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Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

nautil.us

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Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#51

Post by wylee »

coldtea wrote: post #13
mojuba wrote: post #5

Honestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and dull and not only in terms of cultural changes. Take any prediction from the 1960s for example and there will be a lot of food for ridicule. A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it…

> A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this? I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or internet). What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes affected by technology etc in the future.

It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars now, in 2015. Sure, there are prototypes (which are really cool), but there's a big leap between a prototype and the average person owning/hailing a self-driving car.

I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen (at least, not for average people getting around town).

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#52

Post by patal »

ideonexus wrote: post #42
cstross wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planet Earth calling: science fiction is not a predictive medium . It's a literary form -- a subcategory of fiction. Yes, some works of SF are set in a plausibly-imagined future. Yes, some of these works may make projections/extrapolations about technologies around us. But the authors are writing in the social context of the present, and what they write about reflects the present day's concerns and perspectives, unle…

Ah! I recognize you! I consider "Accelerando" futurist/transhumanist cannon. Thank you for such a wonderful book!

Do you maybe mean "canon" as in: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon ?

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#53

Post by gambler »

The thing about futurology is that there are tons of people engaged in "predicting". Most of them are notoriously bad at it. Most tech journalists, for example, are so bad that they can't even "predict" the present - their descriptions of cutting-edge technologies used today often have glaring mistakes.

So you have to read the right people. Nearly every time I open a book from Stanislav Lem, I am thinking: "My god, was this really written in the 70s?!". That is predictive power.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#54

Post by ManFromUranus »

drumdance wrote: post #44
ManFromUranus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't more non-white people become futurists then? Why don't they write their own stuff? If white people do something why is there the implication that they are simultaneously suppressing that output from everybody else? You know why you don't find more black futurists? My guess is they spend their time on anti-white rhetoric, and hypothesizing about fictional oppression. Frankly speaking, black people in the wes…

This is a non-sequitur. The point is not "they should get their own futurists." It's that one particular perspective is often wrong.

Non it's not a non-sequitur as I am not replying to the article but to another poster. My reply is relevant to theirs. The point of the article is that we get cultural changes wrong or don't account for changes in culture the way we anticipate changes in technology. The comment I am replying to makes racist generalizations about white people and what the white people and western world are able to imagine. I imagine if one goes to Thailand you would find media and cultural creations that relate to Thai people and their future, or in China the same thing, Chinese people and their future. Would the parent poster make a similar stupid comment about Chinese men can't imagine the future of women or black liberation?

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#55

Post by Kalium »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #34
notahacker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying cars have been part of science fiction since road-going cars and flight were a relative novelties, and the sentence in the original article is obviously referring to flying cars "we predicted we would" quite some time ago. I don't think pointing out that fantastical views of the far future written in the nineties didn't place quite so much emphasis on them really contradicts his point. On the contrary, I'm sur…

Liberal foreign-policy concerns? Why does everyone always forget that the Culture are anarcho-communists?

Probably because the books are mainly concerned with how the Culture meddles with others to amuse themselves.

And I'd say that they're only anarcho-communists in name. Really, they're ant farms, kept by the Minds.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#56

Post by gambler »

stillsut wrote: post #22

Dystopian anticipations have been 180 degrees wrong: 1.Genetic Testing - Anticpated: GATTACA What we got: A bunch of innocent people freed from jail. Who, today, would want to live in a world without genetic forensics? 2. Pacifying Narcotics - Anticipated: Brave New World What we got:War on Drugs, 80's crack epidemic. Huxley foresaw the gov't forcing people to take drugs. The real problem was the gov't trying to stop…

Bad examples. Both of those things were pretty much spot-on. Just don't get hung up on details.

We don't yet have genetic testing as an entry barrier for things, but we have other similarly arbitrary tests. Companies checking your credit ratings and requiring annual health evaluations of their employees. Some companies "encourage" everyone to wear company-provided health monitors 24/7. Claims that you're predisposed towards certain diseases based on various parameters are everywhere.

Brave New World wasn't wrong about drugs. People dope themselves on painkillers, antidepressants and other mood-altering drugs.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#57

Post by forgottenpass »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #24

One problem is what demographics futurists tend to be. White men are less likely to imagine a future with full gender equality and black liberation than black women are, I would imagine. People living in the West will think less about the rise of the rest of the world.

I don't know that I can agree with this assessment. Large-scale social norms change always seem impossible N years before they become so ingrained to seem unshakable.

So "impossible to imagine" strikes me as an uncharitable characterization. I can imagine that vegetarianism becomes a moral norm, and I can imagine how the change could happen, but that's entirely disconnected from my doubt it will happen. I also remember the time in my life when gay rights weren't the foregone conclusion they've been for the last 10 years.

If we look at the distribution of shifting societal attitudes, there is going to be some threshold that turns things from "wishful thinking" to "probably going to happen." Without knowing what the information available at the time, and methodology used was generate the prediction, lying any blame at the feet of white/male/rich strikes me as applying a currently politically fashionable one size fits all explanation.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#58

Post by gress »

ManFromUranus wrote: post #54
drumdance wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non-sequitur. The point is not "they should get their own futurists." It's that one particular perspective is often wrong.

Non it's not a non-sequitur as I am not replying to the article but to another poster. My reply is relevant to theirs. The point of the article is that we get cultural changes wrong or don't account for changes in culture the way we anticipate changes in technology. The comment I am replying to makes racist generalizations about white people and what the white people and western world are able to imagine. I imagine i…

So your response was to write a comment filled with obviously racist invective attacking black people in general.

Quote: "Maybe if they spent more time DOING things and less time complaining about white people there would be more futurists/engineers/painters/doctors etc instead we have BlackLivesMatter doing die-in's in shopping malls or protesting the deaths of career criminals..."

Perhaps the original commenter is accidentally committing a subtle act of prejudice, but you are being overtly racist.

Noting that the original commenter may or may not be black, Your choice to attack black people is independent of your concern about the potential prejudice in the original comment.

At least this makes it clear where you stand; your comment was not about fighting prejudice.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#59

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

ManFromUranus wrote: post #50
caskance wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, you just dismiss their futurism as "anti-white rhetoric, and hypothesizing about fictional oppression" because it's not sufficiently similar to the futurism someone in your position might come up with.

Name some of them then. I haven't read any content by black futurists (that I was aware of).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism ?

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#60

Post by andyidsinga »

"The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items “dumb.”"

wow - tough crowd. I would have been interesting just to be there and experience the reaction.

was worth skimming just to learn about the mercury dime : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_dime

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