Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- My look forward into the Tumultuous 2020's

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:

Dystopia: Chapter 1- "We are the mutants"

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.

Dystopia: Chapter 2- "The Future the Media Shows You is not the Future You Get"

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.    

Dystopia: Chapter 3- "Where the Hell is My Flying Car?"

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.  

Dystopia: Chapter 4- "Did the Futuristic Movies and TV Shows of My Generation X Childhood Get Anything Right?"

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.  

Dystopia: Chapter 5- "Was There Anyone in the 20th Century Who Did Get "The Future" Right?"

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.  

Dystopia: Chapter 6- "Why Care About the Future?"

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.  

Dystopia: Chapter 7- "The Power of Creative Scenes- (What I Did Instead of College)"

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.  

Dystopia: Chapter 8- "How I Became an Amateur Futurist"

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."  

Dystopia: Chapter 9- "The 'Bladerunner' future, and the future we actually got"

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.  

Dystopia: Chapter 10- "The Tofflers' Third Wave"

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.  

The Third Anniversary of starting my book/blog thing: "Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now"

The home page of my 20 chapter "book/blog thing," as I call it, "Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1"  The idea for this came in October of 2019, I began writing out ideas and doing research right after that.  I published "Dystopia," chapter by chapter, from late December, 2019 until early June 2020.  

"The word 'recession" is basically meaningless in today's ultra manipulated economic world.  I'm calling this decade 'The Phoenix Depression.'  Whatever the numbers and the economists' statistics end up being, this decade will feel like a full blown great depression to most people."

-Me (Steve Emig) Chapter 1 of "Dystopia"

 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.  

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now

 

My 20 chapter book/blog thing- "Welcome to Dystopia" is still out there... waiting

Metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a Monarch butterfly.  In my opinion, this is the kind of transformation all of society is in right now.  

Just a reminder to the more geeky readers that, from October 2019 to April 2020, I wrote a 20 chapter book/blog thing online called Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1.  At the time, late 2019, I believed we were going into a great depression, a 5 to 7 year economic downturn, along with major social transformations predicted by a couple of ultra-long term theories I believe are pretty solid.  The Repo Market crisis was a month old when I started writing this.  Covid-19 hadn't even popped up in China, it was not on anyone's radar here in the U.S..  The stock markets were hitting all time highs, and the conventional wisdom was that there might be a minor recession in late 2020.

I disagreed, I saw us heading into "The Tumultuous 2020's," a time of unparalleled economic, technological, cultural, and social change.  Here's a quote from chapter 20, written in April 2020, about six weeks into the Covid era:

"Change.  Our current Dystopia is massive change.  We are in a period of societal change unlike anything in our known history.  Several aspects of human society are changing, all at once.  And that's hard.  As adaptable as we'd like to think we are, we humans don't like change.  But change is here, it's big, and it will keep happening for some time to come, like it or not.  The downside of this is that what we call "normal" is collapsing around us.  The upside is that we, as humans on Earth, get to build something new."  

"Dystopia," as I refer to this 20 chapter beast of a book/blog thing, goes deep into ideas few have even heard of.  I got things wrong as I looked forward from what is now the "pre-Covid Era."  I dramatically underestimated how much money the Federal Reserve would create to prop up the banking system, major businesses, and Wall Street in particular.  So the economic part is playing out different than I expected.  But I got the change part right.  

"Dystopia" can be read by single chapters, it's more a bunch of essays than a non-fiction book with a well-defined through line.  Or, if you're a glutton for pretty big ideas, you can try to read it all, straight through.  I just wanted to remind people that's it's out there, just chillin' on the interwebs, waiting for adventrous brains to come check it out.  It was written at the end of the "old times" and the very beginning of the "Covid era."  And it was written by me, a man who was homeless for four of the six months I was writing it.  If you want to check it out, click the link above.