#192 - The Future As We See It
or: belief is the most important part of the recipe when you think about it
It's been hard lately to feel any hope for the future.
But I think it's important to be able to picture it, because if they have our imagination they have everything.
The future used to be America's specialty.
The World's Fairs held in Chicago in the 50s and Queens in the 60s was the obvious extension of the futurism of the post-war industry that promised every American could afford a life of luxury (with a robot butler? we also really wanted cars to fly and like babe we can barely be safe on the roads we already have) in this new country that we had built.
Because the country that we think of didn't really start until the New Deal, and that segued straight into rah-rah we're the good guys with the Marshal Plan (which, yes it was very good, but it also replaced the ideals of public labor as the solution with–uh oh–the american military) (and for more on that let's see what famous anti-war pacifist Dwight D. Eisenhower had to say about the dangers of the military industrial complex) and then came the social revolutions and the backlash to the revolutions and the boom of America's best export/soft propoganda: the entertainment industry.
But we used to be obsessed with the future.
And now I feel like we barely talk about it.
I've never wanted to have kids and that used to be an anomaly. And I still don't want kids but I want people to be able to want kids.
I get the argument that it feels irresponsible to some people because we don't have a guaranteed future but I'd just like to point out that the future has never been guaranteed for anyone in the history of the world and if we are giving up on fighting to make a better future happen what's the point of fighting for the present?
It's not easy. But it has to feel plausible in order to become reality.
And the future did appear in many ways like we pictured. Tech arrived! It's ruinous and it's here.
Zenon had a Zap-Pad that she used to make video calls with her friends and recorded front facing personalized videos she would use as alarms in the morning. Like we not only thought about the future a lot, we got it right. We made it come true.
It's not the best use of tech. I think AI is better suited to like...numbers than regurgitating plagarized information from artists but apparently people use chat gpt like google now and I truly do not understand that. It's SO BAD for the environment and I hate that we failed to regulate the tech industry and now they're literally destroying the country for some reason???
(It's war reasons. We're training AI for war reasons. We're draining our resources for war reasons.)
(Who are we at war with again? And why? Was it Eastasia or Eurasia I can't recall?)
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
We gave them everything they wanted and it just made them want more??
You're telling me that historically appeasement has not solved greed???
Remind me what happened in Munich in the 1930s again??
Why would a billionaire need more money? They don't. They want it because they're addicted to it.
They are also apparently all micro/macrodosing designer drugs and like not eating and getting their blood cleaned and other weird health cult shit that juuuuust makes me feel like they're not in the best state of mind to be making any decisions let alone ones that sweepingly affect the federal government.
ANYWAY! It's been really bad and I get why everyone has been feeling bad and probably a little paralyzed to do anything about it.
And the other day I was talking to my friend about the continued demonization of migrants and people seeking asylum and the cruelty that's so casually displayed by those in power about people who are fleeing circumstances the american government probably created for the chance of a better life.
We were critiquing the framing of the conversation that continues to happen on allegedly "liberal" media like WNYC where they present the democrat and republican plan (it's just one plan now!) as if it represents both sides of the argument.
But that's not true. Because the leftist argument never gets presented or taken seriously, but I believe in it. I know in my hearts its true because I know maps are just something we drew because I've crossed to Canada and there's no line on the ground.
I believe in a border-less future.
Globalism has already happened! We connect with people across the world at the click of a button! I've met people who flew from France to New York City so that they could attend the concert of a rapper from Korea.
And we treat any Big Ideas from the left as if they're childish concepts that don't hold up to scrutiny, or as my friend phrases how we're taught about communism, "Yeah, it's a nice concept, but what sucks is that we tried it and it didn't work."
And I just–I'm sorry. Is capitalism working for anyone????
Americans don't have friends, or kids, or own their homes anymore and yet they work really really hard and usually have more than one job and no days off.
Is this how we're choosing to spend our one precious life? Fighting with insurance companies on the phone because our health insurance got tied to jobs back in the 40s and now any progress from the left is thwarted by non-imaginative union leaders who demand to continue using it as a bargaining chip???? (The Right doesn't believe in the inalienable rights so I don't care what their opinion on healthcare is but I care what's happening on my side of the street and it's MESSY! I love unions I think unions are great but I also KNOW that unions are only as good as their leadership because JANE MCALEVEY TOLD ME SO. Find another bargaining chip!!!! I promise we can try new great things and make new bold strides everybody we just have to do it together!)
Alex N. Press
There is every reason to give up hope, but doesn't that fact alone crystalize the need to retain it even more?
Hope may not be a strategy, but it's an essential belief that keeps us going forward.
Hope for the future. Hope for a better world. Hope that the kids grow up in a more just world than the one we did.
How we get there can only be best determined once we figure out where we're going.
The future does not have to be bleak. The people who are making us feel that way have trouble connecting with other humans so they want to put us all in pods and have our consciousness walk around the meta-verse using legless avatars because in that version of the future they'll have friends. Or like, even more power which they can wield to make those around them act like they like them and since that's the only kind of friendship Elon Musk has ever known that's what he assumes it is.
Oops raising your children in isolating wealth is bad and creates genuinely disturbed people!!!! We've known this forever that's why all the royals are Like That but we also don't care about human rights violations when they happen to rich people and like I get that–but if we solve the root of their issues maybe just maybe the ruling class will stop committing mass human rights violations and then we can all live in dignity.
And if that sounds impossible, we may have lost our fundamental faith in other people as like...a whole. Which makes believing in their worth hard and completely dissuades anyone from taking up the fight because like, at that point what are we even fighting for?
But I think humans are generally good.
For the most part, people are really out here trying their best.
Which is a huge part of what makes it so tragic. This is some people's best??? But like, yeah, it is. So that's what we're working with.
Humans are good. Systems are bad. Peer pressure is not the cool kid asking you over and over again to smoke the joint it's your boss asking you to cut department costs and semi-threateningly implying that if you don't make some harsh choices you'll lose your job.
Every single decision that a company makes was made by a human being. They shield themselves from it, but there was a meeting in which a bunch of humans went, "We can make more money by charging outrageous prices for drugs we know people need to survive and since there is no law in place we are going to hold everyone over the edge of a cliff and if they can't afford to pay for their insulin we will kill them."
But since they're not literally holding everyone with diabetes up with their own hands we don't directly blame them. Much easier to blame the person who is now dead for not making enough money to survive. They lost the game of capitalism and the dudes in the boardroom who eeked out even more money this year to add to their overstuffed bank accounts are the winners and therefore we must all follow their formula if we hope to win the game.
People have gotten crueler as we have increasingly glorified greed.
Casual suggestions to outsource labor to knowingly underpaid foreign contractors, upping sales prices with no cost increase, cutting employees hours to keep them juuuuuust under 32 hours in order to avoid paying health insurance for full time, closing entire newsrooms because the line didn't go Up, just the fact that companies are publicly traded is bad and Venture Capital is bad so when I see a bunch of "businesses" go away I'm not like panicked about the market I assume they were all being propped up by fake inflation money from Silicon Valley and didn't actually have a product they were selling nor the chops to figure it out before the money ran dry.
SEE?! I'm being cruel now! Because I think the game is rigged so I judge the players who even want to play and I'm so annoyed that mass amounts of people have been duped into doing capitalisms bidding to their own detriment! And I KNOW that they tore apart the public education system in this country so now fewer people even have access to critical thought because they literally weren't taught how to.
And that's not the teachers fault it's the administrators fault who are so overwhelmed that they're sold bad tech by snake oil salesmen and have to follow guidelines about test scores even though everyone has known for decades that standardized tests are broken and education should take place with a limited student::teacher ratio and be comprehensive rather than piecemeal.
We know that we know that's true because that's what all the best private schools are doing. That's why people pay them the big bucks. So why is public education like this? Is it because our military budget is over-bloated because democrats are too afraid to cut it because they like military contracts for their district/they are afraid the republicans will call them weak/the military industrial complex is so entrenched that it feels inevitable?
Yeah! That and we pay for education via taxes so wealthy districts literally have more money. Why isn't education a federal investment?
Why would the post office need to turn a profit it's an essential service. Why is my neighborhood location chronically understaffed when the nicer districts around me have plenty of people working behind the windows?
(It's on purpose! They know what they're doing!)
Their current end goal may be horrific, but we don't have to keep allowing them to drive the car.
We have to pick a new destination and we've got to actually believe we've got enough tank in the gas to get there.
And we do, and we can.
Because we have historically always defeated fascism.
Regression is the natural backlash to progress.
But progress always wins.