I've been writing and self-publishing my thoughts since I started a BMX freestyle zine, in September of 1985. I have not written a single "real," physcially published, paper book, in the 37 years since. But, I have self-published the equivalent of 20 to 25 average novels worth of writing, over 1.5 million words total. These pieces have been in zines, a couple of dozen published magazine articles, tens months at a paid newsletter job, over 2,500 blog posts, and two e-books, counting Dystopia. This is the most intense piece of writing I've ever done.
Yesterday something reminded me of Dystopia, and I realized that it has now been three years since I got started writing it. After thinking about how much crazy stuff has happened in the past three years, and how our whole world has changed so much since, I decided to go back and re-visit Dystopia, look at what I wrote, and how that compares to the past three years' events, and where things seem to be headed now. I've been writing about BMX, skateboarding, and action sports for a couple of months straight, not writing at all about the future, economics, or societal trends. The big crash I saw coming is the one we are heading into now, so I stopped writing about the future a couple of months ago. Everyone and their brother is writing and reporting on the economic trands now. It seemed time to quit and go on to something else. Now, realizing the three year anniversary of starting Dystopia, it made sense to come back to this blog, Steve Emig: The White Bear, to look back at my prediction of a great depression-like scenario in the future.
I have been blogging about worrisome future trends, like the the loss of millions of jobs to new technology, for example, for many years.
This post, the second post of this blog, from June 2017, is an example. The ideas in
Dystopia didn't come out of a vacuum. They were a culmination, and an organizing of my thoughts, along with theories, trends, and my observations, from over 30 years.
In the 2000's, and into the 2010's, theories I'd read about earlier, gained validity in my head, as actual events seemed to bear them out. As the internet, smartphones, and a whole slew of other new technologies changed our everyday world, a whole bunch of somewhat related ideas and concepts were bouncing around in my head. These gained steam, and seemed to become more interconnected, as we neared the year 2020. I had written blog posts, and journal entries, about bits and pieces of these ideas, but never sat down to really flesh them out and organize them. For a whole bunch of reasons, a big one being that my 5 1/2 years as a taxi driver led me deeper into homelessness, I didn't have time to really sit down and dig into these ideas. For most of the last 20 years, my life has been day to day struggle to keep going, sometimes with a place to live, very often without. With no stability in my personal life, sitting down for months to write a serious book just wasn't going to happen. So all these ideas about where society and the economy were going, just kept building.
Most of that thinking happened while I was living in North Carolina, and then homeless in Richmond, Virginia, from 2008 to 2019. Since I never could find a single "real" job in NC, I spent a lot of time reading books, and watching videos by smart people, at the libraries. I made it back to Southern California in the spring of 2019, with a friend's help, so I could use my blogging and social media skills, to promote his new online business. That didn't pan out as we planned, and I once again found myself on the streets of Southern California. September 2019 found me selling small Sharpie drawings I drew for food money on Hollywood Boulevard, to tourists and locals. I spent my nights over the hill in the San Fernando Valley, which was a bit less crazy and generally less dangerous.
One morning, in the second or third week of October 2019, I woke up in a parking lot where I slept, with a huge idea, about 4:30 am. The basic idea was to watch the movie trailers of all the main dystopic future movies from the 1960's through the 1990's, and see how close they came to predicting the actual "future" we were living in 2019. Part of the idea was realizing that I was living in the "future," of my childhood and high school self. I remembered reading Popular Science articles predicting flying cars, traveling ot the moon as a tourist, and other things we'd do "in the 21st century." In 2019, it was 30-45 years after watching many of those dystopian future movies as a kid and a teen. Did any of those movies accurately predict the real world in 2019, or parts of it? Or did they miss the mark? By seeing how our best novelists and movie writers and directors predicted the future, in decades past, I could get some idea of whether my thoughts about an economic depression, and a chaotic decade of massive amounts of change, might hit or miss the mark as we entered into the 2020's. Starting from a look at how others had predicted the future in earlier decades, I would start putting my ideas down about where I saw us heading in 2020 and beyond.
At the time, there were three big theories I believed in, two of which no one else paid any attention to. Those theories/concepts were; Alvin and Heidi Toffler's "Third Wave," P.R. Sarkar's "Law of Social Cycle," and Richard Florida's Creative Class concept. Those three theories together, along with other mid and long term trends, all seemed to be converging, all heading towards major inflaction points in the early 2020's. The convergence seemed to be setting up the early 2020's as a time of both serious economic chaos, and major societal change. So the insight I woke up with was one of those ideas that pops into the head of writers, seemingly out of nowhere, and saying, "Get started on this... NOW!" I'd had those ideas before. I acted on some, and ignored others, years ago. I've learned to follow those creative impulses over time. So I did.
I had a hand-me-down laptop, a decent one, though about three years old. So I watched trailers of futuristic movies, starting with 1927's Metropolis, and moving forward, hitting classics like Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Mad Max, and Blade Runner, and continued until I got to The Hunger Games. It was a really interesting exercise. The big take was that our best sci-fi novelists, screenwriters and directors got most of "the future" wrong. But they got parts of it, like telescreens making video phone calls, (Facetime, Zoom calls, Skype calls) right.
With those insights fresh in my memory, I got a cheap notebook, which I could barely afford, and started writing. I'd grab on to one big idea, and just write where it led me. Morning after morning, eating a cheap breakfast at McDonald's, I wrote for an hour or more, getting pieces of all these interconnected ideas on paper. After a couple of weeks, early November 2019, they started to form into a few main themes, more concrete ideas and less nebulous ponderings. I had no idea what to do with these ideas, but just a strong urgency to keep writing and see where it took me.
One particularly interesting thing was that when I watched the Blade Runner trailer, for the original 1982 movie, I noticed a silent slate at the start. "Los Angeles, November 2019." I was just getting into this big writing project idea, I wasn't even really a fan of the Blade Runner movie, though my dad really liked it when it came out. But there I was, writing about the future, sitting in The Valley, a handful of miles from downtown Los Angeles, in the exact month and year that Blade Runner movie was set. I had stumbled on a perfect comparison. How did Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic stack up against real life Los Angeles in November 2019. Not well, actually. Nobody gave a fuck about replicants. There are no replicants, unless you count those $6,000 love dolls. People in real world L.A. in November 2019 were polled by the L.A.Times about their biggest worry. The winner? Homeless people. L.A. people were totally worried about all the homeless people (like me). Ridley Scott did get the telescreen thing right, their conversations in the movie were similar to Facetime and Skype calls, just on walls, not phones.
Heading into December 2019, I had a couple of notebooks worth of rough ideas about where the economy, and society in general, was heading in the next several years, in my opinion. I saw a huge crash looming, leading to a Great Recession level, or greater, economic event, at least 3 to 5 turbulent years long, maybe more. The prevailing wisdom on Wall Street at the time was that a minor recession might happen in 2020. Maybe.
My ideas sat on the back of three theories by otherthinkers and writers, Alvin Toffler's Third Wave concept from 1980, P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle, which no one had heard of (except economist Ravi Batra, who wrote about it in 1989), and the much better known, and largely accepted Creative Class concept by Richard Florida. If I wanted to write a book about my thoughts, explaining why I thought those three theories really helped explain the future that would actually happen, it would take a year toresearch and write, and probably two or three more to try to get everything approved, and actually get a publisher, if I was exceptionally lucky.
What I was writing about was going to happen much sooner than any "real," major publisher book could be published. As I said, there was an urgency to this whole idea from that first morning I woke up with it in my head. I thought, "Well, I'm a blogger, what if I just built a blog, laid it out ahead of time, so the chapters would be in correct order (not backwards, like posts in a blog), and then just filled them in as I wrote it?" My tech skills suck, overall, but that was easy to do on Blogger. On December 21, 2019, I built a blog for "Dystopia," organizing it as a book, so you could read one chapter, then scroll on to the next one, a blog version of an ebook, basically. That's how I published it to the world.
It's always been free to anyone, and has never had any advertising. I haven't made a dime from it, directly or indirectly. This was just something I felt needed to be written. I saw a really chaotic period coming our way, lasting years, and I wanted to alert anyone I could. I wanted to explain what I saw coming, and why I thought it was coming, and explain some of the events I thought would happen in this chaotic period. Nobody agreed with me at the time. Except Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki, who had predicted a major economic downturn happening in 2017, way back in 2002, in Rich Dad's Prophesy. He was about the only other person I knew of with thoughts of a big downturn ahead.
When I build the blog, I thought I had maybe 10 or 11 chapters worth of material. But I know how ideas can expand, or lead off to tangents, so I build a 20 chapter "book" blog, to give myself room to grow if needed. The way I built it, I could easily delete chapters, but not add new ones. I just had the chapter titles, and a random urban photo I had taken in Richmond, Virginia, as a placeholder for each chapter. I wrote and edited Dystopia, chapter by chapter, from December 21st, 2019, to around June 8th, 2020.
As we all know now, a lot happened in those 5 1/2 months, as I was writing it. Our world changed dramatically, probably forever. I wound up using those extra 9 or 10 chapters, filling up the full 20. While I was writing, Covid-19 appeared in China, three months later, it made it to U.S. shores, and the completely inadequate initial response cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. The shutdown crashed the stock market, led to the mass shutdowns, to 25 million people losing their jobs for a while, and everyone figuring out what to do while stuck at home.
Well... almost everyone. I wrote the first one or two chapters while homeless. Then a friend in Orange County was able to let me stay in her spare bedroom for a couple of months, where I wrote 6 or 7 more chapters. Then I went back out to the streets, and finished Dystopia, living as a homeless guy, outside, during the Covid shutdowns. By the time I finished writing Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, we were just figuring out that the pandemic would not "be over in 6 to 8 weeks," and it was going to last "a little while longer." Over 25 million Americans were still out of work, others were mastering Zoom calls, learning how to work from home. Us homeless people were, literally, left outside to die. That sounds harsh, but it's true, and there were definitely some people hoping for a dramatic reduction in the homeless population from Covid. Nearly all of the resources, businesses and public buildings, that we relied on, were closed. But as it turned out, the virus didn't like the outdoors, and a relatively small percentage of homeless people died. Only one I know did, and he had very serious health issues before the pandemic
So that's a long look at how I wrote the most intense collection of ideas I've ever written, as well as some of the most prescient. The Dystopia book/blog thing, as I call it, has had less than 3,000 total page views in three years. That's less than I hoped for as time passed, but far more than I initially expected. In the three years since I started writing Dystopia, over 1.1 million Americans died after contracting Covid-19, we have endured a 100 year pandemic, a textbook economic depression (10% drop in GDP), and a textbook economic recession (2 consecutive quarters of GDP contraction), and we're just beginning what I believe will be the hardest 2-3 years of this decade. But enough has happened to verify that I was onto something, writing this when I did. There was life before 2020, and life after 2020. The jacked up part is that 2021 got crazier than 2020, and then 2022 came in, when we'd thought we'd seen it all, and inflation soared, stocks dropped, The Fed raised interest rates to combat inflation, that caused the insane real estate FOMO market to slow down, tip, and head down. And now bond market liquidity and a looming "real" recession are on most people's minds. Politically, most people thought all this chaos would lead to a huge wave of Republican victories in the mid-term elections, and that Red Wave fizzled, taking far fewer political seats over than expected. Things are just weird everywhere you look.
This is what I tried to warn people about, in blog posts over the last four years, and particularly in Dystopia. We're in a really weird place in history. My thoughts, based on three big theories of others, is still the best explanation I've seen for all this chaos. But now, three years after I started writing Dystopia, my thoughts have some credibility. I still think my Big Picture view can help people weather the rest of this crazy storm we all find ourselves in as a country, and a society.
Thinking about it last night and today, while writing this post, I'm going to re-visit Dystopia, chapter by chapter, and see where I got things right, where I didn't, and give my thoughts on where things may go now, and into the next two or three years.
If you're one of the six or so people who read this whole post, thank you. I know this is tough reading for most people. But hopefully it's worth it. Here's the link if you want to check out any part of Dystopia. Each chapter can be ready seperately, without losing much context.
