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Friday, June 08, 2012

Accelerationalization

Falling asleep in 1912 and waking up in 1962 would be such a flabbergasting leap into future shock you would probably think you were still dreaming. Falling asleep in 1962 and waking up in 2012 would be such a shattering disappointment you would probably crawl back to bed to return to your dreaming.

More Futurological Brickbats here.

12 comments:

Dale Carrico said...

No doubt a Black President would be shocking and enormously encouraging, at any rate for nap-time time-travelers who were not evil, but unless our futurologists think our first Black President is also our first Robot President, somehow coughed up by the magick of Moore's Law, I certainly don't think he provides them any grounds for their accelerationalist mantra.

jimf said...

> Falling asleep in 1962 and waking up in 2012 would be such a
> shattering disappointment. . .

Well, you'd probably wonder why the hell everybody was walking
around staring at little flat boxes and not paying attention to
where they're going, or talking loudly to themselves.

The huge flat-screen TVs would be way cool (with color as good as
a movie theater!).

ATMs would be cool.

Cars would look hideous, but you'd find out that they last an
incredibly long time (and start instantly, without having to
pump the gas pedal).

The Internet (and Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, etc.) would be
**way, way** cool.

But yes, based on 50s SF paperbacks (or the GM Futurama II exhibit
at the '64-'65 New York World's Fair) -- let alone _Star Trek_
(warp drive by 2018!) -- 2012 would be a bit of a disappointment.

No cure for cancer. Or Alzheimer's. No robots. No space
colonies. No disposable clothes, or paperless offices.

And people would be freaked out by the results of half a century
of inflation (just the numbers on both price tags **and** pay
checks would scare the pants off my parents).

Dale Carrico said...

you'd probably wonder why the hell everybody was walking
around staring at little flat boxes and not paying attention to
where they're going, or talking loudly to themselves


Nah, you'd think they were stoopid crazy and you'd be exactly right.

jimf said...

> No doubt a Black President would be shocking and enormously encouraging. . .

Come to think, a **lot** of people in 1962 would've been surprised to
discover that the world hadn't blown itself to smithereens by 2012.

Barkeron said...

And many would think the absence of the Soviet Union is a Soviet complot.

jollyspaniard said...

I think both rip van winkles would be equally impressed, suprised and horrified but the cultural changes would probably take longer to adjust to than the technological.

Dale Carrico said...

A scientifically literate liberally minded person from 1962 would have no problem navigating 2012 -- but even a scientifically literate liberally minded person of 1912 would be completely flummoxed by 1962 in my opinion. That North Atlantic transhumanoids have chosen this epoch of flat-lining prosperity and technodevelopmental exhaustion as an era of "accelerating change" is a tale of fraudsters falling for their own hype. Digitization was a shiny object masking massive wealth and authority transfer to the 1% after an era of technological accomplishments and progressive democratization and wealth spreading. At the end of the road the great emancipatory internet may just amount to the lamest imaginable broadcast television but with more spying and more advertorial harassment in the midst of neo-feudalism in a toxic greenhouse swamp. That doesn't have to happen, but futurologists are no allies in the struggle to resist that outcome, and if it does the futurologists will be revealed as useful idiots cheerleading the whole way to hell.

Summerspeaker said...

I remain profoundly baffled by this position, Dale. Your argument only becomes remotely tenable by dismissing digital technology. I was born in the eighties and the twenty-first century approaches a science fiction story for me. Rather dystopian science fiction, but SF nonetheless. I'll summarize in two words: drone and iPhones. I'm confident we're not going get to same library - much less the same page - here, so I'll conclude by noting that revolutionaries from either 1912 or 1962 would find 2012 overwhelming disappointing. However, anarchists from the earliest date might find these times more encouraging than the sixties. There's a pleasant absence of authoritarian communism in today political imagination.

Dale Carrico said...

The presence of authoritarian capitalism provides more than compensating unpleasantness. Anarchists always find their times more encouraging than they have any reason to -- they're pretty relentlessly stupid that way, if you will forgive me.

I find it quite as baffling in turn that anybody who would claim to know anything about the sort of technodevelopmental churn experienced in the lifetime of a person living in the first half of the twentieth century would try to pretend that the technodevelopmental stall coupled with hysterical marketing hype of the second half would buy into the futurological pretense of "accelerating change" in the age of neoliberal fraud.

I daresay you bought a lot of digital kool aid as a child of the eighties getting online in the irrational exuberance of the nineties. It remains to be seen if the "digital revolution" won't just end up as broadcast tee vee with more targeted ads and ubiquitous camera surveillance.

I guess I can agree that it feels a little like we might be living in an especially crappy sf novel but I know plenty of non-sf that says it like it is even better.

Dale Carrico said...

By the way, politics and therefore history are always surprising -- this is actually another serious strike against futurology.

Summerspeaker said...

If you consider digital technology insignificant compared with the atom bomb and the automobile, no wonder you consider transhumanism a Robot Cult. Reading your perspective on the last century helps me better grasp you your position, as relentlessly bizarre as I still find it. I can concur that health outcomes improved far more in the first half of the twentieth than in the second, though I ascribe the improvement to politics/economics before technoscience. Beyond that, we might as well be speaking difference languages.

jimf said...

> If you consider digital technology insignificant compared
> with the atom bomb and the automobile. . . we might as well be
> speaking differen[t] languages.

Maybe you should check out:

_Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change_
by Bob Seidensticker
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Hype-Myths-Technology-Change/dp/1576753700