Growing up in the 1970s I expected that by the year 2000 I'd be taking my holidays on the moon, driving to work in an atomic car, and having my shirts ironed by robots. These expectations were not fueled purely by science fiction, but by a deeper cultural belief that the world around us was about to be fundamentally transformed by science and technology in ways that would radically alter our experiences of work, health and leisure.
If these expectations sound naive, I can only answer that in the 1970s they were widely held and grounded not just in our awareness of emerging technologies, but also our understanding of how the world had aready changed rapidly across the 20th century, and how our childhood was very different to that of our grandparents.
But despite 30 odd years of progress and development, the world I envisaged as a child seems even further away than it did at the time. Yes, we have the internet, some amazing architecture, wonderous medical interventions, and countless other innovations. And I'm sure there will be much more to come. But my view is that all of this does not add up to the radical step-change that I expected to live through. Back in 1970 the American Futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that we'd all be living in a state of 'future shock' caused by too much change in too short a period of time, but I feel exactly the reverse of that; that the world has not changed nearly as much as I want it to and that the clock is ticking away. Even more troubling than the slackening pace of change, is the sense of a cultural shift away from futurism and towards a conservative fear of the new, that seems rife among politicians, media pundits, environmentalists and even many scientists.
The aim of this blog is to describe the future we were expecting, assess the extent to which it has arrived, and explore the social, economic, political and cultural factors that have stood in its way. Examples of lost futures will be welcome as will explanations of why we have been denied them. This may sound like a gloomy project, but the purpose is not so much to wallow in disappointment, but to re-spark the futurist imagination and contribute to a renewed appetite for change.
Toffler strikes me as an excellent person to start this blog. He epitomises that strain of American writers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, borne out of the post war technology boom years, who envisaged a radically different society based around a different form of productive activity. But I’m not sure what they predicted is anything like what you had in mind when you were a kid. They didn’t predict a world of super-sonic flight for all people or three-hour working weeks. Okay, so the sort of anomie from ‘too much change’ that Toffler predicted has not come about but, in some ways, the post-industrial future that Toffler and Daniel Bell described is with us.
ReplyDeleteTheir core prediction of a shift from the production of goods to the production of knowledge has happened and Toffler’s term ‘information overload’ is surely an underestimate of what the internet has given us. Some of these writers were criticised for being technological determinists and I think there’s something in this. The fact that we have these astonishing capabilities of knowledge production and knowledge sharing says little about how we choose to use it. And it’s how we choose to use it that’s the problem.
So how do we choose to interpret the advancement towards a knowledge society? My abiding memory of being tutored on Toffler and Bell while doing my A level in sociology was that they were ‘right-wing sociologists’. That’s also the impression I got from reading the sociology textbook of the time, Haralambos. In a nut shell,
they were ‘right-wing’ because they were positive about some aspects of future society. The predictions of increased freedom in the work-place, more leisure time and greater equality were variously dismissed by academics. In other words, I was socialised by a generation of sociologists into thinking that each advance in society was, in fact, a step backwards.
My suspicion is that this is the leitmotif of thinking about the future. By default, the future is seen as having nothing better to offer than the present and quite possibly much worse. It serves as a lazy way of attacking the capitalist mode of production but this negative way of thinking also harms our ability to exploit the potential those incredible advances offer us.
The most obvious example of this is in respect of climatic change. Our knowledge about change in the environment offers us the ability to combine this knowledge with technology – things like nuclear energy or carbon capture – to continue human advancement. The dominant response, however, is that further capitalist advancement must be bad (it always is, they say) and so we must put the brakes on further development or maybe even return to some kind of pre-industrial age.
I share your scepticism about crude technological determinism. The pace and direction of scientific and technological advance is at least partly shaped by cultural, economic and political factors, for example, it seems clear that the rise and fall of the US space programme was as much a product of cold war rivalry, economic capacity and political will, as it was of rocket science.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that our collective orientation towards the Future is highly politicised. It seems to me that this dates back to what Eric Hobsbawm describes as the two Great Revolutions of the 18th century, the industrial revolution in England and the political revolution in France. It was these two events that created our belief that the future could be radically different to the past, both because of our capacity to transform nature, but also to transform society. Importantly, through most of the 19th century it was the (progressive) Left that supported change and the (conservative) Right that opposed it. By the late 19th century the Left had largely joined the Right in a Romantic hostility to the Enlightenment project of using reason and rationality to transform the natural and social world. Throughout the 20th century the pattern of political support and hostility towards the Future, becomes more fragmented. The Italian Futurists were the most enthusiastic advocates for the exhilirating speed of modern machinery, including the motor-car, the aeroplane and the train, but were politically on the fascist right. Other Futurists were on the Communist Left. The 50s, 60s and early 70s seem to be characterised by a degree of political consensus around modernisation and the 'white heat of technology' and it is still possible to pick up resonances of this in the rhetoric of political parties across the political spectrum, but this rhetoric is increasingly equivocal and tentative and I would argue that it is now very difficult to find substantial political commitment to developing the kind of future we expected in the 1970s, and very common to find opposition to it. the question is, why have the left and the right lost their enthusiasm for rapid change