#6 "The Future" -- Don

“We are living in the future; I'll tell you how I know.  I read it in the paper fifteen years ago.” – John Prine

“And all this science I don't understand; it's just my job five days a week, a rocket man.” – Elton John

When I was a kid, one of my favorite cartoons was The Jetsons.  The Jetsons, which debuted in the fall of 1962, came as a response to Hanna-Barbera’s previous success with The Flintstones, which hit primetime TV two years earlier. While The Flintstones was basically a version of Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners set in a mythic prehistoric past when humans and dinosaurs lived together at the same time (not only did humans never coexist with dinosaurs, people never kept wild boars under their sinks to use as garbage disposals neither – but I digress), The Jetsons was basically a futuristic reworking of the comic strip Blondie.  Like Dagwood, George Jetson was a family man who worked for a short, tyrannical, temperamental boss who fired him regularly but never seemed to put him out of work for very long.   What made The Jetsons fun to watch was the technology the writers and animators imagined a typical American middle-class family would have a hundred years into the future (the series was ostensibly set in the year 2062).

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want people to think that my life has been a huge disappointment, but as I look ahead at the approaching decade when I spend the next ten years in my 50’s, I just want to say, “Dang, where’s my rocketcar?”  If there’s a general melancholy of people from my generation, it’s probably because we all grew up with the expectation that long before now we’d all have our own personal spaceships to zoom around in. 

It doesn’t matter how infeasible this idea is – even if Ford or Toyota were able to crank out little flying cars that we could all afford without selling a kidney, we’d still all end up crashing into each other at lethal speeds; egad, people can’t even figure out how to navigate the new roundabout in Athens and it comes with signs painted on the ground.  Nonetheless, I think most people my age had the genuine expectation when we were kids that by the time we reached adulthood, we’d all have The Jetson’s spacecar hovering in our driveways (or, at the very least, a James Bond style backpack in our closet that we could strap on and whoosh off to work).

Perhaps it’s my generation’s disappointment over the flying car that has tarnished how we feel about the “gee-whiz” technology that really has come along during our lifetimes.  Back in the 70’s when I was in junior high, none of us would have imagined that someday we’d all be carrying around phones the size of candy bars that we could use not just to call anyone from anywhere but that we could also use as portable jukeboxes, video cameras, calculators, newspapers, encyclopedias, cookbooks, mail-order catalogs, flea markets, game arcades, and global positioning units (and I’ll stop there, currently more than a quarter of a million iPhone apps are now available from Apple’s iTunes store).  And yet, even with this amazing cornucopia of technology at our fingertips, people my age are still not overly excited by it because, when you get right down to it, we’re not going to be satisfied until we get the flying cars we were promised when we were seven.

And now, youngsters, lean in closer because I’m going to tell you a secret.  My generation’s dissatisfaction with technology goes well beyond our disappointment over the whole flying car business due to something dreadful that happened to us back in the 1980s.  As young adults, everyone who is close to my age learned to mistrust the bright promise of new electronics when in mass, (almost simultaneously) every single one of us was made to feel like an idiot because we could not get our VCRs to stop blinking 12:00.  I have no hard data to back up this theory, but I imagine vast fortunes were created for the lucky individuals who invested in all the duct tape the rest of us used to cover up that relentless, blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00.

And now it can be told; the younger generation can know my generation’s deepest, darkest secret: duct tape doesn’t just fix everything, it also hides our shame.  For those of you who grew up in the 90’s and who wondered why every VCR you ever came across at the Goodwill store had a little patch of grey tape over where the clock should be, now you know: that endless blinking 12:00 wasn’t just a green LCD version of Chinese water torture, it was an entire generation’s refusal to admit that we actually needed that manual we threw away when we first opened the box.

Don’t be surprised, Dear Readers, if I’m not here next week; it’s only a matter of time before the AARP sends out one of their Death Squads to deal with me for finally revealing the whole blinking VCR secret to the younger generation.  I only hope when their thugs do arrive that I have the stamina to outrun their Hoverrounds®. 

Notice, by the way, how insidious the manufacturers of these scooters were in naming their motorized chairs “The Hoverround.”  They don’t hover.  They roll around on wheels.  Do you see what I mean?  Some dreams just won’t die even if we do.

When I’ve finally shaken off this mortal coil and drawn my last breath, if by some miracle I find myself on the right side of The Pearly Gates, I hope no one is offended when I tell them that I don’t want a pair of angel wings.  I want a Jetsonmobile!  Zoom! Zoom! Amen!

Olivia says:

I'm not going to lie, Dad.  I wish you had a flying car too. 

And also, I feel your loss, but perhaps on a smaller scale.

Ellie use to watch the Disney channel a lot when we were younger.  I would join her mostly for the movies.  Ellie loved a movie called Zenon: Girl of the 21st century.  There was a sequel too, I think.  (Wiki-research informs me that there was a third one too.  Ellie, did you know about this??)

Anyway, Zenon always gets into these space hijinks. And we all know space-hijinks are the best.  She wore cool space clothes, and her bedroom on the space station was extra cool because it was built not only for convenience but for practicality so everything had a cool compartment.  This is pretty much all I remember about this film. 

But the reason why I feel robbed is that I can no longer just enjoy technology aesthetically.  I can't look at ridiculous space shoes and think, "That's just cool."

Not that there was any effort to include realism, but Zenon's world was set in 2050.  And having seen 2010, I have different expectations.

Even watching Minority Report, which is among my favorite films, I notice techology flaws and suddenly I'm less impressed.  At least a little bit.

Sigh.

By the way, you crack me up, as always. 

#6 The Future - Olivia

Look, I'm no fortune teller.  

Let's make that clear before we go on.  In the event that what I say comes across as a prediction within the length of this post, I want you to remember the first sentence.  I'm no fortune teller.  I'm also definitely not Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking.

Besides, trying to describe the deep future is like watching pro-wrestling.  Deeply entertaining, but you must remind yourself it's all talk.  It can be heartbreaking to watch those who still believe.  

We live in 2010.  

We're barely ankle-deep in this century, if you think about it.  I don't believe anyone thought it would be this way when we were this far in the last century.

Even the 30's, 40's, and 50' were pretty sure we'd have some kind of contact with aliens by now, at least in more of a Roswell, New Mexico kind of way than a state of Arizona way.

Antiquated 1950's pop culture totally had no idea that kids would still be wearing rolled-up skinny leg jeans.  And I'm sure there are those who are slightly disappointed that their life isn't a little more space suits and a little less track suits. 

Or those who are even further bummed that things don't fly, teleport, or in general, include more lasers.  My dad may even be numbered among them.  

We still like to play Nostradamus though.  

But instead of trying to predict what the next day will hold, perhaps we should spend more time on how today will look when it's being examined as the lens of yesterday.  How that snapshot will develop is the closest thing we have to genuine prediction.  

My communications professors, the ones that always try to keep us young spunky things on the constant cusp of a the new era in media, like to remind us that the first cars looked a lot like the buggies that require horses.  They say this to suggest that the next big thing may look very much like what we have, but with a slightly different spin.  We go off of what we already have.  

Or, if you are going to paint the future, go crazy.  

Even in late 2008, Flight of the Conchords would sing, "The distant future, the year 2000 ..." before ripping into a killer binary solo.  

And the late great Conan O'brien show use to have a sketch where they would delve into the "future," always beginning with, "In the year 2000 ... " Classic. 

Dream big.  That or, like they say in Back to the Future, make like a tree and get out of here.  

What've you got to lose?

You can't say anyone predicted the likes of Lady Gaga.  

Or the popularity of string cheese.  

I just hope they still have dance parties in the future. 

Don Replies:

I really like the phrase "ankle-deep in this century."  It's both visually descriptive and metaphorically accurate;  a lot of times I feel like we're going through this new century as though we stepping in something sticky and unpleasant.  Perhaps that's why in writing about the future, the both of us took a bit of a nostalgic approach to it.  Writing at the dog's tail of of this decade (okay, that's not "ankle-deep" but I'm trying), I wonder if people 50 or 100 years ago were more optimistic about their future or if that's just they way we imagined them.  Either way, optimism about what's coming down the road seems old-fashioned and a bit corny like an old 78 rpm record scratching its tune through the giant horn of a Victrola. 

I think there was a time in the past when a lot of people felt that innovations in science and technology would eventually lead us to a better life.  And perhaps it has.  Aggro-science is producing more food than ever. People are living longer now, and you do not hear a lot about kids getting crippled by polio or babies dying from the measles.  On the other hand, most of us have seen at least one of the Terminator movies, and I don't think as a whole, society has the confidence it once had in the basic benevolence of scientists.  We've seen too much of corporate greed and what can happen when callous executives order the dumping of chemical waste. Furthermore, it would be hard to name a new technology of the last 50 years that wasn't appropriated by the military to help them kill people who get in their way.

So now instead of movies depicting funny and eccentric scientists who create flubber or who comically shrink their children to the size of pocket change (only to restore them with no harm done just before the credits start to roll), we get insane movie scientists who release superbugs that kill off 99% of the population and turn us into brain chewing zombies.  Or even worse, we get crazy surgeons who sew their kidnap victims into giant human bugs.  Even real life scientists sound scary crazy when they start talking about micro-circuitry the size of blood cells that uses artificial intelligence to adapt itself for its own autonomous purposes.  I can't predict what the next 50 years will bring, but without my rocketcar standing by to make a hasty getaway, I'm not sure I'd want to be around for all of it anyway.