Laika, the Dog That Didn't Bark

New at Reason: Remember how great the future used to be—moon colonies, jet packs, undersea cities, everybody wearing silvery uniforms, the planetary government planning everything out for us just so? No? Charles Paul Freund sifts through the rubble of space age design.

Comments

[Argyles]

Another good book about futuristic design is "Yesterday's Tomorrows," which, among other things, touches on the famous (or infamous) 1939 World's Fair.

[Steve in CO]

I am just trying to imagine 3-dimensional traffic jams. Really, where are the flying cars dammit?!

😀

[the Anti-Nader]

Yeah, flying cars with DVD players and TV screens.

[garym]

One sign that people don't think about the future any more is all the "___ of the century" stuff we see, barely more than three years into the century. (OK, four for the ignorant majority who insisted on celebrating the millennium a year early.) Do people really think that there will be no greater beauties, no more amazing movies, no worse weather in the next 97 years than what we've seen in those three?

We're living in the Decade with No Name. People aren't even thinking ahead to the Teens (the Tens?). Perhaps all those aging Baby Boomers (like me) just don't want to.

[Swamp Justice]

For thoughts on the future, you should check out Stewart Brand's book "The Clock of the Long Now" (www.longnow.org). Stewart Brand (the hippy marketeer), Brian Eno (the musician/artist), Danny Hillis (from Thinking Machines and Disney Imagineering), and others are building a giant clock in the desert that is designed to run for 10,000 years. It is supposed to encourage people to think of their actions in REALLY long terms (thousands of years).

See also longbets.org, the Long Now Foundation's betting pool for really long term bets (years to dedades).

[James Merritt]

Perhaps the wonderful future, complete with central world government, which was once envisioned, didn't occur precisely because there was too much centralized control of that future, at least with respect to aerospace research and development. For instance, one of the greatest impediments to the development of the flying car is actually the lack of a robust and reliable automatic traffic control system. Who is responsible for the creaky old system we now have, not to mention its failure to advance at the same rate as other informatic or communication technologies? Government. One of the key components of a future traffic control system, GPS, remains under control of government and the civilian version of it has been deliberately hobbled by government, so as not to provide a military advantage to unfriendly nations or terrorists.

Go to Davis CA (www.moller.com) to see how the flying car is doing. While we wait for the air-traffic-control mess to be sorted out, you can buy a cute little painted die-cast model to put on your desk. Thanks to the economic inhibition power of government, that's all we'll have for a while.

[Mo]

I don't trust people w/ flying cars, there are enough idiots on the road as is. What I think would work better is an automated flight system with only an emergency landing manual override. Put in the coordinates in for your destination, the flying car will take you there and it will be able to adjust altitude, speed, etc. based on who else is in the area. Lots of people can't drive in 2-D, what makes you think they'll be able to handle and extra dimension and significantly more blind spots?

The only thing I don't like is being tracked all the time in the vehicle.

[Dreamer]

I'd prefer a kind of tube that would suck me away to work, like the old mail tubes in office buildings.

[Shannon Love]

I think the "heroic future" imagery of the Space Age disappeared when the political and cultural Left turned from unabashed technophiles to rabid technophobes.

Well up to the 1960's Leftist liked technology. They viewed technology as the primary means of raising the standard of living of the common person. Their only complaint was that Capitalism was inefficient in delivering the goods. They claimed they could deliver the benefits of industrial technology more quickly and more broadly than Capitalist.

By the late 60's, however, it became apparent that the poli-sci department could not manage a factory as well as a stuff shirt bourgeois. Once the Left could no longer deliver the goods the Capitalist ability to do so became a significant political threat.

The only way to neutralize this political threat was to portray Capitalist technology as a positive danger that could only be contained by a large centralized state. The message became, "Capitalist technology will kill you unless you vote for Leftist who will protect you!"

The technologically optimistic art and design of the Space Age now had to be mocked and degraded. The Left could not give us that future so now nobody can.

[Native NYer]

I'd rather be teleported, either via the Star Trek transporter, or Niven's Transfer Booths.

That way i could finally visit the Pyramids and the Lourve, without having to stay in those nasty countries!

[Gorgak]

I live in the future. It's really nice here. We even get old Hit & Run reruns. But being from the future, I have sad news. Jean Bart will no longer be with you after Monday, February 23. Sorry.

[Critic]

Gorgak,

Who do you have in the third race at Belmont?

[SM]

I think the argument made in the article about Space Age design is wrong, & no matter what political theory its backers may have beleived in. Read Thomas M Disch's "The Dreams our Stuff is made of" for a counterpoint. His argument is that the rocketship of the sci-fi past has been realized in the automobile of today. Space Age motifs are quite pervasive these days. We don't have flying cars but the flip open cell phone is pretty much a star trek communicator.

[a sci-fi fan]

"The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of" is, simply said, a piece of shit. It is a hack job, made all the more surprising that it comes from an otherwise good spec-fic writer.

[Don]

"One of the key components of a future traffic control system, GPS, remains under control of government and the civilian version of it has been deliberately hobbled by government, so as not to provide a military advantage to unfriendly nations or terrorists."

It was my understanding that the government turned off selective interference (or whatever their added Guassian noise was called) several years ago. Now your private, hand-held GPS is VERY accurate. As an aside, I've heard reports that some soldiers are choosing civilian models of GPS over the military-spec versions, and that they like the civi ones better.

[SM]

Maybe. But that still doesn't change the name of the book which is The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World

[SM]

Oops. That last was for Mr. a sci-fi fan.

[a sci-fi fan]

I didn't realize that "SM" is short for "anal retentive".

[daffynition]

sphinctus minimus

[Les]

Shannon,

Just to be clear, are you suggesting that those on "The Left" (insert old horror movie scream here) not only decided to abandon the goal of a high-tech future, but actually destroyed any hopes of one?

I had no idea "The Left" was so powerful. How, exactly, did they prevent these technologies from being developed?

[Gorgak here]

Message from the Future:

Yankees win the Pennant.

Regards,
Gorgak

[critic]

Shannon Love,

You used to be a porn star, right?

[a sci-fi fan]

Geez, Shannon has been taking it on the chin all day long. Give her a break.

But really, are you a porn star?

[Les]

C'mon guys, everyone knows porn was invented by leftists (though I hear Drudge has some cameras placed in some Democrats' bathrooms).

[James Merritt]

Don says, "It was my understanding that the government turned off selective interference (or whatever their added Guassian noise was called) several years ago. Now your private, hand-held GPS is VERY accurate."

James says, "I hadn't heard that. I'll check it out, but I doubt any switchover happened several years ago. I'd believe 1 or maybe 2 years ago, though that doesn't explain how it got past me, as I am doing my best to pay attention to mjaor developments like that. Hmmmm... As much as people think I love to criticize government, I would actually love to have one less thing to lay at their doorstep."

[Shannon Love]

Les,

"How, exactly, did they prevent these technologies from being developed?"

If you read the article you will see that the book is "Where?s My Space Age?: the rise and fall of futuristic design." Its not a book about technology at all but rather about stylistic and artistic motifs.

If you study the history of the various political ideas we generally lump together under Leftism, you will see a major sea change occur in the 60's (Although this was really a major acceleration of change that began at the end of WWII and the beginning of the Atomic Era). Prior to the 60's the Left was technophilic and occicentric but after the 60's it became technophobic and anti-occidental.

This change was reflected in the art and design they could influence . Since Leftist tend to dominate culturally creative fields, their change of attitude toward stylistic technological optimism significantly altered the stylistic landscape.

Stylistically, the new style emphasizes the small, the natural and the calm. It is in no way adventurous or heroic or even optimistic. It more the styling of a retirement community.

[Shannon Love]

critic, sci-fi fan,

Yes, you remember correctly, I was a porn star. My stage name was J. Smith aka "The Trans-Alaskan Pipeline."

If you close your eyes and bend over I'll show you the technique that made me famous.

[a sci-fi fan]

It makes me dizzy, this flirtation.

[Les]

Shannon,

"Technology" was a silly word to use, sorry.

A great deal of "space-age" designs were influenced by popular science fiction which has never been dominated by Leftists.

Was Stanley Kubrick a Leftist? Arthur C. Clark? H. R. Geiger? If so, they kept it to themselves.

I think you're putting too many political ramifications in a matter that has more to do with an increasing ability to more accurately describe the technological designs of the future. The folks in the 40's and 50's saw futuristic designs based on their more limited exposure to technology. As people became more aware of what technology can and will do, and as popular fashions continued to evolve, the designs of the future changed, too. I actually think it's almost completely divorced from political affiliations.

My favorite current (actually 60's and 70's, the heyday of the Leftists) space age designs are here: http://www.spaceref.com/redirect.ref?url=members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm&id=2078

They make me feel like I figure folks did in the first half of the 20th century when they looked at depictions of "the world of the future."

[SM]

Les,
Arthur C. Clarke is most certainly a leftist or at least left leaning; his books always have a "good UN" & so on. Childhoods End had a benign alien occupation! Not the kind of thing you find in Heinlein or Niven. So was Asimov, most of the "new wave" from the sixties & i dont know who else. If you read autobiographies of SF writers or histories of SF in the 1940's you will find that many writers were influenced by leftist ideologies, the new deal etc.
Other than that i agree with you 🙂

[Shannon Love]

Les,

We're not actually talking about real functional or hypothetical designs. We talking about almost purely stylistic designs of buildings, consumer goods, advertisements, logos etc.

During a period of technological optimism people and organizations want to be associated in the public mind with the technology. Space and Atomic imagery had a powerful cachet and everybody from politicians to orange juice companies wanted to be associated with it.

The Left strongly associated itself with this imagery from the days of Marx all the way up to the late 60's. They especially liked the colossal heroic school of architecture that effectively glorified the state. (Check out the technological fetishism of Soviet art and Architecture for an extreme example of this.)

What changed was that the Left could not longer credibly claim to be able to deliver the benefits of technology to the people but their social and political opponents could. So they turned against the Space program, nuclear power, etc. Now technology was portrayed in writing and art as dangerous, evil and contaminating. Nobody wanted to associated with that. Technology, especially large scale technology, lost its cachet. Now people want to be stylistically associated with nature or small intimate technologies like personal computers.

The Left technophobia was not the only driver of this change but it was a major factor.

[a sci-fi fan]

"What changed was that the Left could not longer credibly claim to be able to deliver the benefits of technology to the people but their social and political opponents could. So they turned against the Space program, nuclear power, etc. Now technology was portrayed in writing and art as dangerous, evil and contaminating."

The Left was able to deliver technological advances such as the Gemini and Apollo programs. The tendency to Luddite thought has certainly not been monopolized by the Left, looking at the current debate about thereapeutic cloning, for example. I would agree if you meant anti-individualism, but both Left and Right are guilty of that.

[Douglas Fletcher]

I think we're all bozos on this bus.

[Douglas Fletcher]

"The Left was able to deliver technological advances such as the Gemini and Apollo programs."

Are you telling us that those astronauts and crew-cut sporting, pocket-protector wearing engineers at NASA were a bunch of lefties? Even taking into account politicians, who arranged funding, so to speak, I find it pretty hard to consider people like JFK, LBJ or Nixon leftists.

[James Merritt]

To follow-up on the GPS accuracy issue, GPS apparently acquired "Selective Availability" in the early 1990s, at least according to this government source:

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gpsinfo.html#gpssa

From other sources, learned that SA was "turned off" in May of 2000, although the military retains the capacity of re-activating it on a regional basis to help confound our enemies overseas.

I'm not quite sure how I missed the big announcement that SA was "going away" -- perhaps because there was no big announcement? No GPS geek could have missed it, of course, but I am not one of those, although I almost got involved with geocaching awhile back. I am pleased to be corrected on the SA topic. I note, however, that SA was turned off only after a method for defeating it (Differential GPS) was developed. I suppose the rationale was, if terrorists and others can get around our hobbling of the technology anyway, why go to the trouble of hobbling it for everyone else? Had there not been an effective countermeasure, would we still have SA today...?

[Bob S.]

Enough with the high-falootin' commentary. THIS baby-boomer has his piece of the space-age ...
a big-finned 1960 Plymouth, with the square steering wheel!

[Shannon Love]

"The tendency to Luddite thought has certainly not been monopolized by the Left"

That's very true but the technophobia of social conservatives is a phenomenon of long standing. Social conservatives strongly value the existing relationships between people and new technology changes those relationship. There has never been a time when social conservatives did not have a jaundice view of new technology.

Conversely, the Left was technophilic for over a hundred years and then reversed itself relatively rapidly. This was a major contributor to the stylistic changes. Social conservatives did not really change at all so their impact on the stylistic changes was minimal or nonexistent.

When you ask, "What changed in the political realm that would drive a change in stylistic design across the broad culture?" The dramatic change in the global Left's attitude toward technology offers the best explanation.

[Eric Pobirs]

Actually we (those of us old enough to recall thinking about such things more than two decades ago) got a fantastic high tech future but the tech was primarily in areas we weren't thinking about.

In 1970 I was a kid who had read a lot of SF, enough to know that a lot of the flashy stuff like flying cars were a lot harder to deliver than those who first made the ideas popular had considered. They weren't in the business of serious predictions so much as entertainment. Some tried to apply a little reality. When Heinlein wrote stories in which family helicopters were common the first helicopters were just entering commercial and military application. There was a lot of serious discussion then that they had great potential as personal vehicles in ways that overcame the limitations of small fixed wing craft. For instance, you could have a helipad on the roof of a suburban family home. As it turned out the operating costs of any aircraft kept them from being reasonable for most civilians on the basis of maintenance alone. The penalty for failure being rather high and all. Recall every time you've ever been stuck waiting for a tow truck and add to that the excitement of an emergency landing.

So some toys we didn't get but we've others that most futurist of the first half of the 20th century never imagined or only in extremely limited forms. Plenty saw the advent of electronic computers being hugely important but but virtually all of them missed how micro-manufacturing would result in a large portion of the population carrying several powerful processors on their persons for such trivial tasks as playing music for an audience of one. Instead most of the increases in computing power came with increases in the physical size of the computers to the point of engulfing whole planets to act as computing centers for interstellar empires.

Long before the acronym LASER had been coined the essential concept of a high powered energy beam had been in play but almost exclusively as weaponry. Today, when most of us own several lasers (again, primarily in entertainemnt devices [a quick count gives me an estimate of about 30 lasers in my home between PCs, game consoles, CD/DVD players, etc.]) and the technology has found more applications than anyone could easily list, by far the least common application is in weapons, including target acquisition and guidance systems. The application of laser beams to human bodies is done mainly for purposes of healing rather than harm. How many saw that coming?

And lets not forget the Internet and related networking technologies, which has profundly changed life for a significant portion of our species. People who were fully prepared to see humans exploring other star systems by now never saw that one coming except for a few genuine visionaries like Vannevar Bush. Even his work was only scratching the surface of what would be achieved within the lifetimes of his younger readers in the 1940s.

[Eric Pobirs]

Predicting the future is much harder than you might think. By the time most people reach middle age it becomes very hard to imagine how much things can change. The technology is understood but the repercussions that create a diffent world are much harder to fathom. It works in reverse too. A teenager today with a current generation video game system is hard put to imagine how Pong could have once captivated an earlier generation of teens. When you've never known a world without video games it's hard to imagine how exciting it was to have a simple white line respond to your turning a control. Those same Pong-era teenagers were in a similar position trying to imagine what it was like for their parents when television became widespread in the 50's.

Perfect example is this: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0046213/

Project Moon Base is an atrocious movie notable solely because it was mainly written by Robert Heinlein and very recognizably so. (It made a great MST3K episode.) Heinlein was dead-on in predicting cell phones in many of his works. This movie feature what were obviously intended to be cordless phones. Standard dial desk phones but with no cord connecting the handset. Instead the handset had a big coil antenna sticking out of one end. In spite of this no character in the movie ever treats it as a cordless phone, remaining tethered by an invisible cord. Part of this may have been in the interest of avoiding camera movement but I strongly suspect that a more important factor was that none of the cast using the props were accustome to the idea of moving freely while holding a telephone conversation. A prime opportunity to establish that this was THE FUTURE(!) was entirely lost because nobody understood the implications of a cordless phone.

[SPressler]

When I was thirteen, My Father the Architect had a strange drawing on his board one day in the mid fifties. It was a parking garage that used a lifter on rails to lift Cadillacs and Continentals up on this movable tower frame into these chutes as high as eight stories. Like a closet armoire for shoes It wasn't really his idea but a small 8"x10" drawing for a contractor whose brainstorm it really was. One day months later I was downtown and i happened upon this machine-event of modernism, and gaped in awe that it didn't fall over. The engine attached to the tractor on rails was blowing blue smoke and once the car was lifted up to eight floors, lthe tower swayed so badly that the operator had to wait for this Imperial or whatever monstrosity it was to quit swaying and even up with the chute, it was all enormous so that I have had an eye for certain machine gods remains at areas around world's fairs, like the hotel in seattle that still had this caste iron conveyor from 61 or 62, still standing, for suitcases, unused, even behind plexiglass like a rare thing in a museum, a negative masterpiece too expensive to throw away. When i saw that teetering
parking tower and that desperate oerator wrestling the power source, a flathead v-8 spewing, roaring, sparks and smoke, I said, I'm glad my Dad's name isn't on that thing.