The Future is Just Around the Corner

In the future, we won't need windshields, apparently

We have two bright, curious teenagers in the house, so I thought I’d try to find a good magazine for them to read. Some kind of science magazine, something with a hopeful outlook, to show them the wonderful possibilities that lie ahead for them. I decided to subscribe to Popular Science, since it focuses on upcoming technology. Turns out most of the stuff Popular Science covers is very fringe, and unlikely to ever become reality. I mean, fifty years ago they were predicting “cars without wheels.” Seen any of those flying by lately? We are, after all, in the future.

We are living in the future
I’ll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago
We’re all driving rocket ships
And talking with our minds
And wearing turquoise jewelry
And standing in soup lines
We are standing in soup lines
-John Prine

I think the mistake I made was in taking Popular Science at face value. It’s really not about the future at all. It’s about satisfying a certain geeky male fantasy about saving the world through technology. Is this really the message I want to convey to my kids? That no matter what the problem is, science can solve it for us? That’s right, folks, no need to change your lifestyle or make sacrifices: science will take care of it.

Population out of control? No problem, we’ll build hydroponic skyscrapers! (That’s on the current cover, by the way.) Gasoline running out? We’ll engineer some bacteria that’ll turn sludge into fuel. The city of the future is coming, folks! Step right up! More and more, PopSci is talking green, but their solutions all have to do with more, and better, so that we can continue to live the high tech lifestyle without interruption.

Excuse me, guys, but wasn’t it technology that gave us greenhouse gases and global warming and nuclear waste and toxic waste and shopping malls and four cars in every driveway and…oh, never mind.

This magazine isn’t really interested in predicting the future after all. It’s just about the love of gadgets. It celebrates the New, with an unwavering belief that new is always better, and that all problems can and should be solved through inventions. Science leads the way, and things are always getting better. Don’t believe me? Just look at the cool new stuff every month. Scientific progress! Even interpersonal problems have a technological solution. Can’t get it up? Just check out the ads in the back for the male enhancement wonders of science. Having a little PTSD from seeing your buddies blown up in Iraq? No problem: science has found a way to make it all go away. (No, I’m not making this up.)

Definitely not the sort of thing I had in mind for my kids when I subscribed. It’s just a Wired magazine for the pocket protector crowd. Oh well. Excuse me while I hop in my personal, hydrogen-powered helicopter and fly on down to the spaceport. I’m telling ya: the future is just around the corner! It’s gonna be great!

Questioning Authority

It’s fair to say that my interest in what constitutes normalcy owes alot to when I was born. Last month, I turned 50, which means I was born in 1958, towards the tail end of the Baby Boom. I attended high school in the mid-1970’s, in the shadow of Woodstock. At age 13 I read The Greening of America by Charles Reich, sitting in the back seat of my parent’s car on our way down to the Jersey shore. This book had an enormous effect on me, at that impressionable age. It’s a very naive book, written by an academic, and attempts to explain, in dry sociologial language, the so-called counter-culture movement of the late Sixties. To me, it was a guide book, initiating me into the mysteries of the party I had just missed by a few years. I can’t say it changed my life, but at the time it was earth-shattering.

Suddenly, my middle-class family, squashed into the Plymouth Valiant crawling down the Parkway towards the beach, seemed very different from me. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I felt very different from them. This marked the beginning of my journey away from Normal. By age 14 I was smoking pot for the first time, and by 15 I was smoking it every day, cutting classes with my comrades. The fact that I maintained my place on the Honor Roll merely added to a growing sense of alienation. I could fit in, do the expected things, while teachers and parents had no idea that I saw through it all. They didn’t know how things “really” were. Only we did: the cool ones. The ones who got high, and knew what was really going on. Straight people didn’t have a clue.

Professor Reich was wrong, though. The Revolution never came. The hippies got bored, bought SUVs and got jobs as stock brokers (there’s a great song by the Bobs about that) in three-piece suits, snorting coke instead of smoking hash. They sold out, as we used to say. No one questions authority anymore. No one normal, that is.