Apocalypse Later
Commentary: A futurologist says our apathy to gradual change may bring about slow-motion apocalypse.
August 20, 2008
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It was probably all those afternoons at my local library when I was a kid, reading Isaac Asimov's sci-fi version of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Foundation Trilogy, and those nights under the covers with a flashlight—long after I was supposed to be asleep—frightening myself to death with H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds and the like...
Still, even at my age, I continue to enjoy a glimpse into the future. Of course, so do the Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community. In fact, in recent years, they have practically taken out a copyright on the future. These days, they're always producing scenarios for (and plans and weapons for) 2020 and beyond. As Frida Berrigan noted at this site recently, most federal agencies "project budgets just around the corner of the next decade. Only the Pentagon projects power and possibility decades into the future, colonizing the imagination with scads of different scenarios under which, each year, it will continue to control hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV Roadmap 2030, the Army's Future Combat Systems—the names, which seem unending, tell the tale."
But my feeling is: Why leave voyages into the future to them? Okay, when TomDispatch writers look ahead, they only control budgets in the low double figures, but still...
Back in December 2006, I asked site regular Rebecca Solnit to bring that year to an end by stepping into the nifty TomDispatch Compac 1221 Time Machine, just the basic model of course, and zipping forward to the year 2026 in order to take a gander at the past we have yet to experience. She ended that post:
"The future, of course, is not something you predict and wait for. It is something you invent daily through your actions. As Mas Kodani, a Buddhist in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first century: 'One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into being.' We make it up as we go, and we make it up by going, or as the Zapatistas more elegantly put it, 'Walking we ask questions.' What else can you do?
"Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the future to which we all belong."
Solnit's piece was so satisfying that, every time I noticed that snappy little, all-red Time Machine in my closet, I was beset by regrets. Fortunately, just this week, out of the blue—and the future—I received the following report. Buckle your seat belts, you're in for a ride. Tom
Apocalypse Later
A Futurologist Looks Back at 2008By John Feffer
Being a futurologist means never having to say you're sorry. Our predictions always come true eventually—or, if they don't, well, how quickly people forget. Look at Newsweek's George Will. He predicted that the Berlin Wall would endure, and in an article published on the very day in 1989 that the Germans were tearing it down. That should have been enough to revoke his futurology license and demote him to sports writing. But no, almost three decades later he's still peering into his crystal ball.
Never apologize, never look back: that's our motto.
But this time—think of it as the exception that proves the rule—I really screwed up. We all did.
If you look back at the predictions we made in 2008 about the United States and the world, you'll see just how wrong we were. Today, in 2016, it's time for a mea culpa on behalf of the profession. Both camps, you see, were wrong. The Chicken Littles who predicted dramatic catastrophe were just as far from the mark as the Panglossian utopians who predicted dramatic change for the better.
Of course we have our excuses. Our minds were clouded by eight years of the Bush administration's foreign policy—if you can even call it that—which obscured our vision like a stinging sandstorm. In those days, it was natural to believe one of two things. Either the world was going to end with a bang (and soon), or a new administration would come into office in 2009, open up all Washington's doors and windows, and give the place a good airing out.
No one anticipated what would really happen over the two terms of the Obama administration, even though that's the job of us futurologists—and I was one of the best paid in the profession.
Where did we go wrong? How could I have been so blind? That's what I'm going to try my best to explain.
However, the “future” fails understand human capacity and brilliance. Optimism on my part? Maybe. But, if we can get through one ice age, we can get through another and worse. We may be uncomfortable later and we may lose our Starbucks now, but humans will survive. Though, it may just be us and the cockroaches when all is said and done.
Oh well, it doesn't really matter. We are americans, and the only change we're capable of is buying a flag after some sort of national tragedy. But look on the bright side, all those extra flags should sop up some of the melting polar icecaps, giving us a few extra seconds to climb into the fishing boat and paddle towards... oh hell, we're doomed. You don't have to be Kreskin to figure this one out.