This is my first post revisiting my early blog entries on Livejournal. I wrote this piece in 2005 - At the time I was getting interested in retrofuturism and retro PCs. I still have those interests, but after reading McKenzie Wark's Molecular Red I think in the future we will have created a situation in which our current technology will be seen as a lost golden age. Perhaps the elite will sequester themselves in hidden fortresses and everything will be like the film Zardoz, but I imagine we will be scraping our existence from depleted soils and barely surviving .. the good side is like our Celtic forebears, we will have short lives full of magic and nature. Staring at the stars, building fires, carving deer antlers. What once was will have been again. The eternal return of Eliade.
This week in one of my classes we dealt with a unit on the future tense, and they have this text about the future development of space tourism. Now it is the purview of only the super-rich, but soon, they say, it will be a more affordable destination, with hotels on the moon. They had some pretty annoying quotes in the text .. "Space is our destiny" I started thinking about the Kennedy Space Program and the promise of a new tomorrow. The science fiction propaganda which many lap up .. star trek fantasy. This American frontier ideal, the wild west in outer space, our prime directive to boldly go exploring and colonizing new planets for our ever-growing civilization.
Burroughs suggests that man is a virus .. we must spread ourselves like a disease across the stars. The constant metastizing growth of the market ... as the text put it, "a future of endlessly expanding new choices" - a capitalist wet dream, and outer space as real estate (it's infinite)
The city of the future, imagined countless times throughout the last century as a land of glass towers and monorails. One of my students (a LAN administrator) geekily spoke about colonies on Mars, and terraforming, blah blah .. and I thought what gall we have, us humans, always sticking our noses in where we aren't invited, taking our diseases to other planets .. it's our nature, we are curious.
Not all scifi is this way .. the dystopians see the dehumanizing trap we have set for ourselves. I especially like Barry Malzberg, though his stories are repetitive. He always depicts the neurotic astronaut caught in the corporate machine of the space program, lost in his madness amongst the stars, speaking to aliens who are the voices in his head ...
Of course with the future we always project our ideal society based on what we have today. Reality is always different, things change in unexpected ways. Instead of tall towers and private jet packs, we will more likely be dying off in large numbers due to plagues and holes in the ozone. Resources are drying up. How pray tell will we have the energy to terraform Mars, or build a city inside the moon? We will be lucky if we can manage to feed ourselves in the future .. there are too many people.
I think the future will be more like the past. Cities may disentegrate as people are forced to decentralize due to food transportation concerns. Localized agriculture will become a greater concern. Hand trades will be more important again. Economies will be more local again. It might not be so bad, for those who survive .. click the image above for an interesting article on the development of cities and sustainable land-use.
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