Colonising the future... on film

/Continued from previous post.../

"The central subject matter of futures studies is images of the future; ideas about the future, that are, more or less clearly, in the minds of each of us. Images of the future are the heart and soul of futures studies; they are the place to begin the more extensive (theoretical and methodological) study of the future."
~Jim Dator, Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies

"The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior. The general character and quality of the images of the future which prevail in a society is therefore the most important due to its overall dynamics. The individual's image of the future is likewise the most significant determinant of his personal behavior."
~Kenneth Boulding, Foreword to The Image of the Future, by Fred Polak, translated and abridged by Elise Boulding, Elsevier, 01973, p. v (available here as a pdf, with frequent minor misspellings due to the OCR process).


The "images of the future" described above range beyond the reservoir of visual representations of possible futures. Yet such visuals do indeed comprise an important element of how and what how our culture thinks about the future. In the last post here we saw that, in films set in the future, product placement can be viewed as a "smuggling more deeply into our culture, at the behest of a rather narrow but (of necessity) financially powerful interest group, certain beliefs and expectations about the future".

Now let's revisit the notion of "mental real estate", borrowed from Hollywood script-man Terry Rossio's 02000 column for aspiring screenwriters:

Here's the idea: I name something, and you either recognize it, or you don't. Could be a person, place, or thing, like the classic twenty questions game. If you recognize the thing I tell you, that means it's taking up space in your head -- tangling up a few billion neurons -- residing on a chunk of mental real estate.

That makes it valuable, because if the thing is taking up space in your head, chances are, it's taking up space in a good percentage of other heads across the country. And Hollywood can use that. It's the main commodity of the town --

Hollywood buys, sells, and trades in mental real estate.

If the "mental real estate" trade concerns competing for brand awareness to position a commercial enterprise for doing bigger business in the future -- and we've seen how it does, in the example of product placement -- then we can contemplate an interesting elaboration of the territorial metaphor. What might we call the occupation and exploitation of valuable mental space when it comes to images of the future?

How about colonisation?

Political scientist and academic futurist Jim Dator appears to have been the first to describe the role of futures inquiry this way, paving the way for dissenting alternatives to dominant images: "We discover that we are being colonized in what truly seemed to be 'the last frontier: the future'. That belief motivated me to offer this call for de-colonizing activities." ("De-Colonizing the Future", Journal of Futures Studies, 9(3), 93-104, February 02005, p. 102; republished from Andrew Spekke, ed., The Next 25 Years, Washington: World Future Society, 01975.)

Others, speaking from a more explicit postcolonial theoretical standpoint, have since used this same language to frame the problem. For example, in the eyes of Sohail Inayatullah, "decolonizing the future" entails "examining how we buy other's used futures; how we disempower ourselves by accepting the futures of others as ours". Elsewhere he writes: "Unfortunately, our futures are often colonized – they are filled with the thoughts of others, the dogmas of history. [...] But the problem is not just out there. The future is colonized as well by our own internal images – these are often unconscious - ensuring that the futures we create are not ours." Another postcolonial scholar from the subcontinent, Ashis Nandy, refers to "the theft of distinctive futures". And Futures journal editor Zia Sardar has warned of certain colonial tendencies in futures studies itself, in his 01993 article "Colonizing the Future" (see the responses to that piece in the same issue, as well as Sardar's 01999 book Rescuing All Our Futures).

Although others can surely articulate better than I how the (de)colonial metaphor may be used as part of a program of political and intellectual emancipation, the point I wish to make here is simply that it is available to us, in thinking about the way the economy of images of the future strategically favours some interests, while marginalising others -- not unlike the way that ownership and control of real property does. It is also worth noting that, although not every futures scholar uses the term, "decolonising the future" is not necessarily a specialist activity within that domain; instead it may be better thought of a general description for the first half of what the study of futureS is all about. The thinkers mentioned above might agree that the work carried on by many of the best futurists is quintessentially about "decolonising the future", by questioning, disrupting and displacing the assumed and ostensibly "necessary", "natural", or "inevitable" images of the future we might otherwise take for granted. The other "half" of the work concerns envisioning, inventing and pursuing preferred alternatives.

So where does this leave us?

The argument I've made here so far suggests that advertisers seek to colonise the future by buying up our mental real estate via product placement in stories with a future setting. However, this rather banal observation won't be news to many of us. What else, then, does this postcolonial approach to futures offer? The paradox is that, although these "images of the future" on film are readily seen, their political effects are not. So are there perhaps other, less obvious ways in which our futures have been or are being colonised, right under our noses? Let's go back to Blade Runner for a moment -- focusing this time not upon the film per se, or the particular images in it... what else could we be missing? Could it be, as it were, the thing we always fail to see when we look at a movie; the frame itself? I'm wondering if the language and packaging around this movie, and others like it -- the genre of science fiction -- isn't an example of colonisation of the future.

All too often, people assume that because I study "the future" I must have some infantile obsession with flying cars, or underwater houses... or at least the contents of Wired. This assumption (that specialising in thinking about the future connotes a fascination with high technology) is the very trap that we advocates of plural futureS are attempting to undermine and escape. But this miscommunication is actually embedded in the limited comprehension of the word "future". (If you want to understand who you're dealing with, pay attention to how they misunderstand you...) Sometimes I think pluralising futureS may be too subtle an exercise in culture-jamming or meme-repair, because the people who seem to "get it" right away tend already to share the intuition that a singular conception of the future (I call it "monofuturism") is both inadequate and misleading. Those who don't get it seem too blinkered by the straight lines of monofuturism for the humble "s" to affect their epistemological plumbing.

In any case, there may be a parallel between my encounters with high-tech monofuturism, and the fact that apparently every cinematic narrative depiction of a future seems fated to be classified as science-fiction (Or fantasy, if it's set far enough into the past or future, or in a parallel universe... movies set on other planets could go either way.) If virtually all future stories, by default, are science-fiction, and popular discourse around future scenarios winds up being coterminous with that designation, then in effect the future has been colonised -- by an instrumentalist, technology-heavy "science" fiction. To put it another way, the narrowness of our culture's thinking about futures is reflected in the paucity of our vocabulary for stories that happen there. It looks like we have science fiction on the one hand, and the venerable literary tradition of utopias (etymologically: "no place") on the other. Which, analytically and practically, pretty much boils down to a choice between technologised nightmare, or nothing at all.

In 02002 Jaron Lanier wrote a great article in 21C about being part of director Steven Spielberg's futurist brains trust, offering creative advice during the development of Minority Report:

A more important disappointment for me was that I think there's an essential kind of optimism that ought to be portrayed in science fiction, but it seems to be beyond our imagination at present. Instead of making existential points by pitting people against technology, why not portray people using technology beautifully and creatively?

I presented all sorts of ideas for what information technology might look like in fifty years, but the least noble of these were the only ones that stuck.

Of course, the requirements of dramatic tension make some things far more likely than others to survive the arduous journey from concept to screen. I have pointed out in a comment to a previous post that:

...massive asteroids hitting earth, killer-virus pandemics, and mutant science experiments wreaking havoc on shrieking New Yorkers are scenarios more readily imagined for many of us than ending poverty, peacefully dismantling the world's militaries, or holding a corporation-free summer Olympics in West Africa. The former stories have been imagined for us dozens of times; while these other tales don't typically make it to the multiplexes.

But Lanier's experience seems to echo the problem of "science fiction" being the catch-all term for movies about possible futures. There are constraints and tendencies at the next level down, dictating the kinds of images of the future we get within "science fiction" -- the limitations of the sci-fi imaginary -- which we ignore at our peril.

Finally, it behooves me to add that, like all metaphors, "colonisation" (and indeed "images of the future" -- another metaphor) reveals certain things while obscuring others. Unlike physical colonisation, which involves the occupation of actual space and can involve prodigious effort up to and including violence to be overcome, the overturning of virtual occupation of mental real estate can be challenged simply by thinking differently. With the word "simply" I don't intend to downplay the very intense sociopolitical and educational challenge this can entail -- but happily, it remains the case that colonised futures are in principle more readily recovered than colonised lands. The catch is, of course, that such colonisation may be far more difficult to recognise (and to doing so is one of the central implicit aims of postcolonial theory).

With this in mind, we can now go back to the question which concluded the first part of this article: to what extent do these commercial images of the future in film simply project and reinscribe the assumptions of the present, and to what extent do they enable us to scrutinise and critique them? The answer lies entirely in how we respond to those images, and where on the spectrum our response as viewers falls -- whether we regard them unthinkingly, or with our critical faculties fully engaged.

Don't Panic

Someone I regret that I will never meet is the late, brilliant writer Douglas Adams, who died just over five years ago (11 May 02001). Adams was an extraordinarily original, funny and humane author best known for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy -- which ultimately expanded to five parts ... or was it six? Either way, it was a helluva trilogy. Adams was at least as inventive and eclectic as Neil Gaiman is, but without being the slightest bit self-important (no offence to Gaiman, also an excellent writer, but his chosen mythological subject matter does present certain hazards).

Not having read Adams at all in the last year or two, this week at a great second hand bookstore just around the corner from Long Now, I picked up a copy of The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, featuring his marvellous character Dirk Gently, the holistic detective. Then today, serendipitously, I ran across an essay by Adams from 01999 entitled "How to stop worrying and learn to love the internet". It's terrific. I'll certainly look out for more of his non-fiction. An extract:

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

Adams is highlighting the way that real change occurs between generations, as each successive one assimilates and builds on the inventions and achievements of the one before it. Shades of media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." Thus does the history of technology compound into a shapeshifting cultural force, a medium for the human race to act upon and transform itself, and by extension the planet as a whole.

Now, I have a passing familiarity with the Strauss and Howe theory of generations, which argues that over centuries they cycle predictably from political conservatism to radicalism and back again, through a pattern in four stages. But without having any reliable way -- prospectively as opposed to historically -- to determine when a sociologically relevant "generation" ends and the next begins, or to determine what significant unpredictable events may prove to be formative of a cohort's experience of the world, even if the character of their reaction could be forecasted; as I see it, such an approach can't help but be redolent of horoscopes writ large. How, looking forward, can this afford anything useful in the way of concrete analytical application? (Not a rhetorical question; I'd welcome some responses on this.)

A more limited, but useful approach to analysing generational change is to consider how the presence of existing and emerging technologies may form part of what's taken for granted, and will be built upon, by the children of today. (Further out than that, any generation-based analysis seems highly unlikely to help, because there are basically no raw materials -- read: people with experiences -- to work with, as yet.)

In principle, what we can say is intriguing about this transgenerational, technological baton-passing, is the way that incrementally, through progressive naturalisation of layers of technology-driven change, society ends up in places far removed from what anyone ever imagined, let alone intended. In his 01984 book What Sort of People Should There Be?, an early and very thoughtful contribution to the debate on genetic engineering, the English ethicist Jonathan Glover points out that part of the problem with (what we'll call) compound technological change is that there are conceivable future worlds that would make folks today recoil, but which wouldn't seem at all objectionable to the people living in them; their values having adjusted by baby steps to accommodate most of the changes that got them there.

This is a fascinating philosophical point. It poses a serious problem for long range thinking, let alone actual planning, which is that if we won't have to live "then and there", then who are we to judge this or that scenario, and try to avoid or pursue it? (It's analogous to the ethical conundrum concerning "lives not worth living".) There's an implication here of some kind of inherent limit to the responsibility we can reasonably expect ourselves to take, perhaps mitigating what Jaron Lanier has called "karma vertigo", which unfortunately is a common affliction for long-term thinkers. (Long-term thinking itself, fortunately or not, is a far less common affliction.) And it may induce us zealous futurist types to put a little more stock in the ability of future generations to deal with their own era's problems in their own way, perhaps even accepting a zen-like element in our forward thinking that Douglas Adams surely would have endorsed: Don't Panic.

Wikipedia and the questionable wisdom of crowds

The aggregation of individual opinions, and the collectivisation of many small efforts, is a massive lever for -- and site of -- social change to which our culture is just now awakening, thanks to the evolving affordances of ICT. Wikipedia is the highest profile example at the moment. Its founder, Jimmy Wales, recently provided a very interesting take on this for the Long Now Foundation's Seminars about Long-term Thinking.

Now, in Chicago on 7 June there is a Summit about Prediction Markets -- another testing ground for the principles of collective wisdom (see this example run by the World Economic Forum). The Summit organisers have been distributing some interesting reading matter to delegates via a Prediction Markets google group.

Virtual reality doyen and film director Jaron Lanier's Edge.org article Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, argues that the "hive mind" of the collective works exceedingly well for some things, and very poorly for others, but that the current fad for "wikitopian" thinking overlooks or denies the latter. Among the adverse consequences of what Lanier describes as "inappropriate uses of the collective" are compromises on the quality of information (both the content and how it's expressed), and a culture of avoiding individual responsibility. Whether or not you're inclined to agree, it's a very well written and thought-provoking article.

And either way, it's also helpful to develop a vocabulary for the huge amount of activity going on in this area. A possibly useful new term in this connection is "Crowdsourcing" -- Wired magazine's coined buzzword alluding to the latest examples of the ancient idea that many hands make light work. Could there be a more appropriate way to learn more than through this this Wikipedia article?