What will "the future" look like? Here are Lori Petty and friend, from the intro of Tank Girl, which came out in 1995. The movie is set in 2033, just over ten years from now. I'd say we have about a 50/50 chance of this future, at this point. Here's the trailer for the Tank Girl movie, just in case you somehow missed it. This post is about the 20 chapter look at our future, that I wrote 2 1/2 to 3 years ago, called Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now. I'm going back and reading it, chapter by chapter, to see how it's holding up. Let's do it.
As I wrote in the last post, I woke up one morning in October 2019, with this big idea for a writing project. That project would bring out a whole bunch of nebulous, somewhat connected ideas, that were bouncing around my brain. These ideas were based on three big theories that I had come across, 10 to 30 years earlier, and what I saw playing out in the real world, in the late 2000's and 2010's. That project turned into Dystopia, as I now call it in shorthand.
I started writing this group of ideas on paper, in late October 2019, before Covid-19 sprang up in China. I was writing about a major period of economic chaos, 3 to 5 years long, likely more that I saw coming in our future. By the time I finished writing the 20th chapter, in early June 2020, Covid had hit the U.S., and the rest of the world. The stock markets had crashed, mandatory business closures and lockdowns were in effect, and 25 million people were laid off, working from home, or out of work for an unknown period of time.
So... uh... yeah, I called the chaos part pretty well. To be clear, I DID NOT see the pandemic coming. But I expected some "black swan" event to lead us into economic chaos. Covid became the first black swan. Actually, because of the pandemic, things got way crazier, much faster than I thought they would. When I finished writing Dystopia, in June 2020, we still thought the pandemic would probably be over by late summer 2020. We still had no idea how bad things would get.
As I'm writing this post, just before Thanksgiving 2022, I think we are now headed into the worst couple of years of this decade, 2023-2024. The Fed stepped in and created about $6 trillion to help everyone through the pandemic, particularly the banking system and corporate America. All that money kept the real, underlying economic issues from hitting bottom, and being dealt with. Ultimately, that money caused our current inflation. So now we're headed into the "real" recession, and it's going to get ugly. Er. Uglier.
Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now (Book 1) is completely new ideas to most people, though the theories have been around quite a while, and it's a hard read for most. But I still think I got the underlying Big Picture of why the 2020's will continue to be so crazy, pretty well explained. If you read any of these chapters, let me know what you think on Facebook (Steve Emig- North Hollywood) or Twitter (@steveemig43). Here are links to the individual chapters:
Intro to the idea that several long term trends are converging, which will lead to a long, crazy, economic downturn, and much chaos, in the 2020's. Also, because pretty much all of us were raised in "civilization" as opposed to some indigenous culture, we really don't understand the environment, and everyday destruction of the natural world is simply normal to us. But ultimately, it's unsustainable in the long term. In this way, we are "mutants" on Earth.
In the short chapter 2, I tell how I woke up with the idea to go back and watch a bunch of dystopian moive trailers from my childhood and teenage years. I also discovered that I was writing this project in the exact setting and time, Los Angeles, November 2019, that the 1982 movie Blade Runner was set in. I realized I was living in my high school self's future. So I had a real world comparison, of the Blade Runner vision of Los Angeles in 2019, and the real thing, that I was living in.
In the 1970's, it seemed like we would all have flying cars, like the ones used in Blade Runner, in the 21st century. OK, technically, flying cars do exist, there have been many variations, going back 80 years. But the cool movie type hover cars are not available. The Moller Air Car, which never made it past a hovering prototype, is the closest real world version to that idea. In addition, I link the 35 movie trailers I looked at, to gauge what 20 century writers thought "the future" would be like. They were mostly wrong.
Of all the great minds who wrote about "the future" in the 20 th century, it was an early 1960's cartoon that got more things right about the future, than all the novels and movies. And yes, George Orwell was right in 1984 about the Big Brother state with surveillance everywhere. But there was something, just as powerful, that Orwell didn't see coming.
This chapter takes a look at the husband and wife futurist team of Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Alvin wrote the books, though he mentions often in interviews that he and Heidi worked together thinking concepts through. I write about his first major book, Future Shock, published in 1970, and The Third Wave, published in 1980. Even three years after is 2016 death, much of what they forecast came true, and some is still playing out in today's world.
Why do people watch weather reports? We watch weather forecasts to get an idea of what is coming our way in a few hours, or maybe a few days. By watching a weather report, we get an idea of whether we need ot take different action. If we see rain in the forecast, we can take an umbrella or a raincoat when we go out, and maybe put boots on. If it's going to snow in a couple of days, we know we need to get up early to shovel some snow, and warm up the car before going to work. Reading books or watching videos by futurists is the same idea, their forecasts give you a look at what's coming. Then you can make better decisions, taking their information into account, if it makes sense to you.
In high school, I got into the brand new little sport of BMX freestyle. Doing tricks on "little kid's bikes," that's how most people saw freestyle in 1984-85. It was dumb, it wouldn't go anywhere. That's what I was told. Instead, I was drawn into what I later realized were "creative scenes," small groups of creatively driven people trying something new. I spent my late teen years and 20's in a series of creative scenes. This post explains the idea, and shows a 1986 video of several of us riding in San Francisco, and what some of that group went on to do in the years since.
In the BMX freestyle world I first noticed scenes of riders here and there. This led to my interest in Creative Scenes, and how ideas and movements spread through society. In addition to that, my high school economics class, the SoCal real estate market of the late 1980's, and a book predicting a great depression, all fueled my interest in economics, social dynamics, how trends interplay with each other, and trying to figure out "The Future."
Our real world in Los Angeles in November of 2019 was much different than this setting that director Ridley Scott predicted back in 1982 in the movie Bladerunner. We don't have flying cars, the streamlined design buildings, or high caliber androids called replicants. We do have 30,000 homeless people, 10 million people (not 120 million), the internet, smartphones, and the Kardashians. Of all the TV shows and movies about the future in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, and early 1980's, The Jetsons cartoons from 1962-63 actually did a better job predicting the technology we have now. I explain that there are three big theories that I think really help explain the world of the 2020's, and lead into the next chapter.
In this chapter I introduce the first of the three big theories that I think help explain where we are in the course of history, and why the world seems so chaotic. I go back to the late futurist Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi, who brainstormed as a team. Alvin wrote the books explaining their ideas, and published The Third Wave, in 1980. I explain the first two waves of civilization they saw, and the long periods of time it took for each wave of change to sweep over human society, when they happened. The Third Wave is the transition from the Industrial Age to a new, Information Age. Not only is this transition still happening, but it's happening far faster than the earlier waves of change happened. I believe that understanding that this idea is still at work in our society helps people understand our chaotic current chaotic. It really helps set the stage for why the 2020's, in particular, will see more change than any previous decade.
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