Why your 2050 dystopia is optimistic

Why your 2050 dystopia is optimistic

By Honora / 10 December 2018

TLDR: I urge everyone to join the conversation on how we can create art that more accurately reflect the challenges of our time.

Picture this: A sprawling megalopolis covered in smog. The faint glow of neon signs and giant LED screens displaying the latest advert for the latest high-tech drug. Constant aerial traffic of flying cars and a spaceship is now boarding for the moons of Jupiter. Police wearing full body exo-skeleton armor patrol the crowded, lively streets. While underground networks of ultra-libertarian hackers fight for the rights of the digital commons, religious sects try to outlaw consciousness transfers.

Sounds familiar? It’s basically every other sci-fi world imagined after Blade Runner.

I’m allowed to talk crap about this image because I painted it.

Here’s the thing, Artists have a huge role in influencing the subconscious narrative of humanity
we got into Art because it was fun, for some of us it’s also how we make a living now. 

Problem 1: It’s rooted in the (mostly) outdated challenges and imaginary of the 80’s

Good sci-fi is usually a projection of human challenges and moral/philosophical dilemmas projected into the future. But did you ever notice how most old sci-fi looks very dated?

This comes from the fact that human imagination is usually locked by our surroundings. For example with this electric scrubber: mass produced mechanical parts were the new hot thing in 1900, so it makes sense that a “cleaning machine” would extrapolate based on this. What most people in 1900 couldn’t imagine is that sucking air is way more efficient, but they couldn’t think of it since there were not much pneumatic technology around the life of the average citizen.

So here’s my problem with almost every concept artist (including me!) loving Blade Runner so much ; It’s reinforcing an 80’s imaginary of the future. Meaning it’s the future, but viewed from 1968-1980.

I will separate the imaginary from the challenges.
The imaginary is my personal analysis of science-fiction from the 70’s and 80’s, while challenges are the historical accounts of challenges that the authors of science-fiction from 70’s and 80’s were having at the time. Note: all challenges are sourced at the end of the article using the [source number] tag.

Imaginary: 

  • “We went to the moon, now it’s time to colonize the solar system”
  • “We’re going to colonise other planets once earth is overpopulated”
  • “Flying cars are just around the corner”
  • “The use of robots are going to raise ethics questions very soon”
  • “The USSR will live on forever. The cold war is here to stay.”
  • “Japan’s economy is going to surpass the USA”
  • “science and industry will keep making more and more powerful machines”
  • “Humanity is the center of the economic universe” 

Challenges: 

  • Pollution at the city level was a major concern in the 1980’s as car traffic increased and_ photochemical air pollution_ was getting worse.
    At the time of the making of cyberpunk dystopias like Blade Runner, air pollution was actually at it’s peak in many cities. For example, air quality in Los Angeles slowly got better with the introduction of the clean act in 1970 and 1990 [1] 

  • In the 60’s, the population growth rates of India and many other countries were absolutely out of control [2] , leading to widespread fears of overpopulation from the scientific community. In 1968 Paul R. Ehrlich, (a Stanford University biologist) published “The Population Bomb,” an apocalyptic vision of an overpopulated earth and mass starvation. 

    You can see that the peak of the growth rate matches with the birth of the fear of overpopulation. I highly recommend reading NYT’s article titled “The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion”. We can safely assume that most fiction written around that time was influenced by this challenge.

    While air pollution is still a concern in large cities, it is a mostly understood and reversible phenomenon, and the ethics of robotics is still very much a philosophical debate rather than a software engineer one.

    Now let me attempt to define the imaginary and Challenges of 2019 onwards. This is no small task and of course my list is going to be incomplete, inaccurate, etc. This is more meant as a conversation starter to move towards a more up-to-date vision of the future.

  • Imaginary: 

    • “Humanity is fucked”
    • “We’ll be fine, we’ll go to Mars haha”
    • “Technological singularity is coming soon”
    • “Nuclear Fusion is coming soon”
    • “The economy can keep growing forever”
    • “This is all going to crash soon”
    • “Developing countries are going to provide 2/3 of the GDP growth by 2040”
      (Note : taken from an actual sustainable development investment journal)
    • “Renewable energy, yay!”
    • “Renewable energy is a leftist conspiracy”
    • “The scientists are going to save us all with some breakthrough technology”
    • “Dude, where’s my flying car?”

  • Challenges: 

I’m going to focus on Energy, because most other problems are a result of this.

Remember those memes about graphic design/art? Where you can’t get it all at the same time?