Henry Jenkins laments The Tomorrow That Never Was and as I read it it occurred to me that the spectacular future we envisioned forty or fifty years ago never really came to pass, and we now foresee a much more dismal existence.
As a kid in the sixties I used to read the issues of Popular Mechanics that my dad brought home. By the year 2000 (so very far away) we were going to be commuting to work in personal helicopters and flying cars. I was really looking forward to my personal hovercraft as well. Then the technology seemed to center around improvements in the way we would travel. Almost 50 years later we are still driving the same road-based cars, only there are a lot more of them generating voluminous pollution and congesting highways to the breaking point. And we continue to build more roads to encourage it.
Technology on the other hand has surged forward, vastly decreasing the size of the components, and increasing our ability to communicate and share information beyond anything anyone had imagined. Or course we don’t communicate any better than we did before, and now we fight over who owns the internet and anything else we create.
When I was a teenager I started reading Ayn Rand, who painted the picture of great people creating great things to move the world forward. Her books suggested that these people could save the world from a bleak mediocrity through sheer will. Yet today we seem to be slipping toward that bleakness. I look at what is going on around the world today, and I begin to imagine a bleak future, one that is not improving life for inhabitants of the world, but getting worse.
I wonder what kind of world we are leaving for our children. We are mortgaging their future financially, in the way we mistreat the environment, and in our attitudes toward each other. What ever happened to that really cool future I could dream of when I was young? I wonder if my kids have any dreams like that. I just hope that they aren’t nightmares.