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Growing up in the oughts, the future was Ghost in the Shell: SAC and Xenosaga and .hack//Sign and Gundam 00. I didn't see the dystopia; I imagined a glass metropolis beside a glittering bay, bleached and blue; VR diving into pools of ephemeral neon filament; trips to a space colony. The ISS had launched when I was in elementary school. 2012 came, and I graduated from college, and the Rift had its Kickstarter. I had a supercomputer in my pocket and a black president. Things seemed on track.

Of course, Oculus dragged its feet until it was bought by Facebook, who dragged things even more. Obama droned weddings. The ISS prepares for reentry burn in a few years. Et cetera. All of it - the corporate politicking; the political atrocities; the logarithmic progression of scientific advances, where technological progress is overtaken by the social calamity it unleashes - predicted by the media that had set my mental image of the future in the first place. Whose fault is it that the future failed to materialize again? I'd say corporate greed and the captured institutions that are supposed to police them for the greater good, but the fact that we're seeing the dream die again means that laying blame might be futile (particularly if we're not going to actually do anything about the bad actors).

Essentially, the Millennial era has been one where the glamour ghost came a-knockin' again, but the smart people who were paying attention already knew how the story goes. As for the rest of us? Mana du vortes.

Comparing a Wired Magazine from 2014 compared to 2024 is pretty illuminating to me, because in terms of aesthetics nothing had really changed, the "modern" adverts for furniture or gadgets could be interchangable. But the difference in the content and "spirit" of the writing was palatable, 2014 definetly felt alot more forward looking and speaking towards a more unified crowd, where 2024 was often a barrage of fears and anxieties of X upcoming technologies, or how X industry was not inclusive of Y crowd, the whole thing felt alot more diversionary and tribalistic. I've observed the same thing in media, where alot of the focus has shifted from value through exploration of new concepts to value via representation.

So perhaps corporate greed is one thing, but I'd also argue that America itself dosen't seem very interested in the future anymore either, they seem alot more interested in dividing the cake now rather than making it larger.

a view from a generation earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39084117

Re: Ghost in the Shell, I find it amusing that Gibson's 1984 opening line: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." used to mean grey, but now could mean bright blue (or even black?) due to the march of progress...

The poetic meaning of the line still works. The sky, the symbol of boundless optimism, the place of open infinite wonder and possibility...reduced to meaninglessness, closed possibilities, and failed promise.

I tend to think that the 90s actually did see its analogue to psychedelics in the internet. No need to be a psychonaut and fry your brain anymore; just surf the web. It's the same sort of ideal of connecting with universal knowledge.

There's even a heuristic to track these kinds of awakenings, roughly, and I'm absolutely certain you're not going to guess it. Got it in your head? Okay, wrong, it was "landmark black cinema." The Wiz came out in 1978 after 4 years of the musical. In 1995, we had The Lion King, followed by the Broadway play in 1997. If you look for something repeating the pattern, you find Black Panther in 2018 (alongside a glamour around a specific component of the web, social media and the mature smartphone).

I don't mean to make any sort of causative connection, but perhaps there is something about a widespread desire to "move forward" and "embrace openness" that also benefits the funding of these sorts of productions (and then the subsequent public enthusiasm for them upon release). And there's always a collapse back to conservatism shortly thereafter (Disco Demolition Day and Reagan; Bush and 9/11; COVID and its backlash, and the subsequent failure of Bernie Sanders to beat Joe Biden, and then Joe Biden/Kamala Harris to beat Donald Trump).

The interesting thing about Disco Demolition Day is how localised (to North America?) that backlash seems to have been; I didn't get over here to Europe until this century, but as far as I can tell disco never "died" here.

Good point: Timothy Leary was moving in cyberpunkish circles shortly before his death, and my only IRL interaction with John McCarthy was at a cyberdelic-influenced party in a Bay Area tract house.

What a long strange surf it's been.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgR6UNeQxXEv

(see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41826083 )

> the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

To me, that meant "showing random static," and implied meaninglessness, or at least unknowability.

> used to mean grey, but now could mean bright blue (or even black?) due to the march of progress...

Issues (and maybe possibilities) about reading works out of context and time. There's often a need / tendency to place those ideas relative to your own.

On the issues: Downloaded and started looking through Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636, Catholic Patron Saint of Computers and Internet). [1] The striking part reading through the later year discussions and critique though was how often writers needed to place their own later meaning and rearview criticism on an archival encyclopedist from ~1300-1400 years ago.

  > an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, glossed with his own derivations of the technical terms relevant to the topic in hand. Derivations apart, it was lifted from sources almost entirely at second or third hand ..., none of it checked, and much of it unconditional eyewash – the internet, in other words, to a T.
  > His reductions and compilations did indeed transmit ancient learning, but Isidore, who often relied on scholia and earlier compilations, is often simplistic scientifically and philosophically, especially compared to .. figures such as Ambrose and Augustine.

On the maybe possibilities: Neuromancer's pretty great. In the first paragraph you're already transported to another world:

  > “It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke.  The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. [2]

By the third paragraph Gibson's already discussion "antique" seven-function force-feedback manipulator Russian military prosthesis' and who invented nerve-splicing beneath the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company.

[1] Etymologiae, WP, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae

[2] Neuromancer, Ch 1, penguinrandomhouse.ca, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/293994/neuromancer-b...

No idea how far off I may be on my back-of-the-enveloping here, but:

   475 works * 1 yr/work * $300k/yr ~= USD 140 million

Blessed St Isidore, protect us from hallucinations and deliver us from recursively chewing our cud... —the LLMs' prayer

Resonates me a lot, I am a decade older though. From my POV it looks like we were overgrown kids but now just getting old.

A great essay, worthy of detailed reading as it contains so many interesting connections and associations from the past to explain the present and maybe forecast the future.

Just one example among the many:

> Making family-sized dwellings abundant and thus affordable for most people would be the single most effective step toward restoring faith in progress.

We are drowning in stochastic parrots and cryptographically minted "wealth" while very fundamental aspects of wellbeing are delegated to the dysfunctional, stagnating "technologies" of yesteryear.

My only criticism would be the subtitle: no, the future when it arrived did not feel ordinary. It felt disconnected from the human predicament and ominous about our prospects.

The affordability crisis is entirely a function of over regulation and NIMBYism. Supply and demand are economic laws and it turns out when you restrict supply and demand is held constant or increases, prices skyrocket.

Taxing property on land, as well as the land, creates perverse incentives & disincentives.

If we only taxed land, renormalizing for the same total taxes:

1. It would be much more expensive to hold (absolutely or relatively) undeveloped land as an investment that parasitically increased in value due to surrounding investment.

Land is the exclusionary resource, so fully taxing it makes sense.

Renormalization would tax unused land hard, reducing its passive return, and the supply & availability of less used land will increase, and prices decrease.

2. It would be far more attractive to further develop land for economically rewarding use, since adding living spaces and other increased use would not directly raise annual taxes. Which today are essentially a heavy disincentive to development.

Ironically, property (excluding land) taxes, are a recurrent never ending wealth tax, inhibiting both the wealthy and non-wealthy from increasing their properties utility value.

We are so used to it we don’t really consider how much it warps our choices that putting in capital or labor into home improvements or increased multi-housing actually raises our taxes.

If they didn’t, improvements would be far more attractive for both utility and property value appreciation.

Ask any accountant.

Progress became less about shared human aspirations and more about spectacle or profit-driven innovation

Oooh, that's interesting to me, as someone who sees a common pattern in the way ills that tend to vex black Americans in one generation come back to haunt the rest of the country a few down the road (and often, silently, visited Native Americans first)[1]. There's been a decent amount of scholarship on the gulf between white and black Americans on their experience of the moon landing (shining beacon of progress versus a waste of taxpayer money while food and housing was insecure). Now, everyone's feeling the, "Can you please fund basic things that actually matter," blues. (For the NA analogue, perhaps the way the "progress" of industrialization made their subjugation and denial of land all the easier.)

[1]E.g., the crack epidemic, the opioid epidemic, and alcoholism on reservations, respectively.

That's the view from a country on the trailing edge. In Shenzhen, or Seoul, or Tskuba, or Tapei you'll find enthusiasm for technology.

The US can't even make a smartphone any more. Or electrical distribution equipment. Or telephone central offices. Or TV sets. Next to go, cars. (Chrysler just exited the car business. Minivans only now.)

The US writes most of the software that powers those devices. It also designs the hardware. It also runs the data centers and backend infrastructure and software required to make those phones useful, like GPS satellites and AWS/Azure. It produces most of the content that people watch on their TVs and much of what they play on their video game systems. The U.S. is a leader in robotics, robotic surgery equipment, self driving, electric cars, space technology, agricultural technology, etc.

Chrysler is owned by a French/Dutch company named Stellantis (it was owned by the German Daimler previously). That brand also controls Dodge, Jeep, Ram, etc. so while Chrysler cars and the Chrysler brand have been on a decades long decline, it's hardly an indication of an American exit from car manufacturing. The US is a leader in electic cars, trucks, SUVs, heavy equipment, etc. And even many foreign brands own factories in the U.S. that produce cars here.

> "The US writes most of the software that powers those devices."

For the moment. Have you noticed how many of those people building that software are immigrants? Most of the FAANGs and other significant tech companies have development centers worldwide and it's vastly easier to pack up and move a software development office elsewhere than it is to move a factory and all its equipment.

Do you have a source for the US being a "leader" within trucks, SUVs and heavy equipment? Doesn't match my experience as someone not from the US who sees mostly brands not from the US.

For cars the US does have Tesla, Lucid, and Rivian. The first two are vertically integrated, making as many of their own components as possible.

We also have Intel, and a pretty great rocket company.

Nvidia is also American, so is AMD.

> For cars the US does have Tesla (...) We also have (...) a pretty great rocket company

And yet you all wish you didn't. Well, maybe not everyone, but it's the dominant view.

This brings back a memory of a HN comment from a little over a decade ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885128

I'll just quote it in full:

<quote cite='natural219'>

If you want to track the death of the cultural vision of Silicon Valley -- the belief that some people, at least, can rise above petty human squabbling and competition and are legitimately working to better humanity -- look no further than this thread. Every top comment is a skeptical one. "This is clearly a great PR move, but has no teeth." "How do you enforce this guarantee?" Etc.

These are reasonable questions, but as Shaw said, all progress comes from unreasonable men. I cannot help but be fundamentally depressed as I read these comments. In my view, Elon Musk has, moreso than any other human except maybe Bill Gates, given every absolute inch of human effort and genius to fight to solve the world's biggest problems. And all we have for him, after benefiting freely from the fruit of his labor, is skepticism. We want more. It's not enough. It's never enough.

Yes, Tesla Motors is a company operating in a media-hyped 2014 America. I know some of you are butthurt that he engages in the same "dishonest" PR tactics that other companies do. GET THE FUCK OVER IT. The end product he's producing will save humanity. That all of America has not rallied behind Musk and Tesla as the most important movement and achievement in the last 100 years of human history absolutely blows my mind.

Not only do we not recognize his goals or his achievements, we actively try and bring him down and shit on his accomplishments. "Well, they invented a pretty cool electric motor, sure, but they were kind of dishonest in that one press release that one time."

Go fuck yourself.

I want to say "I'm done with Hacker News", but we know that's not true. I'm supremely disappointed in all of you. Godspeed, Musk. I thought this was a great announcement, and I'm behind you 100%. I just hope you can finish your work before our shitty, myopic, destructive society tears you down. Here's to faith.

</quote>

Elon Musk may have changed for the worse since then, but nowhere near as much and as fast as our "shitty, myopic, destructive society", and in particular the Internet commentariat.

Definitely not me. I was a huge Musk fan back in 2014. These days I'm less thrilled with his new focus on politics, but Tesla and SpaceX are more than just Musk and we're far better off having them. If not for these companies, we'd probably still be convinced by legacy auto that EVs weren't practical and nobody wanted them, and by legacy aerospace that reusable rockets were a bad idea and only large government-run projects could get to orbit.

And that's just the beginning. Between Starship and FSD, the impact of these two companies could end up far greater than what we've seen so far. It'd be a shame to miss out on the sci-fi wonder of it all just due to the CEO's personality and politics.

Well said.

In as much as I enjoy the discussions on this website (hence still visiting often...), I find there to be a few weirdly almost anti-factual positions.

Elon hatred being one. The launch of the Model S as a mass market vehicle was _magical_. Like holy shit levels of wow, you can drive this thing across the US and then Europe with a charging network and it _works_ and it scales. Every EV on the market today owes its' existence to that success against the odds.

A second one that comes to mind is the continuous bias against cryptocurrency with the refrain usually being that "it's not useful" or something. Exactly backwards - all of the scams and craziness and shitcoins etc are occuring precisely because it is useful, it's an absolute game changer to have a digital asset and despite even the maximalists worrying about things like 50% attacks or bugs we're 16 years on from bitcoin.pdf and it's STILL HERE.

There are plenty of others, it's sometimes very difficult for me to fathom why the site seems to take irrational stances seemingly randomly.

You do realize the Tesla "patent pledge" [1] is one of the most unfair, unethical, and downright despicable legal contracts to ever attempt to cynically claim the moral high ground?

To conform to it you must not have:

"asserted, helped others assert or had a financial stake in any assertion of (i) any patent or other intellectual property right against Tesla or (ii) any patent right against a third party for its use of technologies relating to electric vehicles or related equipment;"

In case you do not understand, Tesla is stating that for Tesla to not assert patent rights, you must not assert patent and copyright and trademark rights against Tesla as seen by the inclusion of "or any other intellectual property right" beyond the statement of just "any patent...right". This is a exclusive and intentional carveout for Tesla in particular as explicitly identified in (i). All other parties are governed by (ii) which only states you must not assert applicable patent, and only patent, rights against non-Tesla parties.

They then make double plus sure that it is clear that Tesla is uniquely allowed to assert their copyright and trademark rights against you as seen by the third clause:

"marketed or sold any knock-off product (e.g., a product created by imitating or copying the design or appearance of a Tesla product or which suggests an association with or endorsement by Tesla) or provided any material assistance to another party doing so."

To gain access to Tesla patents, you must give Tesla access to your patents, copyrights, and trademarks. The sheer audacity to call that a "patent pledge" is astounding. No person with even a cursory knowledge of law and contracts, as required for any business executive, could mistake it. As such, it can only be a deliberate and intentional deception in a attempt to launder credibility by aping the name. It is truly unfortunate that it seems to work on people such as yourself.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/legal/additional-resources#patent-pled...

What's unethical there? No one is required to agree to those terms. They can just do without the Tesla patents, or negotiate their own licensing agreement.

> Elon Musk may have changed for the worse since then

The drug use became known in 2017, and it seems to be getting worse.[1]

The timeline of Tesla shows the successful innovation happening before then.[2] Then bad stuff started happening.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e...

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/history-of-tesla-150889...

There is plenty of disillusionment with the modern world in China and Taiwan and Korea.

...which is apparent when you see the fertility rates of these countries.

>The US can't even make a smartphone any more.

Well they are trying. Purism has a "Made in America" phone: the Liberty Phone.

https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/

Why do you think cars are leaving the US? Tesla is a fully American manufacturer with some of the most US sourced components, GM/Ford aren't moving their cash cows out of the country anytime soon. and the Japanese and Germans are expanding their presence in the US. You cited a long declining brand that has had an agism problem. Thats your best evidence? I guess you can make the argument that there are too many brands in the car industry but the car manufacturing sector in the US is still quite strong.

> The US can't even make a smartphone any more

Has the US ever made one in the first place? IIRC Apple had to go to China for the first iPhone, were there any brands that could do it all in the US?

When Motorola was acquired, a plant was purchased (a formerly Nokia one in Fort Worth, Texas) and the Moto X line was made in the US [0].

It was a short-lived experiment. Motorola was sold to Lenovo, and the plant shut down, within a few years.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/11/4717796/made-in-america-a...

Early cell phone manufacturing was more automated than it is now. The "brick" type phones (Nokia, etc.) were a stack of boards with cutouts for the thick components. The whole stack was squeezed together and sometimes riveted. So the internals were well-supported and very tough.

That kind of assembly could be totally automated. Pick and place to make the boards, stack and rivet to put it together.

Modern phones have little pieces and wires all over the place.[1] You'd think these things would be designed for automated assembly, but they're not.

[1] https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2020/11/15/part-2-ifixit-iphon...

Nice find, short-lived explains why I'd not heard of it.

Palm pilot was manufactured in the US.

And wasn't a smart phone.

The treo was. Before that the vii was a smart pager. That is it piggybacked on the pager systems for wireless communication.

The US still makes some electrical distribution equipment. And the best electrical protection relay company, SEL, is in the US.

There are no consumer drone companies in the U.S. worth talking about right now.

I immigrated to Asia around a decade ago and the relative optimism for technology and the future in general is one of the things that struck me as well.

I mean, if you look for pessimism you'll find examples of that too -- but in broad strokes I would also describe the average perception as 'enthusiastic'. It's something I've have a hard time explaining to my North American colleagues.

Maybe it just has to be experienced?

That's a result of massive recent change. The US hasn't had that, since the basic infrastructure was built long ago.

Yeah this writer seems confused, by definition any above average group is more likely to regress to the global mean… Than to keep going upwards.

That’s the default, so any speculations/arguments/etc… should be written to show why the other direction is more likely than not.

It feels like we are instead bifurcating instead of regressing to a mean. The rich are getting richer and moving to one side together as a group, while the middle class and poor are merging the other way into their own "barely hanging on class", distributed around a point far on the other side.

The average going up doesn't mean it's a tide that raises all boats.

Even a 30th percentile US household would be above average globally…?

If only they also had access to goods and services at globally average prices...

How does that relate to the phenomena of regression to the mean?

In that it's tricky to identify the right mean to measure the regression against.

It doesn’t matter which one you pick, there are no known exceptions to the general phenomena.

That’s why I said by definition.

By what definition? It's certainly possible that some kind of societal bell curve or other distribution can just keep getting wider without meaningful movement of the relative positions of individuals. I don't understand why you assume the most likely behavior is regression to the mean. Especially on short terms that seems weird to assume

Who is assuming a short term?

Punching down is clealrly a sign of things regressing. The Cantillon effect is what separates the rich and those aren't. Trickle down economics doesn't work. Imagine telling those barely middle and poor Americans you're still doing better than Thais or South Africans. It doesn't help.

How does this relate to the previous comment?

Did you reply to the wrong one?

When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

While I share your lament, witnessing feats like a Starship getting caught by giant chopsticks feels pretty darned extraordinary!

These moments remind us that the spirit of ambition and innovation is alive and well

I'm wondering if the future arrived just for people of 30 years or older. The past 15 years changed very slowly compared to 15 years before. The expectations of what's futuristic for someone 25 years old today is quite different than of the ones older.

I read this blog post the other day about the hedonic treadmill that influenced my thinking a lot:

https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/the-aim-of-maximising-...

Consider this 1940s ad for a "house that runs like magic", powered by gas:

https://wip.gatspress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/AGAAd-1...

I'm already living this dream life from the 1940s. I have a range, a refrigerator, "permanent hot springs", heating, and air conditioning.

I've had that stuff all my life. It's normal for me. I don't appreciate it.

Perhaps in addition to Progress Studies, we need some sort of neo-mindfulness gratitude journaling movement, focused on appreciating all of the awesome technology that's already widespread.

People demonstrate sophistication by explaining why things suck. It's not cool or fashionable to dwell on life's simple pleasures. Perhaps it's time to take a bold stand for naivete. https://xkcd.com/606/

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the incredible conveniences we have at our disposal. Yet there are still many places around the world today which do not have clean water, let alone hot clean water, immediately, whenever. Refrigeration, painkillers, free time for hobbies, arts, and sports.

Once you start thinking about all the things you already have, asking for more seems selfish. All I wish for is these 'basic' conveniences for everybody in the world, not just me and my peers.

The internet. (Almost) all the world's information, when I want it, for free. I don't even have to go to a library.

Clean air.

Enough food. Enough food that the problem is obesity, not starvation.

Freedom to speak my mind.

When you add it all up... wow. It's immense.

We should have had this thread a couple weeks ago, at Thanksgiving.

You might be interested in https://www.givedirectly.org/

Everyday as I see 98 degree water go into the drain I feel really lucky and a bit privileged to live in a first world nation

True, in my "third-world" nation, 98 degree water would be stupid as it would be burning hot.

One can go hiking or kayaking for a few nights or even just try to pitch a tent when it's sleeting. Ordinary stuff can feel much more appreciable after that. For a short while only though!

I hiked 1000 miles on the AT in the winter of '22, and to this day I marvel at potable water on tap, AND it gets hot! Too hot even! What a delight.

Also plumbing and a bidet! No catholes, no rashes, no norovirus! I wake up every day with gratitude in my heart for this abundance.

>I'm already living this dream life from the 1940s. I have a range, a refrigerator, "permanent hot springs", heating, and air conditioning.

But you also had all this stuff back in the 2000s. In the 80s, harder to say. But in 2024, nothing has really changed.

I don’t think it’s fair to look at artefacts of a past era and compare them to today.

The only things preserved are the ones deemed worthy of preservation. That leads to a skewed perspective.

Well to state it somewhat pessimistically:

1. Thoughts about the future always reflect the anxieties and the ambitions of the present.

2. Today's world has become immersed in the dreary and often dystopian reality of that technology. Today we have Black Mirror instead of the Twilight Zone. People are more mature about the impacts of both world changing technologies and cultural paradigms forcing that technology into our lives weather we like it or not.

3. GenZ,Y and younger see Big Tech as evil or invasive but are addicted to it (Social Media, smart phones) in the way Boomers were addicted to cigarettes and TV

4. Our Oligarchical economy pushes us to eat meagerly from the wealth pot, while our day to day lives, from health care, to family cohesion, to social silos due to socializing online instead of in-person, jobs that lay us off at the drop of a hat, online apps that are convenient but remove human interaction and treat us like numbers to be managed.

Also all that Impersonal Software that has no soul sucks the soul out of human users. -instead of chatting with the mailman, we get email marketing welcoming our birthdays, now personalized with GenAI. The same issues that we complained about during industrialization of cities gets amplified more with the web and mobile revolution - e.g. we are less socialized..

basically we are more jaded after a century of unbelievable technological innovation.

> now personalized with GenAI

Has Philip K Dick called the 21st century better than Asimov or Clarke? https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444685-the-door-refused-to...

Fascinating read. This explains so much of the "crafts" movement I see in myself and friends.

Bad food and shoddy material goods are practically free for a middle class person. It's easy to visit a big box store and get cheap, mass produced garbage. Food filled with preservatives, added sugar, and salt. Sawdust furniture that will barely stand up after assembly.

Now so many people are getting into gardening, woodworking, and fitness. There's so much value in working with our hands after a day filled with zoom meetings.

> When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

That's the... subtitle? Thesis statement? It's the first line after the title at any rate. I stopped reading as soon as the first paragraphs felt the need to define glamour. Anyone with a modicum of life experience should already intuit one obvious answer: glamour can only exist in brief moments in reality. "The Future" necessarily only exists in fiction, and fictional works can string together glamourous moments end-to-end indefinitely.

But in real life, you can't keep the glamour turned on. People need to defecate, that toilet eventually needs be cleaned, and the sewage treatment plant needs to keep working. People have to start as infants that scream and adults that have to hold them and hear it, then toddlers that make messes everywhere, etc. Maybe dinners could all be glamourous, if you want it bad enough, but are you going to get up, do your makeup and put on your most stylish breakfast clothes everyday? Can you get away with the same outfit at lunch and still be glamorous?

"Life" cannot be glamorous unless you are fabulously wealthy AND make very specific life choices.

Related reading: "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit" by David Graeber:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...

https://archive.ph/2024.08.26-162159/https://thebaffler.com/...

As a kid I loved watching Beyond 2000 which basically featured all kinds of new inventions, prototypes and ideas.

In a lot of ways it was the same as reading physorg or other sites that are filled with new groundbreaking research, most of which we will never hear from again.

> Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’

Wonder how it feels to be famous for a whining.

This series might give you some insights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfXbyQ9KFdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDA8hwQ3Fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX-EgbauuOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8fBqRa2NLQ

Tomorrow is hell.

https://collapsetastic.substack.com/p/the-endgame

Curious. The article mentions Star Trek three times, in all cases referring to The Original Series, while stating that "Outside of niche books and magazines, the golden age of optimistic science fiction did not exist.", which is surprising it how it missed the golden era of Star Trek, beginning with The Next Generation (1987-1994), aka. the reference work for optimistic future in popular sci-fi, subsequently followed by several more series and movies set in the same continuity, culminating with Enterprise (2001 - 2005). That's 18 years of stories about humanity enjoying Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism aka. a post-scarcity society! Seven seasons of a show set on a starship that looks like a luxury hotel inside - because why wouldn't it be?

People still joke about the carpets on starships (including in-universe in the recent shows), but honestly, you can pretty much measure how we've lost the optimistic future by tracking how Star Trek shows (including the post-2005 ones) got darker (literally, I'm talking about how the scenes were lit), the architecture less Hilton-like, and eventually, when carpets started to disappear.

Apropos visual media, there's another example of an optimistic vision of the future, which the article also indirectly mentions: Disney's Tomorrowland - not the fair, the 2015 movie. Severely underrated, that one. I broke down in tears when I watched it (okay, I was in a vulnerable period), because it was an unexpected breath of pure optimism about progress. I mean, the movie is literally about the very thing the article talks about - it recalls the optimism of yore, presents a protagonist who's asking herself and us, where did it all go wrong, and then tackles the question directly. The answer it gives may or may not be any good[0], but at least an attempt was made to talk about it. Sadly, this is the last attempt made so far in popular media, at least as far as I know.

I'm puzzled as to why these two stories were not mentioned. They're not exactly outliers no one has heard of.

--

[0] - We're effectively fucking our own future up by only ever talking about disasters - past ones, current ones, and every plausible prediction of future ones - in a feedback loop with news and entertainment; we're simmering in despair, securing a doomed future by not being able to envision anything good as a society.

> measure how we've lost the optimistic future by tracking how Star Trek shows (including the post-2005 ones) got darker (literally, I'm talking about how the scenes were lit), the architecture less Hilton-like, and eventually, when carpets started to disappear.

Yes, you could do that.

Or you could just cite "Alien" (and arguably "Dark Star" before it) as the key break with "the future is bright and shiny and comfortable", long before 2005.

Alien (1979) predates ST:TNG (1987-), and as I remember it, it competed with E.T. (1982) in the popular consciousness.

Nah, dark or grim sci-fi were aplenty, many of them were just regular action movies (also popular then) but done in sci-fi setting.

I'm using Star Trek as a measuring stick, particularly TNG and later, because this was a very big, popular and long-running franchise, that happened to have baked in the idea of optimistic future for humanity as a core part of its setting. It's a measuring stick that spans almost six decades now, and you can see in it how sentiments changed over that time, and how the hope and optimism eroded.

Various dystopian shows and movies that appeared in that time, they were pessimistic by design, and thus work as spot measurements of what people thought would sell best at a particular time. Star Trek wasn't - the weight of an established franchise meant it could've kept selling optimism even as others would find it too financially risky; so Star Trek going darker measures a deeper change in the mindsets of writers and studio executives.

Fair, but see also my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42418281

Dystopian and horror-oriented science fiction have existed as long as the genre. Optimism is hard to do in a way that is both believable and interesting, which at the time TNG ran was fairly successfully achieved for a large audience.

I would argue that cynicism and fear-milking are easier paths (with certain exceptions for works which evoke multiple layered allegories and inspire contemplation), and I think this has become even more true in recent years for a host of reasons.

IMO what mattered about Alien was not that it was dystopian or horror-oriented.

It is that it was about "the other people" who work below decks, or on freighters, or production facilities.

The comparison with the Star Trek franchise's efforts at the same thing says everything.

>Disney's Tomorrowland - not the fair, the 2015 movie

The thing about Tomorrowland is that it really digs into the viewer in that beyond just all the blaming of external forces of corporates or governments, how much did the people truly desire the future.

And it seems as people fear the future, they also want it, they desire that bleak future. Because cynicism dosen't demand anything of them. That they can sit in their chairs comfortably and continue disparging the world, even as things slowly turn worse around them like a frog boiling in a pot.

Look at the discussions here, how so many deperately seek easy theories on how the economy might fail tomorrow or how the stock market would crash. There's nobody trying to build or maintain confidence, even as when those fears would realize would be directly detetrimental to them. They blame social media, they blame the "Algorithm" even as they consciously continue to use those very media. They want things to collapse, they want the economy to burn, they want insitutions to fail even they want to close the path to the future. And the more things get worse, the more they'll double down on a path of self-destruction.

If you were poor and just trying to survive it could be understandable, but it's arguably the poor who have a more optimistic outlook. No, it's the middle class, with far more opportunities than 90% of the other world that seem hell bent on their own own annihilation. How else can you explain how the middle-class in China, in Dubai have far less opportunities and rights than in America, yet they are far more optimistic and confident in their nation and their future? Countries are built on Confidence, and replace that confidence with Cynicism and it's over.

When you see that, it's honestly not difficult to emphasize with the elites' disdain with the whole affair, and their own efforts to building their "arks" just like Governor Nix.

Star Trek TNG had a very singular kind of optimism though; it was presented as optimistic and that everything was wonderful, but if you examined it more closely it started to look kind of unappealing or even dystopian.

https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...

Great essay! Really seems to have tuned into the current feelings of cynicism and loss of belief in progress as a tool for a better future.

Reading the comments, it feels like a lot of people seem to have read this as an anti-capitalist piece? I didn't get that personally

The productivity increases of the modern times led to a corporate class. These oligarchs have eschewed the progressive initiatives, in eager pursuit of even greater wealth, supported by the wholly owned media and a bribed political class. What has been more evenly distributed globally is the ever-growing poverty, pollution and apathy against these powers.

To be fair, some improvements have been made, even at the feet of these giants, driven by government action and populist initiatives. This has been at the cost of concentration and increases in pollution and poverty in the poorest nations. The future looks bleak today, as the divide grows and progressive progress has all but halted.

We're all so pessimistic about the future not because we think it's going to be captured by the plutocrats and oligarchs, but because we know the future has already been preemptively captured by them. They're all doing the work now to cement their positions in the future, and there's nothing the rest of us can do about it.

I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, or 2050, but what I do know is that the benefits and wealth from them will be captured by the same class that is capturing everything today.

> I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, or 2050, but what I do know is that the benefits and wealth from them will be captured by the same class that is capturing everything today.

I have good news and bad news. The world doesn't stand still. There are some iterations that destroy the structure of society, after which a new structure must be built. The oligarchies of today will meet their end at some point. And, no amount of preemptive effort can prevent that. That's as the good news go, in as much as they are good news.

These are not my ideas exclusively. If you want to hear them from people that has dedicated a fair amount of time at exploring this subject and gathering data, I recommend these books:

- Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for an overview of historical change. You will find that the author agrees with you in many accounts.

- The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Josph A. Tainter.

- Principles for dealing with the changing world order.

The bad news is that the most likely iteration coming around the corner is human's lost of control of our societies in favor of machine intelligence. It's not going to be as "peaceful" as the rise of the post WWII world order, but I hope that we survive.

As if all us peasants are using rotary phones while the plutocrats and oligarchs have these expensive iphones.

What is actually interesting is while the plutocrats and oligarchs have more leg room and better food on their private jet, the airplane itself doesn't move that much faster than me in coach.

You simply underestimate the financial mass of the mass market. These plutocrats and oligarchs only exist as part of a system with an even bigger mass market.

This time is not different.

> As if all us peasants are using rotary phones while the plutocrats and oligarchs have these expensive iphones.

What is interesting is that expensive iPhones are really not that great for society in the first place. It is not that they have iPhones and we don't. Rather, it is that we have iPhones and that is how we are controlled and the return isn't worht it.

They are working on automation to replace the bigger system, they rely on.

China just rolled out a police drone, even though china has more than enough people to train for that job.

This is where my dystopian nightmare begins. Autonomous weapon systems, so targeted and unlimited in reach and capability, that no number of civilians thrown into the frey will make a difference. A single machine gun could have stopped the french revolution, and yes, i think humans are very much capable of pressing that button.

That’s what they want us to believe. But at the end of the day, we can always fight. There’s little they can do to stop a massive violent uprising.

There's plenty they can do. For one, control all your media (for example banning of tiktok, since chinese oligarchs are not aligned with our oligarchs), with control over media they can prevent your message from getting out (e.g. Luigi Mangione's manifesto being disappeared), or if the message does get out they can spread propaganda to turn the population against you (see, BLM and many other movements). Also they can remove all your privacy so that any subversive action has a high social cost such as losing your job. Also they can overspend on a stifling police state even as surveillance and control tools get better and cheaper.

Really, they're getting better and better at this, they have tons of practice and their population control tools are getting better.

> That’s what they want us to believe. But at the end of the day, we can always fight. There’s little they can do to stop a massive violent uprising.

The problem with revolution in today's society is that it will be a revolution against a system that provides little trivial comforts, rather than a revolution against a system causing starvation. Thus, it will take much more work to revolt, as it is a revolution against technology itself.

Or a massive not-violent one. Just stop working.

The ruling class will bring the violence soon enough.

> Or a massive not-violent one. Just stop working.

Can't happen. As soon as significantly many people stop working, the remaining will be offered larger salaries to keep working. That is why revolution against the modern power structure is so hard: because there are economic incentives against revolution for the working class.

As a HN reader most likely making 2x, 3x, 4x or more the median wage, _you_ are part of the overpaid techbros they will be leveling the "massive violent uprising"(sic) against. The working class and poor know darned well we aren't part of the proletariat.

You sure about that class strata?

I'm a software developer but I work in a factory making minimum wage now.

I can barely afford rent. I certainly don't feel like bourgeois.

> I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, or 2050, but what I do know is that the benefits and wealth from them will be captured by the same class that is capturing everything today.

Due to the laws of diminishing returns, the inventions aren't going to be that great and in fact actively destructive as we are basically running the world on innovation, rather than creating innovation for the world.

> This has been at the cost of concentration and increases in pollution and poverty in the poorest nations.

Poverty is way down globally. Poor nations are far from where they need to be, but we've lifted a billion or so people out of abject poverty in my lifetime.

Don't let a determination to believe everything is bad force you to ignore when things get better.

Just an illustration of this https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-wor...

"nearly 38 percent of the world's population lived on less than 2.15 U.S. dollars in terms of 2017 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) in 1990, this had fallen to 8.7 percent in 2022"

> Don't let a determination to believe everything is bad force you to ignore when things get better.

A decrease in poverty in this case though is traded by an increased addiction to what the oligarch provides. Is an entire society in a dystopia that provides the basic physical comforts but strips us of meaning in life a good end? I think not.

"Soylent Green" seems more and more prescient. I'm not talking about turning people into food — not even the over-population fracas depicted in the film (that seems to have been a distinctly 70's-era fear).

Seeing the film again I notice the way it portrays the untouchable wealthy classes (briefly) and then the rest of us. (I should read the book [1] because I was intrigued by little scenes like the one with the old people in the library — if you even remember that bit.)

[1] "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison

It's so easy to blame it all on the feet of oligarchs, but it is ultimately our collective responsibility. The democrats lost the popular vote. Think about that.

Progress, or even the status quo as it is today is rejected by half of the population.

> It's so easy to blame it all on the feet of oligarchs, but it is ultimately our collective responsibility. The democrats lost the popular vote. Think about that.

Democrat or republican; both support the oligarchy in separate ways because both support the advancement of technology. And increasingly powerful technology supports oligarchy and that power structure cannot be stopped by democracy because democracy functions within technology.

Yup and it happened purely because of elitism.

As if Democrats aren't owned by oligarchs.

Look at who funds them. Look what they do, instead of what they say.

I don't see how that matter. There was a meaningful choice.

There was certainly a meaningful choice, but it was between status quo conservatism where the plebs get thrown a few bones but no overall reform to ever-ratcheting corporate control, and spiteful populist destructive rage taking for granted everything we still do enjoy. Spite won. It's hard to tell if another Trump term will be merely another standard of living haircut via rampant inflation and corporate giveaways, or the actual end of US hegemony and western society, because the guy is a verbal diarrhea chameleon. But we as a society have bought the ticket, so I guess we're taking the ride regardless.

It is unfortunate that we didn't have a Luigi Mangione a few years ago, and maybe a few copy cats. Not because escalating to that type of accountability dynamic is something to be celebrated, but rather because the wide outpouring of understanding is the type of unifying pressure relief valve our society desperately needs, instead of being divided and conquered by different flavors of authoritarianism.

There were some 'meaningful' differences (mostly in their rhetoric, but still) on some important issues.

However, when both 'choices' are openly supporting a live-streamed genocide, then any 'meaning' in the choice is only for people willing to endorse Nazi-level crimes.

... Not Godwinning here, that's just a simple fact; backed up by basically every human rights organization, and the UN, and billions in unguided bombs, etc.

That's why turnout for the Dems was so much lower, as polls and protests had unambiguously promised would be the case. That and the economy, which Democrats insisted is great even as people struggle to survive. Dumb strategy, but the strategists still got paid so...

Democrats used to say, "Not everyone who votes for Trump is a racist - but they all decided it wasn't a dealbreaker"... Well, genocide is quite a bit worse than racism - even if you try to relabel it as 'sparkling ethnic cleansing lite', or 'deserved', or whatever.

And here we are wondering why the future feels fucked up... Smh

I am not really going to argue on the issue of Palestine since that is apparently what you refer to, only to say that I still think there's a meaningful difference.

That's why turnout for the Dems was so much lower, as polls and protests had unambiguously promised would be the case. That and the economy, which Democrats insisted is great even as people struggle to survive. Dumb strategy, but the strategists still got paid so...

Regardless of the Democrat's strategic mistakes, you can't avoid the responsibility of voters, who are supposed to be well informed, well educated, and difficult to fool. Democratic shooting ourselves in the foot is a collective sin.

> I am not really going to argue on the issue of Palestine since that is apparently what you refer to, only to say that I still think there's a meaningful difference.

Yes, I'm referring to the genocide of Palestinians. It's not something I, or other American voters, could overlook.

> you can't avoid the responsibility of voters

No, and I don't, but when corporate media acts in lockstep with the duopoly's oligarch owners (hey, guess who owns corporate media) then voters can't take the full blame.

Look at corporate media folding themselves into conniptions trying not to acknowledge that Americans response to the assassination of a mass murdering CEO was glee, right across the political spectrum. Look at how they've twisted the 'conflict' (aka genocide) in Gaza.

I'll say it one last time: If Democrats had wanted to win this election, they could have. Easily. All the numbers, all the polls, all the world was telling Biden and Harris for the last year: Stop arming Israel. Stop vetoing ceasefires. Just do the absolute bare minimum so we can hold our noses and vote for you, as is tradition...

Dems refused point blank. Trump's presidency isn't on voters, it's on the Dems themselves; and any analysis which misses this fact isn't worth a pig's fart.

Yes, I'm referring to the genocide of Palestinians. It's not something I, or other American voters, could overlook.

Unfortunately, I don't think the issue of Palestinians are important driving issues to American voters. I wish I have a source to point to but this is based on what I read.

Dems refused point blank. Trump's presidency isn't on voters, it's on the Dems themselves; and any analysis which misses this fact isn't worth a pig's fart.

I have said it before, collective responsibility and sin. There's no get out of jail free card for everyone. People made their decisions and now they have to lie with it. You can blame it on the oligarch or the media or whatever you want but it doesn't absolve voters of anything.

The only people who can truly sleep at night with a good conscious are people who voted Democrats and campaign workers who's working hard to execute strategies.

I wish I had engaged with my family more on political issues as they all voted for Trump in a battleground state. I won't be making that mistake again.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” Ursula Le Guin

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ursulakleguinnatio...

This attitude is so common. It's obviously wrong. Humanity is richer and freer than ever. Here's a theory of why people spend so much time railing against modernity, capitalism, and "the corporate class":

Humans used to have to labor all to avoid starvation. There were few choices and most of us we died in the town where we were born. Compare to today -- now, we have incredible freedom, cheap and delicious food, cheap ubiquitous entertainment, are more or less immune to the elements, and have tons of free time. But all of this freedom and plenty has forced us to make choices, and it turns out people aren't good at making choices. We struggle to not gorge ourselves on food or waste years of our lives on insipid entertainment. We would like to exercise, eat right, read books, learn things, contribute meaningfully to our areas of interest -- but most of us don't. Worse, we have no excuse for our choices because we are almost completely free.

This dynamic leads to a situation where people hate modernity. Partly because making choices is hard and partly because our freedom makes it clear that our bad choices are our own fault. And so people long for a return to un-freedom. Many of us would rather be poor and starving than to have to make choices and face our own inadequacies.

No, people hate modern society because they understand that although things are better than they were they aren't nearly as good as they could be if it wasn't for rampant and unchecked corruption.

What's worse is that people know that whole ecosystems and stable climate patterns are slipping away and will likely never come back.

> people hate modern society because they understand that although things are better than they were they aren't nearly as good as they could be

How do you know how good things "could be"? Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible

> How do you know how good things "could be"? Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible

It's not necessary to know how good things could be. Part of the meaning of life is to work towards a good you think could be, and the modern oligarchy strips us of that right.

That's just another way of saying that the way things are is optimal, and that we as a society have reached perfection, that we're doing our best.

That is blatantly wrong. Better is always possible and the people who steal and cheat the system are the ones who deny that better world for us all.

The Hitlers, the Putins, the Kochs and Epsteins and Madoffs of the world have made the world far worse than it needs to be for the absolutely worst personal reasons.

Do you think cost of living today is lower than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago? Do you think the average person today works more or less than before?

Because I’m really curious what you mean when you say we’re more free than ever. Free time especially is what eludes most people of my peer group; endless tv shows to stream is meaningless without free time for example.

It is easier for the average person today to achieve the standard of living of the average person 10, 20, 30 years ago, and it would've been impossible for the average person 10, 20, 30 years ago to achieve the standard of living of the average person today due to things that are cheap now not even having been invented then.

But expenses expand to fill the available budget, so the actual cost of living is higher, as people earn more to spend more to get more.

(If you wish you had more free time but don't negotiate a pay cut in return for shorter work hours, it just means you value the money more than your time.)

I don’t think it is easier for the average person today to achieve the standard of living of the average person 10, 20, 30 years ago.

Housing is the biggest culprit. It has gone up something like 5x in the last 20 years, while salaries have increased maybe 20%.

Sure, the value of housing has gone up a lot since 2004 (about 2.5×) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL155035013Q

What people actually pay for it, though, in terms of mortgage payments as a share of income, is at basically the same level (6%) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDSP

As long as people buy houses on credit, high house prices only reflect that mortgages are cheap.

Globally? Sure, assuming cost of living is measured against a fixed quality standard.

Specific countries may be failing to improve, but if you're from the USA remember that your country is 4.25% of the world, and very few of you were ever in abject poverty in the beginning of that timeframe.

Global abject poverty as a standard is roughly "sleeping rough" in western terms (more precisely, it's 2.15 US dollars of purchasing power per day), and the number of people worldwide at that level has gone from 1930 million in 1994 to 1510 million in 2004 to 806 million in 2014 to 693 million today.

Cost of living/spending power is not the same as quality of life. Mobile phones alone are an insane improvement in QoL.

We've also destroyed a lot of social norms that used to help people make good decisions.

Continuously making good choices is really difficult, especially when we have so many incredibly alluring distractions. Having some guard rails is a good thing for almost everyone.

without the so called "corporate class" or capitalists and their relentless effort to pursue wealth, everyone would be worse off today. Billons died from communist wet stream in the 20 century but the lessons are still not learned. Yes, government regulation is important but capitalism is the reason why millions of people are not starving today unlike any other periods in time.

> Billons died from communist wet stream in the 20 century but the lessons are still not learned

Billions didn't.

USSR census population in 1989 was only 286 million total, while the Holodomor and the Cambodian genocide combined were between 4.4-8 million.

And the Holodomor (and broader famine in the rest of the USSR) looks suspiciously similar to the failure mode of the British government with the Irish potato famine and the Indian famines under British rule, each of which played a part in those people wanting independence, as does the Chinese great leap forward's 15-55 million.

Even with those, and the Chinese famine happened so soon into a transition away from agrarian society that to me it seems more like a tragedy than a consequence, it's still not billions.

No, what saved billions from starvation is fertiliser, and policies of subsidising over-production so that the bad harvest years food is merely expensive rather than insufficient.

If it was "capitalism", then the Lassiez faire British empire wouldn't have had the Irish potato famine nor would the East India Company have been in charge for so many famines in India.

20 million white Christians were exterminated and this was not an accident. Get your figures right.

I've not seen any sources claiming such a large number; hundreds of thousands targeted specifically due to their religion and over all races combined, but not millions.

20 million targeted by both race and religion would have been a bigger thing than the actual literal holocaust.

"Progress stopped feeling magical when we stopped needing magic"

Earlier submission with some comments: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-world-of-tomorrow/

Also, obligatory meta complaint: the site seems to break trackpad forward/back gestures at least on Firefox :/

That URL goes to the essay itself. Here's an earlier submission with comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42355160

Uf, thanks, a copypaste brain fart.

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