2. Same Old Same Old.
New York tried again in 1964. Perhaps intimidated by the massive miscues of earlier future- guessers, the planners narrowed their vision considerably, and we got things like this proposal for an end-of-the-century living room. Fortunately, we've been spared everything except the flat-screen TV. Two years before the fair, the Jetsons, in a kind of the Flintstones meet Flash Gordon sitcom, had come along with a remote-controlled, robotized world much closer to us than the one the fair organizers suggested.

By this time, "future studies" had become so respectable that it was an academic discipline, and some people began writing "futurist" in the occupation blank on the old 1040 tax form.

Of course, world's fairs are by their nature utopian, being a kind of combination global chamber of commerce and Rotary Club, designed to show the best the world has to offer and also to call everyone's attention to what a bunch of get-up-and-go guys the organizers in the host city are.

Downward-directed visions are a definite no-no at such a festival. Dystopias are left to lone-wolf artists pecking away at their keyboards. In the same decade that the 1939 New York fair was celebrating the coming of Freeway Heaven on Earth, Aldous Huxley was pulling a Louis Sullivan. Brave New World, a dystopia of shocking prescience, was certainly nothing you'd ever have seen a GM vice-president reading during lunch hour.

Then in 1982, Hollywood chimed in with Blade Runner, the most fully realized dystopia in media history. This dark, wet, frightening vision of Los Angeles in 2019 hit hard and it hit home.

Blade Runner: L.A. street scene, ca. 2019.

For a while, the future looked merely bleak, but then here came the Australians plopping Mel Gibson down into a post-nuclear apocalypse world that was far redder in tooth and claw than even capitalism at its worst had been.

We had seen the future, the movies seemed to be saying, and it didn't work. Even while we laughed at "Futurama," wasn't there a wee small voice inside, quietly moaning, "Oh no, not again..."? If Matt Groening couldn't save us from our techno-selves, who could?

Future Tensed, page 3

Magellan's Log IX

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