After attending a 35th anniversary screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail last night -- a movie which revels in outrageous anachronisms and (what some would call) thoroughly postmodern, meta-media commentary -- I'm moved to post below three videos, all comico-spiritual successors to the Python example, that have recently come to my attention. Each plays on film and TV conventions reflexively (and so often invisibly) deployed in relation to other historical times, to great comedic effect: the present treated as retro-future, the very recent past treated as distant past, and the present seen from distant future. They use their targeted tropes to distort a recognisable picture (past or present) which, being so familiar, makes the distortions themselves all the clearer. We could say more, but instead, let these astute satirical tidbits speak for themselves.
1: The Astounding World of the Future, dir. Scott Dikkers, 02001 (YouTube link).
(Thanks to Steve Duncombe.)
2: "Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of 'Friendster' Civilization", Onion News Network, 02010(?).
(Thanks to Kurt Bollacker.)
3: "Beatles 3000", dir. Scott Gairdner, 02009.
(Thanks to Jake Dunagan and Alexander Rose.)
The Iraq War is over, Bush has been indicted on charges of high treason, the PATRIOT Act is to be repealed, the economy will be restructured, and public universities are now free.
I awoke this morning to emails from two New York colleagues about a marvellous and painstakingly planned guerrilla futures intervention today in the Big Apple.
A "special edition" of the New York Times has been produced, to convey, through a detailed set of carefully crafted articles and advertisements, a near-future scenario in which progressives' dreams for the United States have all come true. And 1.2 million copies of it have been distributed for free around the city by a network of volunteers.
Alongside the print edition, a counterpart website has been launched where all the stories are available in full. Both paper and electronic versions are rendered impeccably in the newspaper's signature style, and are dated 4 July 02009 (Independence Day next year).
In scale, this is certainly the most impressive guerrilla futures campaign I've heard of, and I heartily congratulate all those concerned for pulling it off. (It seems -- according to Gothamist, citing Gawker -- that the volunteers were assembled via becausewewantit.org and the effort is being attributed to the Yes Men, guerrilla performance artists supreme, whose astonishing Dow Chemical/Union Carbide interview on BBC World was previously featured here.)
Now, we can expect that some disgruntled newspaper recipients or onlookers may accuse the folks behind this terrific intervention of leading people, shall we say, up the garden path. Such accusations will be missing the point.
Adopting the Times dress is not about hoaxing people; it's a way of calling authority to the vision. As well as being a proprietary media business, its actual status in our media ecology as an authoritative source of news, an idea which belongs to everyone even if the newspaper itself does not, is recruited to lend verisimilitude and weight to the cause.
As Jake Dunagan and I were recently discussing in another context, one of the many devices which makes the Orson Welles classic Citizen Kane so successful is its intermittent cutting to newspaper headlines that help tell the story. (Now, like any novel and effective cinematic trope, this has since become cliche, but this original fictional biopic application, referencing newspaper's authority to help put a frame around plot points in the biography of a larger-than-life newspaper tycoon, makes perfect sense.)
No one addressing more than the most cursory scrap of attention to the actual content of the articles will fail to notice that they are fragments of an "impossible" dream, even if a profoundly noble one: the wholesale transformation of U.S. political culture. Post-election euphoria notwithstanding, the kinds of change described in the "special edition" don't tend to happen overnight, if at all. But the paper quite deliberately calls precisely that into question -- why not?
Similarly, Professor Steve Duncombe recently said in his presentation at HRCFS on Dreampolitik:
These impossible dreams open up a space for democratic participation in the process of imagining the future, which also offers the possibility of escaping the tyranny of the present... for people to imagine, 'why not?', and 'what if?'
This Dream Newspaper is, to use Duncombe's term, an "ethical spectacle" par excellence.
Here's an in-scenario video about the campaign, also from the Times SE site:
Again, kudos to those who orchestrated this highly thoughtful, lovingly detailed, and timely piece of future-jamming. The sceptical futuryst doffs his virtual hat to you all.
Update (19/11/08): On Monday, my own copy of the New York Times Special Edition arrived in the mail.
It brings me so much joy to hold in my hands that it's almost embarrassing.
The difference between hearing about or seeing images of an impossible object, and experiencing it tangibly, is immense.
There's a colour-printed cover; National, International, Business and New York sections; political cartoons; and reports announcing massive legislative and social change around topics ranging from bicycle lanes to corporate criminality. The details in content, graphics, and layout of the 14-page publication are thoroughly splendid -- starting with the slogan "All the News We Hope to Print" on the header. It is, in short, a beautifully wrought artifact of the near-future.
The Yes Men's hallmark "identity correction" strategy is everywhere in evidence: the U.S. government recall notice for all gas-powered cars; advertisements reflecting drastic changes of strategy (or heart?) by companies such as oil giant Exxon Mobil and diamond merchants De Beers; a contrite farewell from pro-invasion columnist Thomas Friedman; and a Corrections section addressing repeated editorial lapses of judgement on the part of the Times itself.
For those unfamiliar with the strategy I mean, the following comes from a book manuscript about the Yes Men's infamous WTO intervention [pdf]...
As many readers will know, "identity theft" has become a major problem on the internet: scoundrels intercept personal information like your date of birth, residence, and credit card numbers, then have all kinds of fun at your expense.
What we have done is the opposite: we have found people and institutions doing horrible things at everyone else's expense, and have assumed their identities to offer correctives. Instead of identity theft, identity correction.
~The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization, 02003, p. 6.
Their future newspaper manages to communicate sincere, blue-sky idealism not through earnest moralising or shrill propaganda, but through wit, irony, political satire, and the indisputable thereness of the physical medium whose mantle and idiom it borrows. A preferred future performed, with aplomb. Injected into everyday life, 1.2 million times over, for your consideration. This is one hell of a feat.
Even better, it strikes me as being part of something bigger, of which the Obama campaign and election was a more formal signal. That is, a coming of age, in terms of self-awareness and tactical savvy, of the American left. An answer to the call made in books like Don't Think of an Elephant and Dream.
But this particular effort deserves to be recognised as a landmark, an ingenious, street-level dissemination of one particular vision for American politics. It was a normative intervention more powerful, interesting, and just plain fun (why not, dammit?) than any number of pamphlets or TV advertisements; as outrageously ballsy as calculatedly logical. And one repaid handsomely in the true currency of human communication: attention. "The amount of media coverage the Fake New York Times stunt received was staggering. It spread to news outlets all over the globe like wildfire." (Urban Prankster, 14 November 02008)
It's true that these newspapers have been fetching quite a bit on eBay over the last week, but my copy is safely in the archive. One piece of a laudable future-jamming effort of unprecedented magnitude, which -- and I mean this in the most flattering possible way -- I hope will be outdone, many times over, as soon as possible.
I'm extremely grateful to Steve Duncombe for sending it (our man in NYC, who helped arrange the intervention). Thanks Steve!
Tragedy today, as former President Gerald Ford was eaten by wolves.
Here, master impressionist Dana Carvey (Wayne's World) plays news anchor Tom Brokaw in a 01996 sketch for Saturday Night Live -- to my knowledge one of the finest moments the show has produced in over 30 years on the air.
It starts with a brilliant comic premise: the newsman is pre-recording a bunch of alternative future headlines so he can take an extended vacation in Barbados. Carvey's Brokaw covers a variety of contingencies in which former U.S. President Gerald Ford meets his maker, through a series of bizarre and increasingly unlikely scenarios. (Ford was still alive in '96, and had the good fortune to live another ten years, wolf-free.)
The sketch works not only because of Carvey's fabulous characterisation -- like any great caricature, whether drawn or performed, you don't actually have to be familiar with the original in order to recognise it -- but also because of the splendid absurdity of the premise, which naturally is stretched as far as humanly possible.
One take-home message from a futures standpoint (hey, you knew we had to go there) is that, although life -- and death -- unfold in infinite specificity, to anticipate and plan for such unforeseeable concrete particulars is inherently absurd.* Another thought that occurs to me is that while any useful statement about the future should appear to be ridiculous (per Dator's second law), it doesn't follow that any or all ridiculous statements about the future are necessarily useful.
* Update (01/11/08): I just remembered a classic sketch by British comedy duo Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in which Stephen's doddering old man character is trying to buy a get well card from Hugh's shopkeeper, but all the pre-printed messages in the cards are incredibly specific [video; transcript]. Great sketch, parallel concept.
At Burning Man this year I was intrigued to see in the schedule a theme camp called "Time Colony", featuring some sort of collective named The Historical Preenactment Society.
Now, historical re-enactments have long smacked to me of the thoroughly bizarre. It could be a result of exposure at an early age to Monty Python (see for example the unforgettable Reenactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor, by the Batley Townswomen's Guild). Pre-enactment, however, while no less bizarre, is admittedly something of a preoccupation of mine (exhibit A, exhibit B).
My search for Time Colony around the advertised intersection was a bust, because (I later found out) the camp had been relocated at the last minute, so I missed their scheduled events. When I did eventually find it, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of one Nick Ernst, the camp's affable coordinator who in real life is an undergraduate student in maths and physics at UC Santa Cruz. Nick told me all about what they had been up to. He's just recently posted a description of their efforts at his blog...
The cyborg leader made to untie the robot at that point. Someone in the audience held up a gun and fired twice. The robot and cyborg leader fell. After a silence, a cyborg yelled "Murder! Double Murder!" And fighting ensued. Everyone stopped for the end narration: The audience member who had shot the cyborg and robot was charged with two accounts of murder in the first degree. The robot was thus recognized as an entity with the right to life, and so this tragic event spurred a big step forward in the fight for robot rights.
This was, as far as Nick knows, the first instance of future performance to travel under the name of "historical preenactment". The concept for the Historical Preenactment Society was borrowed, he explains, from Dresden Codak, a webcomic by Aaron Diaz that will thrill anyone equally interested in manga-style artwork and The Kurzweilian Singularity. (Check out the comic's instalments featuring the Society's first and second mentions, but note they're both part of a longer story that starts here.) Nick has also set up a Facebook group for his version of the Society (296 members and counting -- and there are four or five other chapters, too). Meanwhile, someone else has (independently?) created a website for Society activities, the first instance of which is apparently a concerted group involvement in Superstruct, the massively multiplayer forecasting game set in 02019, which is currently underway. The entrepreneurial artist Diaz has also put HPS t-shirts on sale here.
While we eagerly await news of the group's next intervention, here's another bit of gleefully anachronistic entertainment, sent to me today by Zander Rose at the Long Now because "it reminded me of your projects but in reverse": Tweet Capsule is a twitter feed by Amos, "time twittering" from exactly 100 years ago with Blackadderesque snarkiness. For instance, 6 October 01908:
Late in September, the city of Nashville, Tennessee temporarily ran out of petrol, following rumours that it was about to run out of petrol. Offhand, I can think of no clearer example of the productive (that is, reality-making) impact of images of the future. See for instance this report from CNN, "Nashville pumps dry after panic about rumor of no gas", 20 September 02008:
Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy: An estimated three-fourths of gas stations in the Nashville, Tennessee, area ran dry Friday, victim of an apparent rumor that the city was running out of gas. ... Hearing the rumor, drivers rushed to fill their cars and trucks.
The above video is a simply brilliant hack (à la Woody Allen's 01966 comedy What's Up, Tiger Lily?, which dubbed an old Japanese movie) of a scene from Downfall (Der Untergang, 02004) a deeply serious cinematic account of a certain German dictator's final days.
Sure, it's not a future scenario, but a dramatisation of a past one, redeployed to satirise the present in, er, a rather different context. Still, such a format could serve as a terrific way to evoke, satirically or not, a future scenario by analogy. As Prof Ira Rohter asked, when posting the clip to the HRCFS listserv today, "Could this be Pres McCain in 2012?"
Parody newspaper The Onion has a sterling back-issue (fore-issue?) online dated 02056, satirising future tropes left and right. It came out (in June 02005) before this blog got started, but even if you've seen it before, it's worth revisiting [link]...
Democratic Middle Eastern Union Votes To Invade U.S.
Final Installment of Frogger Trilogy poised to sweep Oscars
Leather-Clad Nomads Seize Power In Australia
Remainder of Ross Ice Shelf Now in Smithsonian Freezer
Opinion™ - We Need A Fourth Law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife
This photo, apparently of a tribute by English Heritage to time traveller Jacob von Hogflume, has been leading a life of its own for the last couple of years online (google "Hogflume") -- including, it seems, a brief career at Wikipedia.
Normanton, a graphic designer, found the correct fonts and mounted the signs on card and paper. Askwith then photographed them in their natural geographical habitat. He likens it to the guerrilla, subversive interventions of the graffiti artist Banksy. [...] Sometimes, especially on the train, he left the signs up and sat waiting for a fellow passenger to register them. "They'd sit there, stare into space, then look at the sign and it didn't say what they expected it to say, and they'd look confused as if to say, 'Hang on, what's going on here'."
~Tim Teeman, "Time of the signs", The Times (London), 21 December 02005.
Normanton adds: "If our joke signs didn’t actually look real, people wouldn’t take notice, wouldn’t get the joke."
It seems the increased likelihood of not noticing the joke, because of the signs' verisimilitude, is also what makes them work. Hmm.
As prices at the petrol pumps climb to record highs in Hawaii, and elsewhere, tongue-in-cheek images from a future "If gas prices continue to rise" are making the rounds...
It's interesting to see this issue handled humorously. Not that these are uproariously funny, but they certainly contrast in tone with the sombre harbingers of post-gas culture seen in the (unphotoshopped) series of images posted here a few months ago. I'm also reminded of World Without Oil writer Ken Eklund's comment to that photo essay: "the future objects that hit me in the gut are the repurposed ones: The Hummer car dealership that's now a refugee camp, the gutted Honda that now uses its alternator as a windmill..." Here, the improvised product life-extensions represented by the sail-car, and the vehicles pulled by horses and dogs, come across as a sort of satirical variation on that repurposing strategy.
(Christine Hansen sent these to the HRCFS listserv two days ago, and although plenty of blogs featured these in April and May [example], I haven't found an original source.)
This month, Wired magazine online includes a cute take on a newspaper of the future -- focusing on a U.S. election sixteen years hence -- dated 22 November 02024.
It's an interactive Flash design, so you need to click through to the original to check it out properly...
It's cool, right?
Right?
Well, ok. I don't know why I'm not more enthusiastic about this: I'd really expect to like it more than I do. It's a future artifact, cleverly thought out, detailed, layered, with a lot of witty morsels to savour... So far, so good.
But as a futures artifact, maybe it tries to do too much. It's not that it isn't thoughtful, or clever, or satirically on-target -- it just, to my (undoubtedly hypercritical) mind, goes overboard. So densely packed is it, so thoroughly burdened with pop culture asides, news satire, tech-savvy smirks, and post-everything ironic wit that frankly it's a little tiresome.
An aspect of this density, clever and confusing at the same time, is the way it plays on multiple layers simultaneously. We're getting jokes about news content (including celebrities, journalists, international crises, American politics) as well as physical medium (the -- in 02008 -- newly minted wireless reading devices; platform convergence including the integration of CNN-like newsbar, and webpage elements like photo sets and vlogs); as well as the written form (quirks of the Wikipedia relating to its dubious contents; the ironic combination of user-produced content and the Wall Street Journal!) Ha! And presented on a later version of the Amazon Kindle -- clever! Ugggghhh. Et cetera. I give in. What's for dinner?
So much is going on here that I'm sure there's a bunch of jokes I simply missed. Which is fine. Much contemporary comedy, and The Simpsons really broke the mould here, relies on an abundance of layers to laugh at, from slapstick and sight gags through to highbrow political and historical references. But that kick-'em-while-they're-down strategy doesn't necessarily translate directly to webpages and flash animations. Unlike a medium with duration (such as video, or live performance) our attention seems to be assaulted all at once, not in sequence. And -- perhaps this is the laugh killer, or indeed the metajoke -- this flash design is a pain to navigate.
Now of course, I'm looking at this through my own biased, persnickety criteria. And this piece is, I concede, principally satire, not futures. Despite the resonance of those two that I thought about here not long ago, there may be a tension that I can't articulate yet between good satire and good futures work. You decide how well this particular example succeeds on each front. But I'll say one more thing about the futures aspect before the tirade subsides.
It's head writer of The Daily Show (a program I much admire) Steve Bodow who "lays out the scenario" here. But through all the clutter I have trouble discerning the scenario. It seems like almost everything that's happening today is still happening in this future, only more so. Which seems to amount to more noise than signal. I suppose that's its intention. Maybe it's too close to the apparently ubiquitous trend for comfort -- hypercomplexity and massively dense referentiality may ring too true to be really funny to me. I guess a simpler scenario would have been easier to follow, but funnier? I don't know.
With this, I betray my simplemindedness and raise a talking point for future future artifacts -- less can be more.
Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting [sic] robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.
~Agence France-Presse, via Yahoo! News [Australia], "Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert", 27 February 02008.
It's always interesting, I find, to witness an outlandish science-fiction scenario migrating gradually towards mainstream credibility (a process that may culminate, at last, in canonisation as reality or common sense). That's Dator's second law at work, folks.
The above spoof on the news channel roundtable discussion is worth a nod for thematic reasons, but remains, I think, good -- not great -- satire.
So let's aim our sights a little higher. Following the mention in my most recent post of the role of humour in some futures interventions (Oil and water), I want to pay tribute to the inspiration that great satire can offer.
Great satire inspires, in strategy and sensibility, what I consider to be a most promising direction for producing effective -- by which I mean aesthetically pleasing as well as perceptually transformative -- future artifacts. Whatever the medium (literature, film, performance, or something else), a coherent use of its familiar forms sets up the satirist to subvert the expectations thereby established. The medium+genre are the vehicle, and the satirical/futures value comes from the satirist's unexpected left turn. (This is more or less the strategy of culture jamming, as practised by Adbusters, among others.)
It seems to me that the more plausible and cohesive the usage of the medium and its tropes -- the better the voice, character, or genre is captured -- the more powerful the licence earned to comment upon it. Rhetorically, the medium+genre package seems to function as a sort of Trojan Horse: via verisimilitude to the familiar form, it can pass muster, yet allow other interesting things to creep through besides. Satire at its best is discursive deconstruction for hedonists. (This usually accessible form of deconstruction can be contrasted instructively with its linguistically ornate, and often humourless, philosophical counterpart, which seems dedicated to the enjoyment of intellectual masochists everywhere -- and, in true Sadist tradition, typically starts out life in French.)
So, one dazzling instance of satire from the annals of literature is Jonathan Swift's classic essay "A Modest Proposal" (01729) about poverty in Ireland. It uncannily captures a certain type of cold, bureaucratic analysis, allowing him to comment on its dehumanising and bloodless modus operandi when he gets around to suggesting, in an impeccably rational tone, infanticide and cannibalism.
Fast forward two or three centuries, jump to a different medium altogether, and the reality-TV look and feel of the BBC television series The Office (and to a lesser extent the U.S. remake) allows its creators to lay bare both the tragicomic emptiness of that lifeworld, and the delusory behaviour of some of its inhabitants. Similarly, consider the genius of a actor like Christopher Guest (for instance, as Nigel Tufnel in the classic 01984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap), or Sacha Baron-Cohen (inhabiting any of his comic personas, but especially Borat). These are characters so convincing that a casual onlooker may not realise they're watching a performance; yet those who are aware revel in the layered duality, applauding both the real and surreal elements, the message and the medium.
The consummate political satirist may well blur the line between reality and play in ways that are deliberately, and strategically, baffling to its whole audience at least temporarily (and to some part of the audience, terminally). The convincing manner of the mischievous performance troupe The Yes Men, for example, gets them into conferences and TV shows where they audaciously go on to mount surprise campaigns of "identity correction", by posing as representatives of large multinational organisations. (For a discussion of identity correction, see this pdf, pp. 6-12.) Here's a terrific example of how they operate. In 02004, BBC World interviewed "Jude Finisterra", a spokesman for Dow Chemical played by Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum, making a shocking on-air announcement...
(For much more in this vein, see the feature-length 02003 documentary about the Yes Men here.)
And at its best, the mastery of writers at The Onion takes no prisoners in playing off the self-importance, vacuity, and other foibles of news reportage, using the whole range of tropes at their disposal.
The following Onion clip (which I also saw for the first time today) is, I think, a beautifully judged bit of satire...
Fantastic. It nails just the right tone, pacing, and visual style. (It compares to a great news-report satire show on Australia's ABC television in the early 00s, CNNNN.) Also, I think it's neat that, even though it has a real-life commercial sponsor, a similar comic sensibility has found its way into those lead-in and lead-out ads on the clip. (Often, video/TV ads do horrific violence to the universe of a show.)
Finally, the following lovely piece goes meta on diagrammatic abstractions, journalistic indifference, and the manufacture of reporterly expertise -- thereby dismantling their authority far more effectively, elegantly, and enjoyably than, for example, an essay. Or a blog post.
