from Silicon Valley northward to the city, given that one of the fundamental characteristics of technology is a constant drive to expand its sphere of influence. For that reason the takeover of San Francisco by the power and values of technique is symptomatic of a process that’s occurring all over the country, and all over the world.

As it happens, last week the annual South by Southwest festival kicked off in Austin, and I’ve been struck by the degree to which the same arguments apply there. As Matt Honan pointed out in Wired, SXSW Interactive used to be a “sideshow” to SXSW Music. Now it’s the main event.

Indeed, SXSW Music itself seems to have been thoroughly interpolated by technology. A look at this year's schedule shows that many if not most of its panels have less to do with music per se than they do with the machinery of music, or with music as filtered through some combination of technology and economics—the methodological and ideological construct that Jacques Ellul called “technique.”  

My favorite example is a book signing by the authors of “Hit Brands: How Music Builds Value for the World’s Smartest Brands.” Here’s how the publisher describes the book on Amazon:

In the battleground for hearts and minds of customers, music is one of the most powerful tools that brands can use. In this definitive guide to how brands harness the power of music to drive business, three leading industry experts show you how to create and execute successful music strategies with lasting impact.

It turns out that “branding” occupies a whole section on the SXSW Music schedule. Sessions include “Using Music to Sell Other Stuff” and “Fashion + Rock n Roll: A Timeless Bond.” The latter session promises to answer the question, “How can fashion brands create authentic partnerships between celebrities and musicians?”

There is no more pressing question in music today, I submit, than how to create that elusive quality known as “authenticity.” 

For those of us old enough to remember Neil Young’s “This Note’s for You," all of this seems to confirm that we now inhabit a brave new world in which values that once prevailed have been turned upside down. There was a time, children, when rock and roll was subversive—that was its one of its main reasons for being. Believing that it actually was subversive may have always been an illusion, of course, but that was the idea.

Young (who appeared at SXSW this year to discuss his new audio streaming system, Pono) was making what has turned out to be a mostly futile protest against the co-optation of rock and roll by the very establishment powers it ostensibly challenged. Again, in its relentless drive toward expansion, technique endeavors to turn all things to its own ends, including the neighborhoods of San Francisco, including the rebellious authenticity of rock and roll.

Cutting loose at SXSW

Jacques Ellul argued that, to a point, rebellion serves a valuable function in a world dominated by technique: It harmlessly dissipates unruly emotions that might otherwise disrupt the functioning of the machine.

"Technique diffuses the revolt of the few and thus appeases the need of the millions for revolt," Ellul wrote.

Human impulses are confined within well-defined limits and become the objects of propaganda, profit-seeking, contractual obligations and the like…The supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt an acquiescent smile.

Photo credit: Neil Young by Danny Clinch, Rolling Stone