from MungBeing Magazine

The Postmodern Paleo-Future
by Matt Novak

I started the Paleo-Future blog (“a look into the future that never was”) in January of 2007 to examine the ways that those in the past envisioned the future. I have since become well acquainted with the many promises of generations past. Clean energy, robotic servants and push-button food were the dreams the paleo-future was built on.

However, we’ve hit a snag of the imagination. It is immensely difficult for me to imagine a world before sarcasm and irony were the norm. American society no longer seems to grab the future by the horns and proclaim that tomorrow holds promise.

In 1966, just a few months before he died, Walt Disney produced a film outlining his vision for the futuristic community of EPCOT. Most people equate the word “Disney” with watered-down conservatism. However, Disney’s “Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow” envisioned a world where the pedestrian held sway. Personal vehicles were all relegated to underground passages and clean-energy mass transit allowed people to travel throughout the city efficiently. EPCOT would be a community planned from the ground up and the needs of the people living within it were the highest priority.

The future is only a concept. You can’t experience the future with any tangible basis in reality. For this reason, the future is whatever you want it to be.

There is a genuine sense of sadness detectable when you talk with people about flying cars and meal pills. Oddly enough, most people don’t want meals-in-a-pill, they simply want the fanciful. We long for the world where anything is possible. We exist in a rather unique age when most American’s basic necessities are met. You and I have luxuries unseen in human history and yet we want more.

I would argue that 1997 was a major tipping point for futurism. American consumer culture could no longer get behind the idea of “building a bridge to the 21st century.” Such sentimentality made one vulnerable to ridicule. Even Disney, the definition of sentimentality, had abandoned the sincere brand of futurism with it’s redesign of Tomorrowland in 1997, replacing the promise of tomorrow with Buck Rogers versions of how we used to view tomorrow.

Warren Belasco, in his book Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, quotes Disney’s head Imagineer as saying, “We used to think Tang was wonderful, but then there came the sense that Tang was all we got out of a multitrillion-dollar space program.” The ironic distance from the fantastical future is a byproduct of our postmodern age.

Can we return to an era of sincerity and optimism?

These thoughts are echoed by a David Brin, who was interviewed on The Future and You podcast last year (here, from ~6:40 in). Saying we need to cure ourselves of cynicism and have confidence in the present world we’re building.

Optimism! so un-natural for a GenX’er such as myself.. it’s like we’ve been trained out of it. Taught only to see the negatives in everything. But for however briefly, we must occasionally open our eyes and see the wonder only.