[tt] [Venturists] Re: Does the 21st Century look "futuristic" to you?

Sun Jan 27 18:03:46 UTC 2008

----- Forwarded message from Goth <fresnolink at gmail.com> -----

From: Goth <fresnolink at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:26:30 -0000
To: Venturists at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Venturists] Re: Does the 21st Century look "futuristic" to you?
User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82
X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster
Reply-To: Venturists at yahoogroups.com

It's interesting, because a while back I wrote (elsewhere) about how totally different the 
world is today from the way it was only 25 years ago.

Human beings adapt so well to change that we often fail to notice the changes around us. 
Instead, we focus on fantasy/SciFi ideas from the past as a "goal" for development, not 
really understanding that (arguments about objectivism aside) we tend to invent, innovate 
and modify our environment to suit what really matters to us.

Time and again mankind has shown that in terms of his day-to-day environment, he 
prefers continuity. But in terms of intellectual achievement, he prefers constant change 
and growth. That's why ideas and politics are where we see constant growth, shifts and 
revolutions, rather than in how we design homes and cities or where we choose to 
vacation: witness how easy it is to find data, compile essays, and disseminate them on the 
internet, whilst we still love moving into old Victorian homes and will pay a premium for 
them.

Many people here, twenty or thirty years ago, had to put in a huge amount of energy to do 
with a zine or club what a weblog can do with a few bucks at an internet cafe. Progress 
has happened - lots of it. It's just been the progress enjoyed most by the most people in 
the largest markets. The fantasies of the SciFi authors have not taken hold because they 
were impractical and not a mass-market desire, at their base.

I wrote a piece of short fiction once which focused on my own concept of the post-
centenarian fantasy world I imagined 200 years hence. In  that story, I was working as an 
urban planner, fighting the good fight to prevent ideologists from using civic law to 
remake society in their image, implementing a pedestrianization scheme here and there, 
and having an egg sammich lunch with my mother-in-law in the greasy-spoon diner 
across the street. In other words, nothing had changed in how I lived my day-to-day life, 
except a few fanciful things like everyone working from home, living a few hundred extra 
years, living a more urban/pedestrian life, and living in small city-states.

The basics of life had not changed, and my fantasy is that it won't. The motivation I have 
for limits to my own mortality are that I can experience an immense quantity more of the 
everyday things I enjoy now. Sure, I want to see the aliens and the interstellar space ships, 
but that's not as important to me as visiting every diner in Canada, researching the urban 
development of Los Angeles while living there for a couple decades, then moving on to 
London, then Toronto, etc. The idea that I can adapt to the changes that come and 
incorporate them into my life goals is what's important to me. I'll leave Mars to the 
professional scientists - there's got to be a futurism for the rest of us too.

Tellingly, my short story assumed that mass-market cryonics had NEVER taken off, but 
rather most of the people who signed up just tended to keep living longer, and I left the 
story of what had happened to the few hundred who went on ice open for speculation. 
That's because I always thought of cryonics as a last-resort idea, not something which 
needs a mass market. We have won on the day when we focus our behavior (and that of 
our neighbors) on longevity for the sake of the things we love in life ALREADY. Strange, 
isn't it, that such an "individualist" movement tends to also be so utopian-collectivist 
when it comes to visions of the society of the future.

MK

--- In Venturists at yahoogroups.com, "holyspiritdenier" <holyspiritdenier at ...> wrote:
>
> Now that we've reached the far-future year of 2008, does the 21st 
> Century look like what you would have imagined it in your childhood?
> 
> It doesn't impress me as notably "futuristic." In fact, in a lot of 
> ways, daily life in the U.S. hasn't changed all that much since the 
> 1970's. What happened to the space colonies, expanded human 
> intelligences and even "immortality" predicted to arrive by right about 
> now according to F.M. Esfandiary, Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary?
> 
> Mark Plus
>

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Venturists/

<*> Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Venturists/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
    mailto:Venturists-digest at yahoogroups.com 
    mailto:Venturists-fullfeatured at yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    Venturists-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE