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Power Fantasies at the End of
Modernity
By:
Langdon Winner
As I
ponder the issues that this conference has addressed, I wonder why there aren’t
masses of people in the streets of every town and city demanding basic change
in ways our civilization operates.
Alas, what we see instead is a widespread mood of passivity and inaction
often bordering on despair.
While
there are many possible explanations for the torpor that surrounds us, I’ll
focus briefly on just one. My guess is
that people are having a devil of a time getting used to an increasingly
widespread perception: The Future has been cancelled.
Well, you’re
probably saying, that’s just absurd. Surely
there will always be a future. Our clocks
keep steadily ticking as we move along the line from past to present to future.
But that
is not “The Future” I’m thinking about.
The
Future that has almost certainly been cancelled, one that is thoroughly defunct,
is a period of history imagined and partly constructed during the 20th century – “The
Future” offered by a collection of ambitious modernists, techno-triumphalists,
utopian visionaries, urban planners, industrial designers, Madison Avenue
advertisers, and others who projected a better world just over the horizon.
All of us
have been fed a steady diet of this “Future” over the years, for example the futures
depicted in science fiction from the 1902 movie “A Trip to the Moon” to the
recent blockbuster, “Interstellar.” The
skyscrapers, airplanes, rocket ships, robots, sleek and shiny cities, time
machines, space stations, and the like depicted the apparatus of tomorrow, of
widely shared prosperity, of excitement with the new, of personal wellbeing. The basic idea of generations of modernists
and futurists has been that if you built
it, humanity would move in and flourish. By moving from a dreary paleo-industrial past
into a technology-rich future, the world would be vastly improved, ennobled and
uplifted.
Yes, it should
be noted, much of science fiction writing and movies dramatized (as stories
must) what might go wrong if even the most hopeful visions were fully realized.
But at the level of social planning and
promotion, “The Future” was projected as uniformly favorable for humanity as a
whole.
Schemes
of this kind were exquisitely detailed in a steady stream of architectural
drawings, urban plans, science fiction novels and movies, Worlds Fairs, advertising
and marketing campaigns in the United States, Europe and around the globe for
several decades. Some of these visions
were, one can say, socially progressive, for example, the reformist designs of
early Bauhaus modernism that sought to provide agreeable architectures, tools
and appliances for everyday working people. But much of the standard treatment was
narcissistic fantasy, presented in ways that left audiences amused and
delighted with images of personal helicopters, automated factories, appliance
filled homes, energy too cheap to meter, robot servants, and the like.
It seems
to me that the basic but often unstated theme here was that ordinary, everyday people
of modest means would be emancipated and empowered by participating in “Modernity.”
That was, for example, the explicit promise of an ongoing sequence of Worlds
Fairs, the one in New York in 1939, for instance. In the minds of its planners, a society mired
in The Great Depression could bootstrap its way to prosperity and by adopting all
the new vehicles, household gadgets, super highways, and electrical gear on the
drawing boards. The “Futurama” ride, designed by Normal Bel
Geddes, offered the crowds a comfortable flyover of the spectacular landscape
of “Tomorrow.” At another exhibit,
adults and children could feel the power by interacting with Electro, the
gigantic metal (but entirely fake) talking robot.
Notions
of this sort were strongly favored by industrial corporations of the period along
with the teams of designers, advertisers and marketers they employed. One popular format was
that of streamlining, its smooth surfaces embossed on everything from
locomotives to toasters from the late 1930s through the 1950s. Evidently, you needed a streamlined toaster or
vacuum cleaner in case you encountered unusual wind turbulence in your suburban
home.
Crucial
in campaigns of this kind was the conviction that by purchasing and using a new
car, washing machine, radio or television, consumers would become full
participants in and, in fact, citizens of a world based upon science and
technology.
The explicit
sales pitch in countless advertising campaigns was the promise of personal
power to be gained by joining the Modern World.
A
succession of new historical periods or “ages” (or “centuries”) embodied supposed
transformations of this sort – the machine age, automobile age, air age, radio
age, atomic age, television age, space age, computer age, information age,
personal computer age, biotechnology age, nanotechnology age, etc. -- each one
heralded in a stream of books, magazine article and movies. Alas, an unfortunate feature of these “ages” was
that they grew old rather quickly, soon to be forgotten, replaced by the next
great techno-contender just over the horizon.
While there
are still strong boosters for nuclear power even today, nobody talks about coming
of the Atomic Age any more and for obvious reasons. The words “Chernobyl” and “Fukushima” come to
mind. Similarly, there is no longer any mention
about the glorious arrival of “The Space Age.”
Once the U.S. had flown its astronauts to the Moon, a notable victory in
the Cold War standoff between the U.S.A. and U.S.S. R., there was little public
enthusiasm for spending money on space rockets, space stations, or manned
missions to distant planets.
Eventually,
incessant proclamation of one visionary “Future” after another began to seem rather
like an elaborated con game in which the public was the rube. The point of exhaustion seems to have arrived
with the approach of the year 2000 when one might have expected a fresh batch
of futures to come rolling out. But that
didn’t happen, at least not to any great extent. Much of the chatter that accompanied the
approach of the “new millennium” centered upon worries about a “Y2K bug,” a
technical glitch that seemed to threaten all the world’s computers and
communications systems.
For
better or worse, the extravagant futurism of earlier decades is by now thoroughly
exhausted. There are for example, no plans for any
new World’s Fairs to show us the new gadgets of tomorrow. Although planning continues on ambitious metroplexes
like that in Dubai, their construction has less to do with modernist hopes for
universal human improvement than the risible vanities of a few dozen billionaires.
And while there are still dewy-eyed dreams
of trans-humanism, the “singularity” and of massively robotized society, prophecies
of this generation are little more that pet schemes of isolated technophiles hoping to
attract funding from the Silicon Valley nouveau riche.
Taking
note of the demise of genuine technological utopias of yesteryear, Neil
Degrasse Tyson, eloquent spokesman for the accomplishments of science and
technology, recently launched a TV mini-series lamenting the fact that “We have
stopped dreaming.” By this he meant that
Americans now seem incapable of the visionary Space Age enthusiasms like those
that followed Sputnik. Thus, Tyson
argued, the U.S. has gradually defunded NASA and no longer seems willing to
recruit, inspire and educate a new generation of space scientists and
engineers.
Well, what
has happened to the visionary enthusiasms of decades gone by?
The answer
is fairly clear. When people today,
especially Americans, think seriously about times to come they typically avoid
idle speculation about a New Space Age or any heroic World of Tomorrow, but instead
attend to a set of obvious, immediate, urgent, challenging, often unhappy
realities. Among these are:
Global climate
crisis and its highly visible consequences;
The end
of the era of cheap fossil fuels;
Ocean
acidification;
The rapid
decline of world wildlife populations;
Huge and
growing inequalities of wealth, income and political power;
Destruction
of well-paying jobs;
Demise of
the middle class, etc.
In brief,
my argument is that what came to be known as
“The
Future” -- the technology saturated tomorrow of twentieth century utopian visions
-- has already been cancelled and that in down-to-earth, practical terms a great
many people fully understand this is the case and are prepared to face the
situation squarely. Some of the most
intelligent voices of this kind have spoken – creatively and persuasively --
at this gathering.
But, as
the old adage has it, dreams die hard. Despite what the best of our knowledge tells
us about climate change, environmental crises, the end of the era of cheap
fossil fuels, the increasingly oligarchic character of our “economy” and
“democracy,” there remain within the most common representations of the world
and its possibilities, a collection of increasingly exaggerated, absurd residues
of “The Future” from the recent past. As one might expect, the basic vision still
derives from the massive sales campaigns that enticed consumers/citizens with
illusions of empowerment, with participation in power itself. But the message has shifted its focus. Sorry, folks, it’s no longer possible to offer
you decent jobs at high wages; to offer comfortable, affordable apartments in
clear, sleek urban wonderlands; to offer cheap, speedy transportation around
the globe even for those of modest means; to offer a wonderfully favorable
relationship between Nature and Artifice that uplifts and dignifies the Earth
and its species. No, alas, all of that
is now beyond our reach. But what we still
have on offer is a never-ending, multi-faceted array of power fantasies that will
delight and beguile you, perhaps even more thoroughly than in our earlier versions.
A comprehensive
list of categories within the production of today’s power fantasies would be a
lengthy catalogue indeed. It would
include much of what passes for political communication, product advertising, national
security propaganda, entertainment, sports, fashion, social media, and even
education in our time.
One could
begin with the exotic power fantasies that carried the United States into the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following the 9/11 attack. This would surely include the spectacular
video of “Shock and Awe” during the bombardment of Baghdad in 2003, broadcast
in prime time for an audience promised that the war would be short, cheap and
easy. All of those colorful bombs, deafening
blasts, carefully scripted rockets suggested that victory was at hand, that
“we will be greeted as liberators.” Feel
the power!
In much the
same mode came the fabulous “Mission Accomplished” episode, a TV reality show
produced shortly after the attack on Iraq in which President George W. Bush,
dressed in Air Force gear with a noticeable codpiece, landed in a fighter jet
on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, greeted by an
enthusiastic group of military stand ins, to proclaim that “the United States
and its allies have prevailed.” Feel the
power!
As the conflict continues (now more than a decade along) an
enduring, highly marketable genre of combat fantasies combines images of
warfare – battlefield shootouts, fiery explosions, cruise missile launches,
drone aircraft strikes, and the like – within television news segments,
Hollywood films and, most notably, the first person shooter video games that
are now the most profitable and fastest growing segment of the entertainment
industry. Here the hideous realities of
war blend seamlessly with ghastly on screen imaginaries that occupy much of the
leisure time of the world’s youth, especially young men and boys. Aware of the indelible attraction that
violent video and computer games have for their target generation, the Pentagon
now uses video games at all stages of their soldiers’ careers – to recruit them
into the “service,” to train them for combat in foreign lands, and finally as therapy to
help the troops recover from post-traumatic stress disorder when they return
home.
Evidence
that everyday Americans are completely enthralled by the vicarious experience
of watching and hearing explosions, planes and cars moving at dangerously
vertiginous speeds, high velocity crashes, and mega-force collisions of all
kinds is evident in the daily fare of advertising, feature films, television
serials, and two of the nation’s most popular sports – NASCAR racing and NFL
football. As news slowly leaks out about
the long term brain damage caused to thousands of high school, college and
professional football players by repeated bashing and crashing on the field,
the nation ponders (but seems eager to reject) the possibility that the game will
have to be modified to make it less lethal to body and brain.
Certainly
the most significant “innovation” in recent decades that has helped spawn the
riotous spread of power fantasies within our central institutions and troubled
ways of living is the exquisite perfection of Computer Graphic Imagery – CGI –
within
every corner of the new digital realm.
Where earlier modes for the production of fake imagery were clunky and
far too costly, today’s methods of computer programming make them easy to
fashion and replicate. What this means
is that the expensive, risky, or destructive realities of warfare, hand-to-hand
combat, space travel, and other ambitious undertakings can be conveniently sold
to today’s consumers as CGI marvels on the screen.
Exactly
the same “big magic” depicts speed and explosive power has become standard coin
of the realm in advertising, especially in television ads for automobiles where
CGI helps cars appear to “fly” from place to place. In fact, it may be that the most thoroughly
satisfying and marketable experiences of the adventures of today’s
technological civilization are likely those realized within CGI and nowhere
else. The most widely engaging,
personally fulfilling accomplishments of the nation’s space program were not
those of, say, the Apollo moon missions or even of today’s robot vehicles
scratching around on Mars, but rather the CGI filled extravaganzas of Hollywood
films and TV series such as “Avatar” and “Battlestar Galactica.” By the same
token, the most gratifying representations America’s otherwise forlorn military
encounters in recent years are those fought everyday on Xbox, Play Station in
homes and dorm rooms across the nation. Feel
the Power!
For those
averse to the sheer violence that characterizes much of this domain, there is another
focus of technology-centered fantasies that has an irresistible allure. At long last our civilization has designed a
splendid, affordable little implement that anybody can hold in one hand, a
gadget that combines telephone, camera, texting, video screen, video recorder, and
GPS, along with countless thousand of “apps” that enable a person to read the
daily news, handle one’s social media contacts, schedule one’s appointments,
monitor one’s diet and exercise, guide one’s zen meditation routines, etc. It is, of course, the iPhone or, alternately,
the smart phone – what many consider the signature accomplishment of the 21st
century. Surely (we tell ourselves), no
emperor, king, or pope has ever commanded such magnificent power. And because (we confidently imagine)
every-man and every-woman now has this device at his/her fingertips, a more
perfect democracy must be just around the corner. Thus, we happily gaze at the little black
mirror, seldom looking up to notice the troubling realities on every side.
Oh oh. I’d like to offer you a little more help on
these matters, but, damn, my Android is ringing.
Never
mind….