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Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

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Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#61

Post by drzaiusapelord »

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…

>So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time.

Are there any serious minds trying predictions? When we talk about futurism, in reality it just ends up being weirdos on the internet (hi /r/futurism which is always 10-15 years away from some tech revolution) or whatever sci-fi authors are doing today. Except sci-fi isn't futurism, its literature. These authors aren't trying to divine the future, they're trying to write sellable dramatic stories. There's a reason Star Wars has action-packed dogfighting and not boring over the horizon missile launches. Or up-close-and-personal lightsaber fights instead of drones attacks from miles away.

Maybe getting the future right isn't that tough. Some investors seem to be able to do it. It just doesn't seem that anyone is seriously trying outside of the limited scope or very near future investing. I imagine there's a poor value proposition here. Maybe you can tell us that in 30 years some hot new tech will be common, but if it costs $50m to get to that conclusion, is it worth it? Especially if you can't monopolize that tech?

I also think its a little foolish for the author to conflate technology and society. You can get a car or an iphone in Saudi Arabia with no problem, but if you're a woman, you can't drive the car, but you can use the iphone. Social advances don't propagate out like technological ones do. Or if you're gay you can run a powerful company and be influencial like Tim Cook or Peter Theil, but Tim Cook's equivalent in Russia would have been discriminated away from any position of power.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#62

Post by stevejones »

RodericDay wrote: post #14
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…

The article is about how people into "futurism", like people over at /r/futurism or a large part of HN's userbase, keeps wishing people would stop "concerning" themselves with society and politics to bring technological future faster, have a big blind spot about what really matters and changes our lives. G.K. Chesterton points out, in reply to the original manifesto: Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying d…

> The article is about how people into "futurism", like people over at /r/futurism or a large part of HN's userbase, keeps wishing people would stop "concerning" themselves with society and politics to bring technological future faster, have a big blind spot about what really matters and changes our lives.

The article, and you, fail to make the case that this is anything more than a strawman.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#63

Post by cgh »

gambler wrote: post #56
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…

Gattaca was specifically about genetic testing. Saying that's analogous to checking credit ratings is moving the goalposts.

The government doesn't force or encourage people to take antidepressants or other "mood-altering drugs", except when they are eg incarcerated. Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#65

Post by TorKlingberg »

astazangasta wrote: post #48
detaro wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re 2) I'd read it as that the makers of Instagram initially didn't believe in people actually using cameras in their phones, so the opposite of your interpretation. How many people did have camera feature-phones/early smartphones and did really use the camera? Granted, I was still in high-school, but tons of my peers had phones with cameras, but they were only used very seldomly and not in any phone-specific way (tak…

The innovation that allowed this was really faster wireless networks with internet. My first cell (2005) was a feature phone, had a camera, I used it, but transferring it over the network was slow and painful, so sharing of any kind was impossible. Once it was, it of course required no great leap of imagination to start moving things to the cloud.

Also phones with WiFi, and everyone having WiFi in their home.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#66

Post by Dylan16807 »

caskance wrote: post #47
stillsut wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protagonist doesn't wish his brother was born with his same gene for heart failure, he wishes companies would stop using genetic tests to filter out candidates. Most of the movie deals with bad guys trying to find trace hair and DNA from imposters. Genetic testing.

He wishes it the way modern antivaxxers wish big pharma would stop giving kids autism.

What? In the movie he wishes for the companies to stop doing something they are actually doing. They are overzealously testing for any possible problem and marking people as unclean.

It's unsubtle textbook discrimination, removing perfectly good candidates from consideration. The company is hardly affected, there are plenty of candidates, but since these people are shunned by most companies they suffer terribly.

How in the world does that related to people with imaginary causes of autism.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#67

Post by cgh »

jkot wrote: post #9

> One futurist noted that a 1960s film of the “office of the future” made on-par technological predictions (fax machines and the like), but had a glaring omission: The office had no women. To be fair, most futurist thought work will be fully automated by now, and there would be NO people needed in the office or factory.

The video game Metro 2033 (recently remastered for modern consoles, so it's still around and relevant) envisions a typical post-apocalyptic future. People live underground, in subway (metro) tunnels under the cities, which are hellish radioactive wastelands.

Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.

However, the game isn't Western, it's Russian. I can't help but wonder if the role of women simply reflects the Russian male game creators' view of the world and an expanded role for the women of the future was simply not on their collective horizon.

Otherwise, great game, especially for $10.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

cgh wrote: post #67
jkot wrote: post #9

> One futurist noted that a 1960s film of the “office of the future” made on-par technological predictions (fax machines and the like), but had a glaring omission: The office had no women. To be fair, most futurist thought work will be fully automated by now, and there would be NO people needed in the office or factory.

The video game Metro 2033 (recently remastered for modern consoles, so it's still around and relevant) envisions a typical post-apocalyptic future. People live underground, in subway (metro) tunnels under the cities, which are hellish radioactive wastelands. Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not refl…

> The video game Metro 2033 (recently remastered for modern consoles, so it's still around and relevant) envisions a typical post-apocalyptic future. People live underground, in subway (metro) tunnels under the cities, which are hellish radioactive wastelands.

> Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.

Reversion to (or, at least, reintroduction of elements of) pre-modern social structures is a pretty common trope of post-apocalyptic fiction; insofar as social structures are adaptive to environmental conditions, its not entirely without a realistic basis.

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#69

Post by psb217 »

Kalium wrote: post #55
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The minds are the Culture and the minds are anarcho-communists (at least as far as I can tell).

Re: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

#70

Post by koberstein »

cstross wrote: post #29
SRasch wrote: post #15

I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict. Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power-structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series In one aspect futurism often looks like an…

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…

What is the difference between predicting and influencing?
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