The Power of Utopia

One of my favourite engagements of the past year was a panel about The Power of Utopia with accomplished artistic activists Terry Marshall (co-instigator of Intelligent Mischief, a creative studio dedicated to “unleashing Black imagination to shape the future”), and Cory Doctorow (bestselling science fiction author and journalist whose work includes How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism and Walkaway, among many other titles).

The Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA) hosted the event as part of its Revolutionizing Activism series, a brilliant resource for agents of change to practise infusing radical imagination into present action. Afterwards, the organisation shared some key takeaways from the event under the title How to strengthen the vision of your advocacy.

Video of the full conversation is embedded below.

Related:
> Imagination Is a Commons: An experiential futures project for UNDP (02021)
> Ethnographic Experiential Futures / EXF (02017)
> FoundFutures: Chinatown: Green Dragon (02007)
> Critical activism: An interview with Anab Jain (02019)
> The New York Times Special Edition (02008)
> Future documentary (02016)
> Guerrilla Futures: Strategic foresight meets tactical media (02014)
> Dreampolitik: On the political importance of impossible dreams (2008)
> The Tao of Steve (02011)
> Guerrilla Futures C4AA webinar (02017)
> The School of Worldbuilding (02019)

Not very long ago

in a galaxy not at all far away...

Still from Michael Horn's video Death Star over San Francisco
via The Official Star Wars Blog

Star Wars fans are excited about this video of the Death Star making an appearance in the skies over San Francisco. Check it out:


While I've never been a rabid fan of the space opera franchise, to me this is a neat transreality tribute, and for a homemade effort, it's exceptional, playing the home-video approach completely deadpan (thereby making a virtue of necessity), which is just great. It also illustrates the point, noted here last week in relation to producing in-scenario fragments, that "the artifacts of documentary (jerky camerawork, imperfect vantage points, bad sound fidelity) can sometimes lend a more nuanced and lifelike texture to the story than squeaky-clean realist cinema".

The clip is reminiscent of what to me stands as the gold standard of high-tech, lo-fi "future documentary" -- South African director Neill Blomkamp's shorts Tetra Vaal and Alive in Joburg.

However, what really excites me here is that this kind of visualisation is becoming so accessible, a sign of the rapid democratisation of the means of production of video artifacts "from" the future. Says the filmmaker, Michael Horn, in an interview for The Official Star Wars Blog:

I shot everything on my junkie DV camera, did motion-tracking and comping in After Effects, and basic sound design in Final Cut.

Now that's cool.

Related posts:
> Neill Blomkamp, visual futurist
> Death of a President

(Thanks Bryan Boyer!)

Your destiny is no longer in question

Above, two videos from NEXTgencode, "the industry leader in personal genetic life enhancement" [link > About Us].

These ads, and the website to which they point, were part of a promotional campaign for sci-fi writer Michael Crichton's 02006 novel Next.

A Wall Street Journal article at that time examined the hazards of hoax-like advertising material that manifests, so to speak, fragments of the in-scenario universe.

Fake videos are part of a broader trend in marketing involving the creation of pseudo events or phony organizations aimed at sparking buzz among fans. Among big marketers to take similar steps are Volkswagen AG's Audi brand and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC TV network.
...
ABC is still studying in the impact of its fake-marketing campaign [for TV series Lost].
...
Such efforts are known as "alternate reality games." They tantalize consumers with a mysterious story line, then ask them to explore more deeply.

To gauge the success of these marketing ploys, advertisers will typically examine consumer posts on blogs and elsewhere on the Web and see if they sound positive or negative, according to David Cohen, an executive at Interpublic Group of Cos.' Universal McCann.

~Jeffrey Trachtenberg and Brian Steinberg, "Believe It or Not, Fake Biotech Firm Is Key Marketing Ploy for Crichton Novel", Wall Street Journal, 16 November 02006

Online videos may still be relatively new, but Crichton has long used material of (if I may put it this way) ambiguous facticity to prop up the conceits of his science fiction. The first novel he published under his own name (The Andromeda Strain, 01969) was garnished with plausible, yet fabricated, scientific-looking footnotes. Back in high school, the first book of his I read (Jurassic Park, 01990) strove for and, I think, achieved terrific verisimilitude in the same way; using the false document technique.

So, I read Next sometime in the last year. The characters are thin, and the plot is less than convincing; it's certainly not his best work. I do, however, really like this playful use of quasi-documentary material to draw potential readers into a story which, like much of Crichton's fiction, although set in the present day, is predicated on the idea that cutting-edge technology is considerably more potent than you realise. In other words, the promotional medium matches the message, which is, as the book's blurb puts it, "The future is closer than you think." The brief moment when one is taken in by the video(s) or website -- if it happens this way for you -- thereby entertaining the reality of the fictitious premise, may be accompanied by a minor shock that such a thing could be possible, or already here (future-shock therapy).

Now, from a foresight communication perspective, there's a tricky balance to be struck in all this, which we face in designing experiential or immersive scenarios. The depiction of a near-term future may come across as more urgent, more frightening (for example), and more likely to be mistaken for actual fact, while being less responsive to intervention (since there's less time to do something about it); whereas a further-out scenario, in terms of timeline and plausibility, may allow more scope for action (i.e., avoid or pursue), yet could be less likely to seem salient, and hence to find or engage an audience. This dilemma may be of little concern where the primary goal is to entertain, but it's important for a futurist attempting to generate present-day traction for real problems and opportunities on (or over) the horizon. Only once have I been involved in experientially manifesting a scenario that could on closer inspection still be regarded as plausibly happening at that moment, as opposed to decades into the future; it gained attention, but as much for the strategy itself as for the issues it raised [link]. I've also seen scenaric possibilities that would be far more impactful in reality being dismissed or ignored altogether, where they are understood from the beginning as "art", or a mere "exercise".

In-scenario communication elements can draw criticism for their supposed deceptive qualities, even though often, as with this particular example, the dislocation isn't meant to last, and it's not at all difficult to debunk. From the WSJ article:

HarperCollins says the approach reflects Mr. Crichton's innovative style and is intended to be provocative and mysterious. "It's not about fooling people," says Kathy Schneider, associate publisher of the HarperCollins imprint. "It's about creating a playful add-on to the book."

Well, I guess the publisher would have to say that, even if it weren't the case. Another view, from Steve Bryant of The Hollywood Reporter [original; subscription required]:

Don't call HarperCollins' plan a hoax, though. That's ascribing too much narrative depth to a transparent scheme that isn't intended to fool the doggedly curious but to coddle the easily bemused. Rather, HarperCollins' plan is more of a "faux hoax," a mystery that winks at you. Subtle enough to be interesting and transparent enough to be followed, the videos gin up interest and eventual sales.

It all depends on how it's done; but such campaigns raise questions about to what degree, or for how long, an audience is "deceived", and also what ethical (or legal) consequences may flow from this. Jake Dunagan and I maintain that, in many cases, "it makes more sense to be surprised by a simulation than blindsided by reality" [see comments]. Still, both the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome (where people become inured to false alarms), and people's justifiably adverse reactions to the sense of having someone try to fool them, are hazards of working in this space.

The tagline "Your destiny is no longer in question", at the top of this post, is a semi-sinister figment of NEXTgencode's fictitious in-scenario website. It's one of several elements about the videos and site that satirically represent the intrusion of genetic science into our lives (with what combination of serious and jocular intent, it's hard to tell). And it's arguably more interesting for these -- what are they; future? alternate-reality? however you cut it, ambiguous -- artifacts to occupy a grey zone than to profess an earnest black-or-white adherence to either ideology or comedy. Not that they're brilliant, but from a public discourse perspective they are probably more effective and interesting (though much less profitable) than the book. Bryant again:

A clever Web hoax is the kind of ancillary content that can be even more useful and engaging than the original content itself.

Indeed.

The irony here is that Crichton, a veteran of these epistemological borderlands, has publicly emphasised the importance of being able to separate the two in the midst of our info-glutted media environment. In a 02003 speech which made an impression on me when I came across it online several years ago, he says:

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

The original context has to do with certain claims of environmentalists which he characterises as ideologically driven and overblown (while others make much the same argument about his sceptical stance on climate change), but the epistemic challenge he points out remains valid and troubling.

Still, I disagree that it is the most important issue we face. Arguably its equal is the transformative power of our socio-technical process, coupled with our collective unwillingness to take responsibility for its possible outcomes. The melding of fact and fiction, the rigorous exercise of the imagination, the practise of futures studies, have much to offer here. And as alternate reality games, and massively multiplayer forecasting, continue to come into their own, I wonder if more of us will see some value in the deliberate -- not mischievous or pranksterish, but deliberate and temporary -- dimming of the too-bright border between fact and fiction. Where our "destiny" is always in question.

This is where the future lives.

[NEXTgencode videos and website]

Related posts:
> Don't break the universe
> Behold: a disturbing hole!

(Thanks for reminding me about this one, Matt.)

Play money

#6 Soylent Corp.
Headquarters: New York, N.Y. | Industry: Processed & Packaged Goods
CEO: William R. Simonson | Est. 2007 sales: $157.1 billion
"Exclusive provider of U.S. government synthetic-food rations. [...] Rumors abound regarding composition of the tasty, brightly colored wafers; Soylent Corp. describes them as "a miracle food of high-energy plankton," but critics claim they might be made of something less appetizing."
[Forbes | IMDB]

U.S. business magazine Forbes ("The Capitalist Tool") is famous for lists such as the annual "Forbes 400" which ranks America's wealthiest 400 individuals.

Back in December, Forbes published for the first time a suprisingly playful, and deeply geeky feature on "The Forbes Fictional 15" [article], a sort of alternate reality rich-list topped by Scrooge McDuck. It was accompanied by a ranking of "The 25 Largest Fictional Companies" [slideshow], in which a hodgepodge of sci-fi and fantasy corporate creations from literature, cinema and cartoons vie for the top spot. Just like in real life!

It came as a surprise to find so deadly serious a subject as money treated with almost cavalier levity by these guys.

Then, on second thought, it struck me as stunningly appropriate that fictional corporations -- the explicitly made-up counterparts to those astonishing artificial entities that comprise some of the most significant protagonists in the fantastical otherworld of the global economy -- be given the league-table treatment. Finance is a game, after all.

#1 Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM)
Pharmaceuticals giant featured in Dune.

#4 MomCorp
Intra-solar conglomerate featured in Futurama.

#10 Tyrell Corp.
Maker of highly realistic androids, featured in Blade Runner.

#14 Umbrella Corp.
Shadowy London-based pharmaceutical company featured in Resident Evil.

#20 Cyberdyne Systems Corp.
Defence contractor featured in The Terminator.

#25 Spacely Space Sprockets
Cosmo Spacely's sprocket manufacturing concern, featured in The Jetsons.

Incidentally, the (entirely serious) 02008 Forbes 400 was published yesterday, and the total net worth of the 400 amounted to $1.57 trillion. According to my calculations using figures from the World Bank ["GDP 2007" pdf], that's more than the aggregate 02007 Gross Domestic Product of two thirds of the world's countries -- all but 61 of 185, or to say it another way, every economy from Croatia on down -- put together.

I think I prefer the fictional list.

(via Noise is Information)

Imagining Africa

Image via City of Cape Town official website

Over at sci-fi blog io9, Charlie Jane Anders has posted about an award winning short story by South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes.  "Poison" recently won the 02008 Caine Prize, Africa's highest literary honour. An extract:

The cloud was creeping higher behind her back, casting a dull murk, not solid enough to be shadow. She could see veils of dirty rain bleeding from its near edge. Earlier, in the city, she had heard sirens, helicopters in the sky; but there were none out here. It was silent. Standing alone on the highway was unnerving. This was for cars. The road surface was not meant to be touched with hands or feet, to be examined too closely or in stillness. The four lanes were so wide. Even the white lines and the gaps between them were much longer than they appeared from the car: the length of her whole body, were she to lie down in the road. She had to stop herself looking over her shoulder, flinching from invisible cars coming up from behind.

It's a tightly written, evocative read (find it in full at The Guardian). A day after the award was announced, Rose-Innes spoke with the Saudi Gazette:

Asked whether she thinks "Poison" taps into the wider anxiety pervading the globe, while having a specific South African context, Rose-Innes replies: "I think it’s in the zeitgeist. There’s a trend towards apocalyptic images in popular culture at the moment...The world is a pretty anxiety-ridden place, although at the time of writing the story it felt like it was very much embedded in the South African situation specifically".

Apocalyptic stories have "a weird attraction; part of me is drawn to the idea of everything being wiped away and starting again anew." She was a fan of science fiction when she was younger and "it’s interesting for me that a lot of those classic science fiction scenarios seem to have been discovered anew by mainstream literary authors."

~Susannah Tarbush, "Disquieting metaphor for our anxiety-ridden times", Saudi Gazette, 14 July 02008 [see also the tanjara

Now, while the question of whether this story ought to be classified as science fiction sensu stricto may be debated by some, what's more interesting to me is that its success has helped focus attention on the state of the genre in Africa. The story caught my attention because yesterday, flying out west to San Francisco, I got around to reading an article by futurists Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic about a very similar topic ("Futures dreaming outside and on the margins of the western world", Futures 35(5), 493-507, June 02003: via IngentaConnect [subscription only]; via Metafuture). The authors make a case for broadening and diversifying science fiction, both in how we understand the application of the term, as well as in the number and variety of cultural perspectives presented through the genre. Through the former line of argument, they suggest that sci-fi equivalents exist in all cultures, even if they aren't visible or appreciated as such; while through the latter, they lament the actual dominance (presumably, in terms of both volume and visibility) of "western" science fiction.

While there is science fiction in all cultures, it is only the west that has systematized science and fiction, made it into an industrial endeavor, and created a particular brand of literature called science fiction. [p. 500]
...
Taking a paradigmatic view, to assert that science fiction exists only in the west is merely to favor one particular form of a much wider endeavor. Science fiction thus should not merely be about the technological as defined in forward time but the creation of plausible future worlds from a range of civilizational perspectives. Science fiction is not just about debating the consequences of scientific progress. It is also about creating utopian or at least eutopian (the good not perfect) societies of
the future. [p. 495]

I can't help thinking that the term science fiction is itself responsible for some confusion here. As I've argued before:

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.

I find myself in agreement, then, with the drive to encourage elaboration and dissemination of alternative imaginaries, as prescribed by Milojevic and Inayatullah, even if I'm a little wary of "science fiction" as a label. The open-ended, pluripotent future with its endless possible settings and interpretations is an ideal place to call eutopian dreams into discussion.

Having said that, "Poison" is no cheerful portrait of a dream-come-true. Thematically, it wouldn't have been out of place in last year's groundbreaking alternate reality game, World Without Oil, which saw players around the world produce stories, in writing as well as other media, imagining the effects of an oil crisis on their lives. Also, with minimal editing, the action could be transposed to any number of other settings in Australia, Britain, or Canada (all places where I've lived) or the U.S. (where I live now).

This may be African science fiction, but the author acknowledges its roots lie in a global mood of apocalyptic anticipation which is grimly plausible almost anywhere.

So, while we may hope to find in African (or other) science fiction some kind of radical antidote to the limits of "Western" imagination; we may find instead that imagination is most appropriately located within individuals-in-a-context, not in monolithic cultures. In the interest of pluralism, I agree that to have many voices is better than to privilege a few. In the massively collaborative process of future-making, the variety of expression, through specific stories, ideas, and possibilities that play into and reinforce (on one hand) or challenge and undermine (on the other) is enormously important. But to be clear: the key question isn't merely whether a sci-fi story is "Western" or not in origin. It's whether (and how) it addresses, be it in endorsement or in dissent, the array of images of the future that we hold in our hearts and minds. I need scarcely add that "we" are many and varied, readers as well as writers.

No one can force anyone to think outside the box they live in, but given the opportunity, the future will irresistibly beckon to some of the people, some of the time, as a horizon of exploration: where today's impossible becomes a different normal.

Consequently, some African sci-fi is sure to look highly familiar. And some won't.

Kenyan writer John Rugoiyo Gichuki set an award-winning play Eternal, Forever in the year 02410, with the United States of Africa riding the cutting edge of technological advance. Gichuki says:

There is always cyclical development.

The British Empire was big. Now America is there. Maybe in the next 50 years it’s going to be the Chinese. Maybe in 100 years it’s going to be Africa.

A nice concept: Africa as cradle of posthumanity.

Related posts:
> The Darfur Olympics
> Colonising the future... on film
> Neill Blomkamp, visual futurist

(Thanks Rachel!)

Posthuman New York

"If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish."
~Jonas Salk (attrib. by Sir Ken Robinson, TED, Monterey, February 02006)

2 days: New York City subway system floods
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

2-4 years: Weed covered streets cave in
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

300 years: New York's suspension bridges have fallen
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

Image: Mondolithic

Wending its way to me through the US Postal Service as I type is Alan Weisman's 02007 book The World Without Us, described by Bill McKibben (quoted in a spooky animated intro to the book's website) as "one of the grandest thought experiments of our time" -- in principle, right up the proverbial alley of the sceptical futuryst.

The book imagines "what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished [...] a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house" (from a New Yorker review extracted at Amazon). When I first heard about it, I assumed for some reason that it was a picture book, which turns out not to be the case. But these days a compelling bit of apocalyptic fantasy doesn't seem to be confined to text for long, and in July 02007, an interview with Weisman appeared in Scientific American accompanied by a series of illustrations envisaging the gradual decay of New York City. These were produced by Mondolithic Studios, an illustration and design firm in Vancouver with a strong record in futuristic and science fiction imagery.

On the basis of this work, report the artists, an additional image along the same lines was commissioned by Expresso magazine in Lisbon, Portugal, depicting the city's 25 de Abril Bridge, to lend local flavour to their coverage (see below). It was incorporated into a slideshow at the magazine's website posted 26 October 02007 (and featuring the theme from Blade Runner as background music!)

Lisboa e a ponte 25 de Abril vistas de Almada, 300 anos depois
Image: Mondolithic

I'm fascinated to learn that a feature film adaptation of The World Without Us is in the works, slated for release in 02009 (there's a pdf prospectus at the book's website). It's being scripted by Michel Fessler (March of the Penguins) and directed by Jacques Malaterre, who made a three-part documentary series called A Species' Odyssey (review) about the evolution of humanity.

I'll reserve judgment on all this until I actually get a chance to read the book, but I want to say I find The World Without Us phenomenon interesting for two reasons.

The first is the fact that this "thought experiment", though initiated in text, simply begs to be manifested visually. Regular readers of t.s.f. will be thoroughly unsurprised that I see here an example of my usual contention; that good quality futures thinking wants to be more visual and visceral than it has been hitherto. This is the way to get through to people. I hope, of course, that the film version manages to deliver on the tantalising promise suggested by these eerily beautiful images dreamed up by the artists at Mondolithic. What impact the film might have, if any, I can't really say anything meaningful about for now.

The second point I want to make -- as much a bookmark for my own future reference as anything -- is that, while addressing what may seem a rather morbid theme, its popularity suggests a resonance with what I see as our contemporary mood of pop existentialism, associated with big-picture threats such as climate change. (The book has spent several months on the NY Times best seller list, and is currently #25.) I can't do justice to this line of thought here, but in short (and contrary to the pejorative reading it may invite -- "we're narcissistically obsessed with our own demise"), I wonder if this couldn't more helpfully be regarded as positive evidence of a sort of coming of age. There may be, it seems to me, a long delayed and long denied -- especially in callow Western culture -- collective realisation of our species' mortality, akin to the experience each of us has in our childhood or youth of awakening to the prospect of our own death, out there on the horizon. It's the same thing I think about when I consider Jared Diamond's bestselling book Collapse -- that these kinds of salutary thoughts are gaining currency might be seen as signs of emerging maturity.

Maybe.



(From the movie outline:)

Given the rapidly increasing human population and the phenomenal reach of our technologies, humankind has been become a real force of nature. Human activities have shaped our planet for better or for worse. We are involuntarily changing the climate; alerting, polluting and eradicating ecosystems; and driving evolution as other organisms struggle to adapt to a new human-made world. So, what if humankind suddenly vanished?

Mars Products

The three shops opened their doors to the public at ten A.M., on the tenth of March -- in local time and day. In New York, the letters spelling out MARS PRODUCTS had been displayed for eight days, and a good deal of curiosity had been aroused, both among the public and the press. But until actual opening, no information had been offered.

During those days, four objects had been on display in the shop windows. No doubt the reader of this précis has seen or examined these objects, each of which stood upon a small crystal display-stand, framed in black velvet, for all the world like precious jewels, which in a sense they were. The display consisted of a clock, an adding machine, an outboard motor and a music box...
[...]
This advertisement was hardly the first word in the press concerning the Martian shops. Already, every columnist had carried an item or two about what was, without question one of the most imaginative and novel publicity schemes of the space age.

Futurist colleague Howard Rheingold, in Honolulu with his family last week, drew to our attention a 01959 science fiction short story by Howard Fast (01914-02003) called "The Martian Shop".

Fast, a versatile, prolific, and politically conscientious writer, was at one time a member of the American Communist Party and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He may be known to movie buffs for Spartacus, a novel which he started writing while serving three months in prison for contempt of Congress, and on which the Stanley Kubrick film was based.

Anyway, the work we've been doing with public installations of future artifacts reminded Rheingold of the story, a nifty account of the intriguing, sudden appearance of luxury stores showcasing Martian technology in Tokyo, Paris and New York. Fiction, yes, but a tale of proto-future-shock therapy nonetheless (or so I'd like to think).

The full text of "The Martian Shop" can be found here. It's well worth a read.

Thanks, Howards!

Don't break the universe

In my view, one of the best feature films of the last ten years is the scintillating Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gondry, 02004). While researching it for a term paper, I discovered that the story originated with a kind of "found futures" art concept...

It all started at a Brussels restaurant when my friend and artist Pierre Bismuth challenged me with this concept: "What if in your mail you find a kind of official card stipulating: 'We are acknowledging, Monsieur Gondry Michel, that Lisa Brook had you erased from her memory. Please don't try to reach her.' Pierre wanted to randomly send these cards to people and study their reaction."

~From director Michel Gondry's introduction to the film's Shooting Script (02004, Newmarket, p. vii)

Gondry found this idea too enthralling for it to remain a small scale performance art project, and the rest is movie history. In case you haven't seen it yet -- well, first of all, you should, but it shouldn't spoil the experience for you to keep reading now -- the story plays extensively with layers of perception and time, so frequently you're unsure whether what's onscreen is the "real time" experience of the characters, a reconstructed recollection, or a fantastic composite of elements. It takes at least a couple of viewings to keep your bearings throughout, which oddly does not detract from enjoyment, but rather (for this viewer at least) deepens it.

I am fascinated with the idea of actually doing what Bismuth only got so far as suggesting, an influence which probably manifested in our recent postcards-from-the-future campaign (a connection that's far more obvious in retrospect). But, though Bismuth's splendid guerilla art initiative was duly sacrificed for the benefit of the larger audience eventually reached by Eternal Sunshine, it's interesting -- and, it seems to me, telling -- that part of the film's promotional strategy involved taking this thought experiment (what if selective memory erasure were possible?) and carrying it into "realistic" (tongue-in-cheek, yes, but attempts at stylistically and diegetically consistent) "artifacts" from the world of the film.

The memory-erasure company's website: http://www.lacunainc.com/home.html

And a low-rent TV spot:

I can't yet fully articulate what it is that works (or does not) about Eternal Sunshine's example, regarding the maintenance of coherence in the way scenarios are communicated -- the art of diegesis. But I think designer Matt Jensen (aka Tokyocrunch), is right on target in his terrific response to the "Simpsons simulacrum" post which recently appeared here:

I was similarly disheartened by the compromises the Kwik-E-Mart promotion made to the fourth wall (plastic stand-ups? blech.). [...] Promoverkill like this is a testament to the flatness of marketers and their unwillingness to accept the power of the cognitive bridges we, as a semi-intelligent audience, build between concepts. [...] It seems an awful waste of effort to build a universe only to break it.

The artifact's universe is a fragile creation whose creators undermine the beauty and -- I think this is a the key word -- integrity of what they make, with flashing arrows and elbows in the ribs. Jensen again:

I'd imagine that somewhere on that oh-so-authentic KrustyO's box is a reminder of the movie opening date and official movie URL, just like they have on the "real" boxes in the animated universe. [...] As if an ever-present box of KrustyO's on your kitchen shelf wasn't reminder enough that your obsession was soon to grace the big screen? Can we not connect our own dots in whatsoever way we choose to arrange them?

Plastic cutouts of Simpsons characters in Kwik-E-Mart; KrustyO's boxes with extrascenario URLs to make sure you don't miss the point. Similarly, and sadly, a picture of Eternal Sunshine's star Jim Carrey whose unassuming character just happens to be profiled on the memory erasure firm's website. Sigh.

Don't break the universe could be a good starting point, a rule of thumb for scenaric integrity. But whose universe is this? Let's be clear: an artifact from the future (or an imagined parallel present) is in a sort of competition for ontological authority with the consensual "real world" (the one within which you're building a Kwik-E-Mart, or Lacuna website). The difference is, I think, that the supposedly consensual universe was made to be broken (or rather, remade). But designers of artifacts and stories intended to transport us elsewhere -- whether for commercial, entertainment, or more explicitly transformative purposes -- can shatter their own fragile creations all too easily. And from the concerned futuryst's point of view, then, the transformative potential of experiential intensity embedded in these interloper artifacts (these competing realities) is weakened the more they concede.

Well, more on this to come, but tomorrow morning I'll be heading home to Black Rock City for a second time. Plenty of wide open space out there on the playa to facilitate reflection on artifacts from the future, and life's other conundrums.

/To be continued.../

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.

Brand runner

Still from Blade Runner (01982) via Paleofuture.

I have written here before about the centrality of "images of the future" to the study of alternative futures, most recently in relation to the intriguing "future documentary" genre. Last week in one of my classes, we watched extracts from a much more mainstream source -- the Hollywood dream factory -- in the form of Blade Runner. I'll resist providing a recap of the story here -- an exercise unnecessary for those who have seen it and inadvisable for those who have not; suffice it to say that anyone who reads this weblog is encouraged to see Ridley Scott's marvellously realised 01982 dystopian sci-fi film noir.

This movie is notable, from a futurist's point of view, for at least two reasons. First, it is exceptionally well thought out, as reflected in, for instance, its ranking as the best "futurist movie" of all time according to Josh Calder's Futurist at the Movies website. On a list of 118 films, it comes out no. 1 overall across ratings for futurism, entertainment, and plausibility. With a 9/10 score, it is also the highest rated on the first of those three metrics, which addresses the quality of the scenario presented: "Is the movie a thoughtful, coherent view of the future? Does it present something innovative? Does it depict an elaborate scenario, an event, or a single variable?" (The strength of the scenario is certainly due, in part, to its provenance as a story by the brilliantly twisted Philip K. Dick, whose work has also inspired Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, and -- you can't win 'em all -- Paycheck, featuring the lamentable Ben Affleck.) Second, it actually names in the credits a "Visual Futurist", Syd Mead. Few "science-fiction" films bear the marks of such careful visual craftsmanship, and the reward here is that even 25 years later, the look of the film (which is set in 02019) though dated, does not come off as silly as you might expect. Granted, the heyday of the flying-car future may have passed some time back, but the atmosphere and gritty realism of the genre convention lends the story, and especially the setting, Scott's Los Angeles of twelve years hence a sort of counterfictional coherence all its own.

But in particular, it was a memorable shot of a huge advertising billboard for Coca-Cola on the side of an enormous skyscraper in this future megalopolis (see image above), one of the more obvious of many brand-brandishing moments in the film, which led me to wonder about the state of play around the advertising strategy of product placement in the movies (what it is; how it works).

What people consume visually does seem to have significant potential to affect their buying habits; for instance, last week it was reported that white American teenagers exposed to R-rated movies are far more likely to smoke than their non movie-watching counterparts. And broadly, the trend towards integration of advertising with storytelling has been well established. In the era of "most repeatable programming" (Steven Johnson) when every frame of a successful movie -- later, DVD -- release may be watched tens or hundreds of times over, guaranteeing brand exposure to an attentive viewership over many years, from the advertiser's perspective this may prove a better investment than TV commercial broadcasts during prime-time. (Of course, such a payoff is contingent on the success of the film, making product placement, like other aspects of film production, a giant gamble on the fickle tastes of the crowd.) Even so, it's no surprise that one Hollywood producer quoted in a Slate article suggests that "Product placement gigs will become a major source of production financing in the future". But as interesting as that trend may be, it is not the future of product placement that interests me here: rather, it's product placement in "the future".

Products may appear in filmed futures for a spectrum of reasons, from the artistically defensible to the purely commercial. From a filmmaker's point of view, brands onscreen may legitimately enable greater verisimilitude with, or even critique of, a commercialised future (for example, Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future Part II, made in 01989 but set in 02015, jokes about the then-seemingly endless Jaws franchise). On the other hand, it can also come across as crass commercialisation -- selling out the future. One business writer, marvelling at a recent "science fiction" movie that somehow seemed to resist the product placement rush, observed: "It may very well be that product placements continue to work in contempory movie situations but blatantly extending brands hundreds of years into the future risks a backlash from consumers." The criminally underrated Mike Judge satire Idiocracy (02006) subversively hopes to generate exactly that, by depicting the cultural vacuity of a future America after 500 years of unabated commercialisation and dumbing-down. The brands referenced therein -- some disguised more artfully than others -- appear more in the vein of grim social commentary than cinematic salesmanship, the latter being better exemplified by the likes of I, Robot (seen as success; seen as sellout; on striking the balance).

So it's a complex matter to determine how and to what extent such appearances work alternately to promote or condemn a product. But the fact remains that stories set in the future are used by commercial vendors to sell their wares. Blade Runner alone features not only the Coke billboard, but also, according to one eagle-eyed observer, some thirty other products and brands; the fortunes of several of which plummeted in the years following the film's release, which unofficially earned it an interesting reputation for being "cursed". (Whether there was any causal connection here, or if this even represented higher than the average attrition rate for companies falling on tough times, perhaps readers of this blog would know how to find out better than I do.) Filling in the futurescape with current brand-names proceeds apace -- take any big-ticket American movie with an explicitly future setting, and I wager you'll be able to find prominent signs of brand-name involvement in bringing that story to the screen... see for yourself.

So, a question that crossed my mind was this: Do advertisers pay a premium for the privilege of implanting their products in the futurescape of viewers? I found this article from The New York Times in 01993:

An auto maker with a glorious past is using a film of the present to reassure consumers that it has a future. When Warner Brothers opens "Demolition Man" today at more than 2,000 theaters nationwide, moviegoers watching Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes play cop and robber in the year 2032 can see the results of an unusual product placement promotion by the Oldsmobile division of General Motors.

Rather than simply helping to sell more cars, the promotion is intended to burnish the images of Oldsmobile and G.M. by linking them to the presumed technological wonders of tomorrow.

"We felt being involved in this movie, set in the future, would send a subtle message to the public that G.M. was alive and well in 2032," said Eric Dahlquist, president at the Vista Group, a product exposure management company in Van Nuys, Calif., that handles promotional activities like product placement and licensing.

It seems movie product placement represents a sort of speculative bidding on mental real estate (Terry Rossio), motivated by the investor's hope that the film in question will endure. At best, it could even become a classic, taking the product along for the ride into movie history, becoming a staple of our diet of visual culture -- an evergreen advertisement. But this strategy also stakes a deeper claim in the ideational landscape, sending a "subtle message" that not only the product or brand, and the sponsoring company, but indeed the matrix of political, economic and social practices that underpins it all, are all "alive and well" in the future shown. When a Lexus appears in Minority Report (released 02002, set in 02054) it's not just branding cars in that filmic universe, for is it not meanwhile claiming some sort of legitimacy or plausibility for a world in which individualistic and resource-intensive car culture -- more highly technologised, but still fully recognisable -- thrives for another half-century?

The broader issue of interest here becomes whether product placement in a future setting is always merely a superficial detail of how a story gets told; or whether, by contrast -- even in the best of cinematic "science-fiction" -- it's somehow integral to 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. To what extent, then, does that huge Coke poster simply project and reinscribe the assumptions of the filmmaker's present, and to what extent does it enable us to scrutinise and critique them?

/To be continued.../

[* Updated 11 Sept 02016: replaced original broken image at top of post.]

Tombstone and the future of history

"The town too tough to die." That's the proud slogan of Tombstone, which perches in splendid isolation at the eastern fringe of the Sonoran desert, an hour's drive southeast of the city of Tucson, Arizona, and about 30 miles north of the Mexican border. I've come to Tucson for the weekend, and since my friend mysteriously failed to pick me up at the airport two days ago, I've had to improvise an alternative agenda. So it is that I find myself sharing a rental car with four other young travellers, hailing from Bermuda, Liverpool and Utrecht, all fellow denizens of a hostel a short walk from downtown Tucson. Unlike me, all are in their early twenties and in the midst of their respective trans-continental quests to "see America". Today, Tombstone is our chosen day-trip destination.

As no visitor to the area can fail to notice, this settlement, which some 1,600 souls call home, prides itself on being an icon of the Wild West. As a tourist attraction, it taps into that lucrative cultural reservoir of collective memory, part history and part myth, which has been immortalised -- or, to those inclined to emphasise the latter ingredient, generated -- by a thousand movies. The town's excellent name is perhaps one of the most effective imaginable evocations of hardbitten frontiersmen and devil-may-care gunslingers (possibly outdone only by the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico -- although in point of fact that town was actually named after a radio show in the 1950s). Tombstone's real claim to fame, however, is that it was the site of the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881. Though the original event has long since passed, thankfully you can enjoy a re-enactment any time you care to visit: "Gunfight daily!" cry the billboards scattered en route.

Probably like many others unfamiliar with these parts, what I know about the actual history of the colonisation of the West by European Americans could fit comfortably on the back of a postage stamp, and despite my passion for cinema, the western is surely the genre of American film with which I'm least familiar. Even so, the look and feel, the sensibility, or mythos invoked here is so familiar from culture (and yet so remote from my own experience) that in my mind it is the very essence of B-movie cliche: hard stares, bold moustaches, stray bullets, and dust.

Why did I come here? I have no satisfactory answer to that question. I don't know what to make of the fact that I am spending time and money in this bone-dry, baking hot place in the middle of nowhere. But while pondering that I'm put in mind of an interesting comparison. While I was studying at the University of Melbourne at the turn of the century, part of my family lived in Ballarat, Victoria, an hour and a half away; a town founded during southeast Australia's gold rush. Ballarat has a major tourist attraction named Sovereign Hill, a recreated 01860s gold mining settlement and so-called "living museum". There are certain historical and aesthetic similarities -- both places are recreated frontier towns in the New World (albeit on different continents, though you'd be hard-pressed to pick that from appearances only) and owe their existence to the mid-to-late 19th century mad dash of prospectors seeking precious metals. Both are filled with wooden buildings, have walls adorned with ersatz parchmenty official looking posters, and have horses regularly clopping past, carts and passengers in tow... But whereas Sovereign Hill is a paid-admission only, privately owned attraction in its own right, near but not integrated with the modern city of Ballarat with its 80,000 inhabitants or so, the town of Tombstone, which is a place where people actually live and work in the early 21st century, is itself the attraction. Here ordinary life overlaps with the historical streetscape that is maintained by dint of tight local regulations, and which has made it a nationally listed attraction since the 01960s. Sovereign Hill is at pains to provide some kind of sense of life in the era (it has a working mine set up, you can pan for gold, there are educational programs including a school in which children can experience the classroom of a bygone era, writing out lines with a quill and inkwell). In Tombstone, by contrast, there are no fences between the dusty street and the desert -- the centre of the original town is itself the attraction -- but as a result, modern life keeps intruding. There are Harley Davidson motorcycles parked everywhere. You have to pay to get into the OK Corral. Every store is jammed full of souvenirs. (Oddly, visiting the town, and commemorating -- or commodifying -- your visit for future reference are merged, so seeing all those souvenirs and witty posters through every doorway inevitably becomes one of the main recollections you take away.) It's a place where people live, but to seems to operate almost entirely at the level of appearances and legend, throwing back to the Hollywood-made mythos. This creates a kind of paradox: the real town of Tombstone contrives to deliver a far more crassly commercial and less authentic experience of history as it might have been than the thoroughly controlled simulacrum at Sovereign Hill.

So, the weekend we're here, as it happens, the United States marks Memorial Day, which is an opportunity to celebrate the sacrifice of servicemen in the country's growing list of wars. But it's "Wyatt Earp Days" in Tombstone. This makes it one of two occasions annually when people descend on Tombstone to stroll around dressed gloriously in 01880s style -- the other is the 26 October anniversary of the O.K. Corral showdown. It is impossible to say in most cases which of these elegantly dressed are locals pandering to tourists, and which are tourists indulging their own eccentric hobby. I overhear one woman, elaborately dressed in heavy dresses, gleefully declaring that "We came here once and keep coming back!" At first I'm puzzled as to what the attraction could be -- wandering around in an overheated costume for a weekend. However, my fellow hostellers can't resist having their photos taken with a dapper couple in Wild West regalia who turned out to be repeat visitors from Michigan, and I begin to see how this role play could be fun: authenticity might be much less of a concern than the thrill of participating in the illusion, like actors on the stage.

What a place to visit! But what must it be like to live here? Evidently there are certain costs to living in a museum. I meet a bright eyed young lady behind the counter at a wild west outfitter. She's perhaps 16 or 17 years old, wearing a black dress recalling Jody Foster in "Maverick". I ask her about what it's like to live here. She explains that she didn't grow up in this town, but is originally from California, and her mother had decamped here in pursuit of her dream home -- a 01904 Victorian. Clearly, for a young woman, though, it's almost unbearably boring. "I'd love a skyscraper here," she says wistfully. "Or a McDonald's, a drive-in theater... anything!" Earlier this year, it seems the streets were restored to their unpaved state by the Tombstone Restoration Committee, because the asphalt may have endangered its coveted designation as a National Historic District. It's an interesting situation when an American town reverts to stones and dust in search of authenticity. And it is not unanimously appreciated, either. One of our group spotted a flyer in one of the store windows alluding to this, evidently an ongoing dispute in the town -- should the dust stay, or should it go?

What keeps these streets dusty in 02006 is a myth that is too tough to die. We feed the myths with our attention. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." What then of the future of Tombstone? Well, if Rukeyser is right, then as long as its stories persist, it seems Tombstone's viability as a place to visit, its existence in our universe, is assured. The most recent contributions to this corpus of storytelling, as far as Tombstone is concerned, are the movies Wyatt Earp (1994, starring Kevin Costner) and Tombstone (1993, with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer). As one storekeeper remarked to me, there was a major resurgence of tourist interest in the area after these films came out. In fact, many of the souvenir posters and t-shirts for sale here feature those stars' faces rather than the less recognisable ones of the town's real historical inhabitants.

I asked my travelling companions whether they could think of anything interesting or special going on in our own era that people might see fit to devote their lives to preserving in this fashion in 130 years' time. We couldn't think of anything offhand. (Maybe, with our emerging ironic postmodern sensibilities, the real story in the future will be the idea of people dressing up their bodies, and dressing down their streets, to "recreate" the surface layer of a long-gone past.) Perhaps Michael Crichton's 1973 sci-fi movie Westworld had the right idea: the tourist attraction of the future could be a theme park which faithfully recreates the favourite, most highly mythologised times and places in the popular imaginary -- history's greatest hits. In Crichton's story, a whole Wild West theme park is populated with human-looking robots that can, at least in theory, be safely exploited by the (human) guests who pay a premium to satiate their appetites for realistic brothels and gunfights.

I picture that young lady from the clothing store getting her wish: a skyscraper in Tombstone -- now that would be worth seeing! You could put the whole town's population inside, with a spectacular, towering view of the surrounding landscape, and let the tourists amuse themselves by tussling with robots in the dust below. If our stories shape our world, we should choose them wisely. There are surely some sacrifices associated with making a living off the past, and this shrine to a past that I suspect in many ways never really existed, though fascinating, raises a lot of questions. Among them: what might a settlement be like that evinced as much devotion to its futures as Tombstone, Arizona does to its history?