Saturday, January 05, 2013

WHAT WILL THE FUTURE THINK OF US?


First of all, I don't think much of what we see around us now will survive to reach the future. All the plastic containers and ads, all the iphones and books...all that stuff will be incinerated by successors who just want to get rid of the clutter.  One thing that might survive, oddly enough, is hard wood furniture because old growth wood will become a luxury item as forests disappear. If you have a message to convey to the future you might consider carving it on the bottom of your wooden dining room table if you have a nice one.


I'm glad we have a Library of Congress and a Smithsonian but these institutions are vulnerable to fire and war, and to the apathy of the public if the culture no longer values what's in them. My guess is that most of what's in those institutions is sitting in Bekins Storage-type warehouses in the area around Washington D.C.  A fire in a single Maryland Bekins could wipe out a whole chunk of American history that's preserved there.



Then too, what the Smithsonian decides to keep is problematic. The history of a  powerful lobby like feminism might be secure unless America converts to Islam, but less powerful interests will go undocumented. We only have pictures of some of the great jazz musicians because a single individual decided to photograph them. The Smithsonian never photographed Spumco. The Savoy Ballroom and the Jitterbug weren't much covered by Smithsonian photographers. The dancing in Black clubs today is underdocumented in pictures.



My prediction for the future is that it will ransack the past for inspiration in every cultural area.  If you were to step out of a time machine in the future you'd see buildings benefiting from the latest technology to be sure, but you'd also see recreations of Fort Apache, old pagodas, the Parthenon and 50s "Googie" diners. The 20th Century will be well represented because epochs that creative are few and far between and the future will want to understand how we did it.

My guess is that the future will delight in imagining how we lived in our time. They won't hold our limited technology against us, they'll envy us in some respects. I picture levitating brains of the far future doing cosplay recreations of what it was like to be a cartoonist at Spumco. Wearing all wrong interpretations of the clothing of our time, they'll meet in clubhouses and try to recreate a typical morning at Spumco of the 1990s:



BRAIN #1: "Greetings Jun Krid-faal-lucy (John Kricfalusi)!"

BRAIN #2: Greetings "Veen-send Wahl-lair (Vincent Waller)! Let us have a Gog Session (a gag session)!"

The brains, dragging faux blue jeans from their undercarriage and wearing knitted Superfly hats, levitate to a room with a conference table.



BRAIN #1: "Okay, I have a gog that is quite humorous: The Ren dog gets into a sanitizing water container and furts (farts). Ha-ha-ha-ha."

BRAIN #2: "Er...what is a furt?"

BRAIN#1: "Um...I don't know, but a methane bubble is created."

BRAIN #2: "A bubble? Hmmmm. Let us have two bubbles to make it twice as good! Ha-ha-ha-ha."

And so on........

13 comments:

kurtwil said...

Interesting post, Eddie.
It seems any current culture disses an older one, especially for technological aspects.
Still, at the aerospace museum I docent at, our guests are amazed by 60's rocket technology created mainly by slide ruler and physical testing. It helps that we have a Titan II standing upright, essentially intact, inside our museum.

For years, visual technology ala film FX and animation appears bi-polar. Technology drives production tools forward, while the creative climates, usually trying for quick, easy profits, recycles previous creations into new forms or along slightly new tangents. On horizon (perhaps this decade) will be AI computers creating animated stories from submitted scripts - no humans or chimps required.

Also, many filmmakers tinker with their previous creations to "improve" them. Would Disney's SNOW WHITE become "better" with a Dolby 7.1 soundtrack of new cast members reciting the original lo-fi dialog?

JK could motion capture old Spumco animation into 3D figures and animation to "update" them. But fortunately he chooses to create new animation with new tools, using real people.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Kurt: True! Adapting old 2D characters to 3D is a bad idea. Most characters work best in the medium they were created for.

I guess there are exceptions, though. The best animated Popeyes were good adaptions of the newspaper strip.

Unknown said...

I think the future will think that we were stupid for even proposing a dumb idea like a trillion dollar coin to pay part of the country's debt off or how we had a scumbag college professor like Louis Seidman write an article called "Let's Give Up on The Constitution" in The New York Times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnR64bUdfa0

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/01/trillion-dollar-coin-posts-on-legality-and-constitutionality.html#more-4307

I can't take this anymore. The decline of the West is right here and right now. Everything that Pat Buchanan has been saying and writing about for years is finally happening. The extreme wing of the feminist movement will only continue to grow stronger to spread their propaganda around only to make the lives of women worse in the end. Let's hope the future really is better than what we have now.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Roberto: One of the most influential people in America now is economist Paul Krugman, who believes that we should spend even more and go into much deeper debt. He claims to be a Keynsian, but is he?

Keynes believed that spending could get us out of a crisis but he also believed in simultaneously lowering the taxes. That's unsustainable for more than a short time, but Keynes believed in capitalism and was interested in kickstarting the economy to get it going again. He didn't believe in blank check spending and high taxes as Obama and Krugman do.

I'm slowly making my way through Krugman's last book and the arguments don't convince me. I find myself wondering if even Krugman believes in them.

Unknown said...

I hate Paul Krugman. He's become a shill for the Democratic Party and the more progressive wing of it, making Keynesian economics look stupid. Someone on Tumblr told me that even his macro is outdated and that he isn't even a macroeconomist. He's a trade economist trying to mix a misinterpretation of macroeconomics up with left wing politics. The guy is too cowardly to even debate Austrian economist Bob Murphy, insults anyone who has a different opinion from him, straw mans their argument and has contradicted himself many times on his blog.

I think he should if he really believes that Austrian economics is wrong and doesn't work, then he would have no problem destroying Bob Murphy at a debate. After all, the so-called debate would be completely for a charity in New York. I'm reading John Maynard Keynes' General Theory and it seems to me that a lot of his followers were far more statist than he ever was and that he had a lot of classical liberal tendencies. In fact, he even loved Hayek's Road to Serfdom and was friends with him in real life. At the end of his life, Keynes said this: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."

I prefer New Keynesian economist Greg Mankiw if the President wants to listen to someone who's part of that economic school of thought. He's a Republican and possibly far more conservative with what he believes and seems to have a much better understanding of macro than Krugman. The main economic schools of thought that seem to be having most influence right now are basically the New Keynesians, which is what both Krugman and Mankiw are, the monetarists (Milton Friedman types), supply side economics, and New Classical economics, all part of the general New Consensus. Market monetarism, Post Keynesianism, Austrian economics, and a non Austrian form of libertarian economics seem to be popular via the blogosphere, along with modern monetary theory, but aren't having that much of an effect on public policy in comparison.

This blog explains this really well. It's a really well written left wing Keynesian blog which I don't really agree with or am convinced that much by. I really wasn't convinced when the blogger said this on one of his posts, even though he really knows how to write like a physicist, so I commend him for that.

"No doubt additional jobs will be created in new private businesses, but it is unlikely to be enough. Free markets do not guarantee full employment, nor does Say’s law work. Employment in tradable goods and services in many countries will probably fall dramatically. Our employment future will probably be mainly in services, education, and most probably in employment programs funded by government or in government-sector jobs. There will probably be a great reduction in the hours that people need to work as well and more leisure."

It might well be that much of the government-funded labour force will be in education (e.g., universities), sciences, research and development, or other services. I suspect a much greater labour force working in basic sciences and applied R&D would mean a much more rapid advancement of science and technology too – a virtuous circle.

Even though he's very specific with what kinds of government jobs these would need to be, it just comes across as way too utopian. There's a reason why STEM fields pay much more than other kinds of jobs and I'm skeptical that the government can actually get many people up to speed on their math, etc. in order for this to even work.

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2011/01/overview-of-major-schools-of-economics.html

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2012/12/rise-of-robots.html

As a contrast, here are two blogs that are pretty much dedicated to critiquing Krugman's articles.

http://krugman-in-wonderland.blogspot.com/

http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Roberto: WOoooow! Many thanks for the great links! I've been hoping to find sites like this!

What I found so far was a blog called "Paul Krugman is Wrong" which is a great title because it comes up whenever you do a general search on Krugman's name. My personal preference though, is for the style of writing in the blogs you mentioned.

So far as books go, what's needed is a book, accessable to the general reader, that criticizes Paul Krugman's latest book chapter by chapter. Krugman's a good writer. He's witty and has a showman's ear for what reads well. I wish our side had somebody with that kind of flair. Maybe we do. If so, the time for him to step up to the plate is now.

kurtwil said...

Perhaps future people will say of us: "Ohh those poor ignoramuses, stumbling around without AAAFNRAA computer-person networking". We're on line, _all_ the time!".

Greg Bear's ETERNITY tells a possible outcome of such networking (though its wormhole and aliens remain, for now, hard science fiction).

AAAFNRAA = anytime anywhere for no reason at all (credit to Frank Zappa).

Joel Brinkerhoff said...

I'm worried about what today thinks of us!

Nicholas John Pozega said...

Eddie, I have a question to ask you that I believe is relevant to this topic. Right now, me and a friend of mine are worried that in animation schools and on art sites, there are too few students influenced by older culture or animation or comics or even by real life in general, instead pandering to these cliche drawing styles--particularly anime. The reason I bring this up is because a friend of mine is worried that years from now, we'll in another dark age of animation with too much anime conformity without any personal POV in cartooning.

I figure since you're a much more experienced person than I am, I figured I should go to you to ask about things like this. It would even make an interesting post on your blog if you wanted to ask others about it as well--thats one of the things I do like about animation and cartoons, that it can really get people thinking about real life things.

Thanks if you reply back as soon as possible, I'll apppreciate it.

pappy d said...

A lot of Hayek's followers would be surprised that he believed in the welfare state & universal health coverage.
The role of national governments is bound to shrink in the face of international capitalism. I don't think the quantity of jobs will be a problem, but the middle class jobs aren't coming back, since large middle class is a threat to stability.
Maybe this will be the last word:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/opinion/why-chinas-political-model-is-superior.html?_r=2&

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Pappy: Thanks for the link! What the Times writer is describing sounds like fascism, i.e., state control of politics combined with a synthesis of socialism and regulated capitalism with no freedom of the press. In my opinion that's a bad system.

Apparently the times writer believes that the factions who will run the fascist state will always be benign and rational and have the country's best interest at heart. Considering how centralists like Hitler, Stalin and Mao steered their states that strikes me as unlikely.

Did Hayek believe in a welfare state? Yikes, I can see I have more reading to do.

What you said about a large middle class being a threat to stability is something I haven't heard before. If you come across an article on that subject, would you let me know?

We probably disagree about politics but you strike me as a thoughtful person and it's nice to have you here.





pappy d said...

By its own admission, China has adopted a policy of "We will do what works & call it socialism."
I think the coming thing will be less national & more what Mussolini termed "corporatism". The the body politic is a group of supranational financial collectives instead of traditional states. It will be marketed under the brand name, "Pragmatism". Politics must concede to markets just as good intentions must yield to practical necessity. The right to vote has expanded from men with freehold property to all free men, to all white people, to everyone & finally, with the recognition of money as equal to free speech, to one dollar=one vote.
The middle class is where revolutions start. The peasants & the lumpen-proletariat lack the leisure time & the financial resources to pull it off. Poor people tend to stage peaceful marches led by clergy to present humble petitions to the rulers. They are consumed by pragmatism.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Pappy: Fascinating! I don't agree, but hearing you put things this way helps me to understand the appeal of this philosophy.

Sparky: Yikes! That's a big subject!