The world of tomorrow

Well to state it somewhat pessimistically:

1. Thoughts about the future always reflect the anxieties and the ambitions of the present.

2. Today's world has become immersed in the dreary and often dystopian reality of that technology. Today we have Black Mirror instead of the Twilight Zone. People are more mature about the impacts of both world changing technologies and cultural paradigms forcing that technology into our lives weather we like it or not.

3. GenZ,Y and younger see Big Tech as evil or invasive but are addicted to it (Social Media, smart phones) in the way Boomers were addicted to cigarettes and TV

4. Our Oligarchical economy pushes us to eat meagerly from the wealth pot, while our day to day lives, from health care, to family cohesion, to social silos due to socializing online instead of in-person, jobs that lay us off at the drop of a hat, online apps that are convenient but remove human interaction and treat us like numbers to be managed.

Also all that Impersonal Software that has no soul sucks the soul out of human users. -instead of chatting with the mailman, we get email marketing welcoming our birthdays, now personalized with GenAI. The same issues that we complained about during industrialization of cities gets amplified more with the web and mobile revolution - e.g. we are less socialized..

basically we are more jaded after a century of unbelievable technological innovation.

Even a 30th percentile US household would be above average globally…?

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"Soylent Green" seems more and more prescient. I'm not talking about turning people into food — not even the over-population fracas depicted in the film (that seems to have been a distinctly 70's-era fear).

Seeing the film again I notice the way it portrays the untouchable wealthy classes (briefly) and then the rest of us. (I should read the book [1] because I was intrigued by little scenes like the one with the old people in the library — if you even remember that bit.)

[1] "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison

Curious. The article mentions Star Trek three times, in all cases referring to The Original Series, while stating that "Outside of niche books and magazines, the golden age of optimistic science fiction did not exist.", which is surprising it how it missed the golden era of Star Trek, beginning with The Next Generation (1987-1994), aka. the reference work for optimistic future in popular sci-fi, subsequently followed by several more series and movies set in the same continuity, culminating with Enterprise (2001 - 2005). That's 18 years of stories about humanity enjoying Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism aka. a post-scarcity society! Seven seasons of a show set on a starship that looks like a luxury hotel inside - because why wouldn't it be?

People still joke about the carpets on starships (including in-universe in the recent shows), but honestly, you can pretty much measure how we've lost the optimistic future by tracking how Star Trek shows (including the post-2005 ones) got darker (literally, I'm talking about how the scenes were lit), the architecture less Hilton-like, and eventually, when carpets started to disappear.

Apropos visual media, there's another example of an optimistic vision of the future, which the article also indirectly mentions: Disney's Tomorrowland - not the fair, the 2015 movie. Severely underrated, that one. I broke down in tears when I watched it (okay, I was in a vulnerable period), because it was an unexpected breath of pure optimism about progress. I mean, the movie is literally about the very thing the article talks about - it recalls the optimism of yore, presents a protagonist who's asking herself and us, where did it all go wrong, and then tackles the question directly. The answer it gives may or may not be any good[0], but at least an attempt was made to talk about it. Sadly, this is the last attempt made so far in popular media, at least as far as I know.

I'm puzzled as to why these two stories were not mentioned. They're not exactly outliers no one has heard of.

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[0] - We're effectively fucking our own future up by only ever talking about disasters - past ones, current ones, and every plausible prediction of future ones - in a feedback loop with news and entertainment; we're simmering in despair, securing a doomed future by not being able to envision anything good as a society.