Envisioning The Future

Apparently we have not made a lot of progress….

The late 19th Century was one very much like our own in many ways.

It was an era which saw an explosion of new technologies that were rapidly changing the world.

Steam engines, locomotives, trains, electricity, steel production.  

It was the naisance of the Industrial Age and it was enormously disruptive.

I am in the midst of two books, both by David McCullough:  The Path Between The Seas, which is the story of the building of the Panama Canal (ca. 1903), and The Great Bridge, which is the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, (ca 1889).

Both events were emblematic of a society in transition, grappling for the first time with the enormous power and promise of the industrial age. 

Nothing seemed impossible.  

Indeed, there had never been anything like The Brooklyn Bridge (or the Panama Canal) for that matter, ever built before. It was also an era that saw the first skyscrapers, latterly the first cars, the first trains, the first electric lights, the telephone, the telegraph… the list goes on and on.

In many ways, this explosion of technology was somewhat similar to what we see in our own time – the massive technological transformation of a society, but this time driven by digital processing, microprocessors and the web.   Like our own time, there were massive booms and busts, bubbles and stock explosions and collapses. The more things change…

One difference however, struck me quite soundly, and that, curiously, is in the world not of technology or economics, but rather in the realm of fiction.

One thing that stood out in the ‘great industrialization’ was the way the notion of what the future could be captured the nation, and indeed much of the world.

Endless reams of literature, whether books, newspapers or magazines (such as they were), extolled visions of a grand ‘electric’ or steel-age future, with images of bridges, railroads, buildings and so on.  The launch of the Brooklyn Bridge in NY, for example, included murals of what NY looked like in 1789, 1889 – with the completion of the bridge, and a vision of 1989, in which a dozen or more such bridges spanned the East River.  Well, the didn’t get it right, but at least they tried.

Foremost in the era, and to a great extent the driver of a great deal of vision for the future, was the work of the writer Jules Verne.

Born in 1828, Verne’s vision of the future cast in books like 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea,  Around the World in 80 Days or From Earth to the Moon were enormously popular and captured the popular imagination both in Europe and the US.

Verne looked at where the new technologies were headed and painted an image of a fantastic world in which, (unbelievably at that time), one could actually go around the entire world in 80 days.  Before Verne was dead, that very feat had been achieved.

Where, I wonder, is the vision of where our own new technologies might be taking us.

Hollywood, I think, far from embracing the potential of a digital age and of what a truly connected world might be, prefers to pretend that for the most part it does not exist.  

How many times in a movie plot do you see a character get on Google to solve a problem?  Never? I can’t think of one instance. Had Tom Hanks only gotten on line and Googled a few facts at the beginning of The DaVinci Code, the whole mystery and movie might mercifully have been concluded in about 15 minutes.  

Likewise  Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace.  So much driving around, sneaking into people’s hotel rooms, grabbing paper(!) files, beating people up. Just google the guy for crying out loud.. or twitter and see what comes back.  Does James Bond for all his hi-tech crap in the car even have a blackberry, let alone an iPhone? Have you ever seen him on a blackberry throughout the whole movie?

And when computers and the web are in movies, most of the technology is from about 20 years ago.  Really, how many times does the ‘good guy’ have to sneak past endless laser-driven security systems to slip a disc into a desktop and copy a file, which is shown on screen in that endless green thing taking forever to copy… what is it, 10 pages of information in text? Seriously.  How about hacking into the files from, say, a nice beachfront condo in Miami?

The only films I can think of that even deal with email are You’ve Got Mail, and that was, what, 20 years ago?  There was one other one with Sandra Bullock, I think, in which someone steals her identity, but it was not memorable.

Other than The Matrix,  which does not give a very pleasant vision of our digital future, (but at least it does envision one), I cannot think of any other popular film that takes us where Verne took the world in his era.

Which is too bad, because we are going there anyway.

It might be nice to have something of a roadmap before we go.

Verne didn’t do too badly.  Note the illustration from From The Earth to The Moon.  Even though it was more than 100 years ago, Verne got a lot of it right.  

Or maybe that’s where the NASA guys got the idea from.