Saturday, December 21, 2019

Chapter 1: We are the Mutants


Why are us modern humans, with our amazing technology and hyper connected civilization, so fascinated by mutants in fiction?  Because we are the mutants of Earth.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

"May you live in interesting times."
-Ancient Chinese curse

Danger and Opportunity

Yes, we live in "interesting times."  With so much craziness already happening in our world, what's coming in the future?  There's an old axiom that the Chinese word "crisis" is made up of the characters "danger" and "opportunity."  Actually that's not true, it's a linguistic mistake.  But those two words probably best describe the decade I see us heading into.  This coming period, from 2020 to 2030 is a decade of both great danger and great opportunity.

Several long term trends are converging and amplifying the speed and intensity of the transition period we're already in. The theme for this coming decade is collapse of the old, with all the pain and uncertainty that causes, and a rebuilding of something new.  The Industrial Age many think is long over, is actually still lingering on, in many old businesses, and many old institutions, like our political and education system, among others.  The remaining Industrial Age institutions will collapse in this decade, sparked by the worst economic collapse any of us living have ever seen.  That's the danger.

The massive corruption and cronyism of today's world is grinding the world's economy to a halt.  It's been propped up for years now, and we're teetering on the brink of a major collapse, an upside down pyramid heavy with levels of debt never seen in human history.  That collapse, though it's been predicted by a few, and is now being anticipated, written about, and talked about by many, will take most people by surprise, and cause a ton of pain and hard times.

But in this collapse of the old comes levels of opportunity like we've never seen.  The economic situation, which I personally think will visibly fall before the 2020 U.S. elections, will strip away much of the archaic, Industrial Age ideas and institutions that are now holding most regions of the United States back.  While a handful of major cities and their metro areas have grown into high tech hubs, most of rural, small town, and small city America has been held back, not by lack of technology, but just by old ideas and old leaders struggling to hang on to their local power structures in the face of very uncertain times.

In every rural community, every small town or city, there are people now who know what that town or region needs to rebuild their economy, and their hope.  But as rural and small town America lost factories, jobs, and talented people to the large tech hubs, those people trying to rebuild have often been held back by local power structures clinging to how things used to be.
Industrial Age urban jungle infrastructure, Shockhoe Bottom district, Richmond, Virginia, 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig

First there was the Factory Apocalypse, hitting all those areas with the loss of millions of good paying manufacturing jobs.  For the last several years there has been the Retail Apocalypse, hitting those regions hard with store and mall closures.  With this next financial downturn, and the collapse of the student loan debt bubble, and other market bubbles, we will see the College Apocalypse, among other great societal upheavals.  Many of our small towns and cities have become "Eds and Meds" towns, with most jobs tied to the local college and hospitals.  The College Apocalypse has already started, dozens of small colleges have already been bought out, or have gone out of business.  In this coming decade, we'll see this trend explode, and it will take a heavy toll on 150 or 200 small towns and cities across America.  As we continue to head into the full scale Information Age, where most information is free and available to everyone, colleges will play a much different role in the future, a role that has to be figured out in the next decade.

While this collapse will be a hard and a dangerous blow to many small towns and cities, the chaos, and the desperate need to create jobs... any jobs... will finally allow all those creative, motivated, and hard working people in those towns to build something new.  The waning power structures in all those areas will simply have to let new ideas take hold.  It will be contentious, it will be turbulent, and a lot of people, who aren't paying attention to those talking and writing about the economic and societal shifts now, will lose a lot.  But, like a forest fire that clears the old brush, this will allow for a lot of new growth, both in the major tech cities, but even more so across rural, small town, and small city America.

The word "recession" is basically meaningless in today's ultra-manipulated economic world.  I'm calling this coming decade "The Phoenix Depression."  Whatever the numbers and economists' statistics wind up being, this decade will feel like a full blown Great Depression to most people.  Yes, no one wants to hear that, but that's where we're headed.  But the tough initial blows economically are setting the stage for tremendous opportunity, like the mythical phoenix being reborn from the ashes.

How to I know this?  That's what the rest of this "book," that I'm publishing for free as a blog, is all about.  This has been my life's work, what I've really been learning about through a string of odd jobs and crazy adventures.  These online chapters will explain how I came to discover all this is coming.  Future books in this "Welcome to Dystopia" series will go into much greater depth in specific parts of this overall idea. 
Mutant figure in a giant sneaker, street art on the back of a building in Hollywood, California, December 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig

 Why are we fascinated by mutants?

To a cancer cell, the tumor seems normal.  An abnormal cell, sick, mutated, and deformed, a cell that sucks life and energy from its host, that cell sees the putrid, smelly, puss-filled, fungus-riddled tumor as its natural environment.  That cell, and all those like it, reproduce and multiply, bent on self-destruction, slowly sucking the life from, and ultimately killing, its host.  To that cell, its disease-riddled environment is "just the way things are."

To a healthy cell, the tumor is an aberration that must be destroyed, to keep the larger body from dying.  The healthy cells of the immune system attack and destroy the mutated cells of the tumor, and work to remove the toxic mess from the body.  The body feels really sick while this is happening, yet knows it is ultimately for its higher good.  Instinctively, healthy cells know that they are part of an environment, the body, and if they pollute and destroy that body, they ultimately destroy themselves.  The mutant cells just don't give a fuck.

A huge, deep, underlying problem of human civilization here on Earth is that we are born and raised as "cancer cells."  We are born into modern civilization, a society where it's simply normal to pollute, attack, destroy, and trash the environment that surrounds us, and ultimately makes our lives possible.  We are born and raised in a social system that pollutes the air, water, and earth that supports our very lives.

Our towns and cities, where the majority of us are now born, live, and grow up, are human created environments of steel, concrete, asphalt, brick, and dead wood from trees that were cut down.  Our immediate environment, the places we live, work, play, and sleep, are filled with toxic substances.  Our cities are designed for large numbers of humans to live close together, which is made possible by taking huge amounts of resources from areas far away from those cities, to support the comfortable lives of the city dwellers.  We are all raised in an environment that is simply not sustainable over the long term.

Other humans, miles away, grow our food, cut down trees to build our houses, mine minerals to build and fuel our vehicles and make our cell phones, and bury our incredible amounts of waste products.  Our everyday lives depend on this huge system of taking resources from a distance, from a few miles to thousands of miles away, to support our urban populations.

We are born into this thing called "human civilization," a way of living that is ultimately going to collapse.  That's our normal.  We are so intertwined in this system, that it is rarely, if ever, questioned.  It's simply believed to be the way things are supposed to be.  The simple, underlying root belief of human civilization is that we can live our urban or suburban lives, that our society can take more than it gives back, and that we can do this, forever.  Our human civilization is based upon this lie.  We go through our daily lives, all of us, without ever questioning it.

Because our entire social structure is based upon this lie that we are not bound by the limits of our environment, we have created a whole nest of other lies to justify our everyday lives.  We built this nest of lies so we never have to take the uncomfortable step of even glancing at the the root lie underneath.

We are born and raised as "cancer cells," we live in towns and cities that, from space, appear to be tumors on the green and yellow skin Earth's land masses.  Why are we so fascinated by the mutants in comic books and video games and movies? 

Because we are the mutants. 

This underlying lie of human civilization, has bothered me since I was in junior high, about 40 years ago.  "The Great Lie," as I dubbed it four decades ago, doesn't mean we have to give up living in towns and cities.  While cities create pollution, toxins, and most of the worst aspects of human society, cities also fuel our innovation, music, art, entrepreneurship, creativity, and great humanitarian acts of kindness and good as well.  It just means that human civilization will always have some serious problems to contend with, and that our "high civilization" will... someday... collapse.

This Great Lie is the foundation of everything our day to day lives are built upon.  And we wonder why our world seems so crazy.
 A tarped homeless person's encampment, in the skid row area of downtown Los Angeles, with new skyscrapers being built in the background.  December 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig

 Welcome to Dystopia.
 Our 2019 world is a place where thousands of homeless people struggle for day to day survival on the streets, often mere blocks away from high rise luxury apartments and condos which are empty, on purpose.  Those high end living spaces, occupying many key places in the most prestigious cities of our world, are empty because they are investments.  The handful of insects that may wander those empty apartments, could crawl up on a window sill and look down on human cockroaches, the homeless, living in a world where average humans would never let a stray dog or cat live for long.  Yet we'll let feral humans suffer indefinitely. The buildings full of empty condos, and the growing homeless population several floors below, is just one of the many paradoxes of today's chaotic world.

Is there some underlying order, or disorder, that can shed light on why our world today seems so different, so crazy, so chaotic?  Yes, I think there is.  This big picture of our world is what I've spent my life being fascinated by, and learning about.  There are major themes underlying today's chaos, and there are long term cycles playing out, that give it context. This little book, originally intended to be a self-published book, both ebook and in print, is my work to explain the context I see for today's crazy world.  But I'm self-publishing this as a blog, because in today's crazy world, I'm a homeless man as I start publishing it, who hasn't been able to escape the streets.  I don't drink anymore, I stopped drinking while working as a taxi driver years ago.  I'm not an alcoholic, I just got tired of being around drunks, since I drove them home every night for years, and stopped drinking.  I don't do any drugs, legal, illegal, or otherwise.  The only exception is a Tylenol for a toothache maybe once every few months.  I'm not the stereotypical homeless person, yet I'm living in that crazy world, for now.  Then again, no person is really any stereotype, homeless or otherwise.

So I deal with some of the worst of us "cancer cells," a lot, on a day to day, minute to minute basis.  This afternoon changing trains under downtown L.A., I stood 15 feet from a heated fight where one guy grabbed his girlfriend's taser to go after the other guy, as the train doors were closing.  Just another day on the streets, working through the urban world millions of us inhabit.

You may ask, if all of us urban dwellers are the human "cancer cells," who are the "healthy cells?"  The healthy cells are the small numbers of tribal people, the ones we usually call hunter/gatherers, left in our world.  While we call them primitive, they are born into the actual, natural, environment, and grow up wandering it in bare feet or with thin shoes of some sort, and less clothing that we use.  As kids they are taught which things in the natural environment are good to eat, which are not, which are used for tools and weapons, which can be used as medicine.  They are taught what's safe and what's not.  Without a book or a smartphone to Google stuff, these "primitive" people learn, and remember, thousands of things, in and about their local environment that us "civilized" people will never know.  For these tribal people, living within the parameters and actual capacity of their local, natural environment, is "normal," and so they don't pollute the water, air, or earth in a dramatic way.  When our civilization eventually collapses, theirs can most likely go on, more or less indefinitely.

So do we all need to learn to hunt rabbits and deer and eat local edible plants?  Only if that's a personal draw we have.   If learning primitive survival skills is fascinating to you, then, by all means, go learn all you can.  But in today's world, in another paradox, the local environments that those small groups of remaining tribal people live in, are dependent on our civilization.  Our 7 billion plus people, over half living in cities right now, have such an effect on the global environment, that we could take out those remaining tribal people in our greed, as we have millions of others, simply with pollution or continued habitat destruction that affects their regions.  Their sustainable lives are often dependent on our civilization in our crazy world today.

Again... welcome to Dystopia.  This is not the global authoritarian government world George Orwell and similar writers envisioned.  This is not the post-nuclear apocalypse world that other sci-fi writers imagined.  It's not the end times waiting for the rapture, that some Christians invented from a misunderstanding of the crazy book of Revelation.  Our Dystopia, this time we're now living through, this time where change and chaos is rapidly escalating, is a period of great transition.  It's a long, drawn out, turbulent time of transition from one kind of human society to another.  Our Dystopia is the greatest period of rapid change in known human history, and a greater change than most of the human history that's long been lost to us, as well. 

Written by Steve Emig (aka The White Bear)
All opinions are mine, and are not officially endorsed by anyone in the videos shared, or in the works and theories of other people I mention.

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed anything since writing these posts in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom, I've even left the typos in.  My thoughts on the 2020's are making more sense now, as a lot of chaos has already played out.  You can read more my thoughts on my Substack:

Chapter 2: The Future the Media Shows You is Not the Future You Get



In this trailer from 1982, for the film noir, dystopian future, science fiction classic, Blade Runner, we see the familiar face of Harrison Ford, and hear his exposition...

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

"A blade runner's job is to hunt down replicants, manufactured humans you can't tell from the real thing."

He goes on to say that he's searching for " six people in a city of 106 million."  It's a good introduction in a movie about the far off, distant future.

About a month ago, I woke up about 4 am, with an idea for a writing project in my head.  I woke up in a parking lot, just over the hill from Hollywood, California, where I usually sleep as a homeless man.  I've been a writer for 34 years now, and I've learned how my creative process works pretty well, so waking up early in the morning with an idea is not unusual.  Part of the idea involved going back to my childhood and teenage era, and looking at futuristic TV shows and movies we saw then, to see how they envisioned the future.

I got on YouTube, and watched trailers for about 20 well known movies, from the classic 1927 Metropolis, all the way up to the Hunger Games trailer from 2012.  I wanted to see how these movies, mostly from the 20th century, envisioned our future, and compare those futures with the weird world we actually live in today.

A lot of my current ideas that I want to write about, are about our collective future, the period we're heading into right now, and what's going to happen in the next 5-10-20 years.  To give my ideas a context, I wanted to re-visit the futuristic ideas of my childhood, made in that era before computers, cell phones, the internet, and so many other technologies, entered our everyday lives.  It was an incredibly low tech era by today's standards.

Going through all those movie trailers, I saw a couple of main themes.  One theme was a future with an all powerful, authoritarian state, using massive surveillance and massive pressure towards conformity, to control the population.  George Orwell's 1984 exemplifies that theme.
 Security camera bubble, so common now, we don't even consciously notice them, subway train car, L.A., 2019. Photo by Steve Emig

The other main theme, and the one I actually remembered seeing more as a kid, was the "post apocalyptic, wander the desert and fight crazy people" theme.  That idea was almost expected by the time I was in high school in the early 1980's.  We half-believed that there would actually be a nuclear holocaust, and some of us would survive and wander the aftermath looking for other people... and food.

I remember sitting around the living room of my best friend's house, in Boise, Idaho, when a commercial, it might have been for Mad Max II: Road Warrior, came on TV.  One of my friends joked, "Man, I hope the apocalypse happens soon, because if it doesn't, we're going to all have to go get real jobs."  We all laughed, and mused about how cool it would be to wander around the ruins of a destroyed civilization, looking for the other few survivors.  In 1982, that lifestyle was far more appealing than the future we all faced, 40 years at a miserable office or factory job.
 Industrial age urban jungle area, Shockhoe Bottom district in Richmond, Virginia, searching for its place in today's transition growing Information Age, 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig


As I went back and watched the Blade Runner trailer a second time, I noticed something I missed at first.  The trailer starts with a silent title, "Los Angeles - November 2019."  I thought, "Oh shit,  I'm now living in "the future" of my high school self."  All of my generation, Generation X, is.  We are now living in the future era we dreamed about in high school.  We are now in the future imagined in movies like Blade Runner.

The craziest thing is that I was a high school kid in Boise, Idaho, dreaming about becoming a wildlife biologist in 1982, when Blade Runner came out.  Today I'm writing this in an actual paper notebook, in a McDonald's, in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, on November 26th, 2019.  I'm in Los Angeles county.  The actual city of L.A. is just over the line of small mountains behind me.  By some weird quirk of fate, I'm in the setting, in the exact time, the makers of Blade Runner were trying to imagine.

There are no replicants.  I don't have a flying car, nobody I know does.  Blade Runner, and all those dystopian futuristic movies of my youth, got "the future" almost completely wrong.  And yet, right now, "the future" of my high school self, is far different, far more amazing, and far worse, than everyone imagined.  Well, almost everyone.

"2019 is only a few years away, meaning Blade Runner will likely go down as another sci-fi film that failed to accurately predict the future."
-"Top Ten Futuristic Movie Cities," WatchMojo.com, in 2015
(Blade Runner's L.A. ranked #1 on the list, BTW)

The real new skyscrapers going up in downtown Los Angeles, juxtaposed with a bible verse on the side of a homeless shelter, late 2019, the exact time the 1982 movie Blade Runner was imagining.  Photo by Steve Emig

Written by Steve Emig (aka The White Bear)
The opinions above are mine, and are not officially endorsed by anyone in the videos shared, or anyone whose work I mention.  

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording in any of these posts, not even the typos I originally missed. "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense to more people now that we have seen 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can read more of my thoughts on my Substack:

Chapter 3: Where the Hell is My Flying Car?


Flying cars are real.  They do exist.  You can actually buy one, for anywhere from $200,00 to about $1.7 million.  Of course, for $1.7 million, you could buy two Lamborghinis, a Mclaren, A Tesla, a big pick-up, and a Cessna for the flying part, which makes more sense.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

Harrison Ford's character is flying in one at the beginning of the Blade Runner trailer.  George Jetson had a flying car in the Jetsons cartoon, that folded up into a briefcase.  I saw them repeatedly in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, in the 1970's, when I was a kid.  Those magazines made it sound like we would all have flying cars by the year 2000.  Bruce Willis had the classic, movie-type flying car design, while playing futuristic a taxi driver in The Fifth Element, in futuristic New York City.  Many futuristic movies, from some Star Wars films on down the list, have had flying cars in them.

It's 2019 as I write this, we're in "the future" Generation X kids, like me, saw predicted in books, TV shows, and movies, as kids and teenagers.  But we don't see flying cars buzzing above the traffic on the freeways, or whizzing through our skyscrapers like in Blade Runner.  While we're at it, there are no human colonies on the moon, also widely expected by many for our time period by people 30 or 40 years ago.  There are no human colonies on Mars.  We can't go to a hotel on the moon for the weekend.  There are no bionic men or women who can run 50 miles per hour, or run 80.4 kmph in other countries.  Scotty, from the original Star Trek Enterprise, can't beam us up to an orbiting starship.  None of us has a hovering land speeder like young Luke Skywalker.  None of us have a fully functioning Mach 5 like Speed Racer, or a giant robot to fly us around like Johnny Sako.  Most of all, we haven't had a worldwide nuclear apocalypse that allows a few of us to wander the desert, building deadly rat rods, stealing gas, and partying.  OK, our deserts are full of wandering tweekers and crackheads who pretty much do just that, but it's just not the same as Mad Max in Road Warrior.

As I looked through all of these movie trailers below, to refresh my memory about the "futures" that 20th century novelists, TV, and film writers predicted, one thing became glaringly obvious.  Those intelligent, motivated, well meaning writers of the past got "the future" almost completely wrong.  Take a look for yourself, these are the movie trailers and TV shows I looked at:

Metropolis (1927),
1984 (1956)
The Time Machine (1960)
The Jetsons TV cartoon (1962-63)
Lost in Space TV show clip (1965)
Farenheit 451 (1966)
Star Trek- original TV show (1966)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Soylent Green (1973)
The Six Million Dollar Man TV show (1973-78)
Rollerball (1975)
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
Logan's Run (1976)
Logan's Run TV show intro (1977-78)
Damnation Alley (1977)
Mad Max (1979)
Escape From New York (1981)
Mad Max 2: Road Warrior (1981)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Terminator (1984)
1984 (remake- 1984)
Apple Macintosh "1984" commercial (1984)
Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Brazil (1985)
Robocop (1987)
Judge Dredd (1995)
Tank Girl (1995- My personal favorite of all of these)
Gattaca (1997)
The Fifth Element (1997- My second favorite)
The Matrix Trailer (1999)
Minority Report (2002)
Aeon Flux (2005)
V for Vendetta (2005)
The Hunger Games (2012)
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

The weird thing about this look at "the future" is that flying cars actually do exist.  There have been many functional flying cars, for nearly 100 years now.  As crazy as it sounds, Charles Lindbergh actually piloted one once, about 80 years ago.  The Moller Sky Car is the closest functional, real world, flying car to the ones we've seen in so many movies, and read about in sci-fi books.  The Moller Sky Car never went into production, for business financing reasons.  You can see one hovering in the video at the top of this blog post.  The Terrafugia Transition, the newest flying car, may go on sale this year.  Flying cars sounded amazing in science fiction stories, they look cool in movies, and they actually exist in real life.  But we don't all have flying cars, like those 1970's magazines I read predicted.  They just didn't take off in the real world (pun intended), and become widespread.

I was born in 1966, so my first memories are from around 1971, a time when the Apollo space program was sending men to the moon.  That period of the early 1970's, with repeated manned missions to the moon actually happening, was an exciting time of looking forward to the future.  A lot of people then, in my formative years as a little kid, thought we would have colonies on the moon and Mars in 30 or 40 years, which would be the years from 2000-2010.  Actual, intelligent adults then actually thought we would be able to take a week's vacation on the moon by now.  A lot of really smart people then believed that we would be sending people on long term space voyages to other star systems by now.

Yet us humans haven't even been back to the moon in the 48 years since (officially, anyhow).  We haven't sent people to Mars.  There is a dummy human in a Telsa car heading to the asteroid belt, though, so that's something.  We do have really cool, unmanned rovers wandering slowly around Mars, explained here, which is cool and informative.  We can't go for a weekend in space as average individuals, which many smart, 1970's era people, thought might be possible by now.

Yet, like the flying cars, space tourism actually does exist.  I actually met one man in the 1990's who went on to become a space tourist.  Guy Laliberte', co-founder of Cirque Du Soleil, paid $20 million to go up in a Russian rocket, and spend a week on the International Space Station as a tourist.  Here's actual footage of Guy and the crew in space.  He's the bald guy with the red clown nose.  He's French Canadian, so he's speaking French to his daughter in the clip.  He's one of a very small group of actual space tourists alive in today's world.



A clown in space.  Street performing accordion player, stilt walker, and fire breather.  World traveler.  New wave circus founder.  Entrepreneur, philanthropist, high stakes poker player, and space tourist, Guy Laliberte'.  He's one interesting character.  I'm a little bummed I had to go to RT, the Russian propaganda channel, for this clip, but that's life.


Closer to home, for me, anyhow, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic plans to start taking people, space tourists, to the edge of space, for a bargain price compared to what Guy paid.  It was supposed to be possible this year, in 2019.  But years of technical delays have set the program back.  The first actual space tourists on Virgin Galactic are tentatively scheduled to fly next year, in 2020, if things go well.  Their base of operations is in the Mojave desert, north of L.A., about an hour from where I'm sitting now.  Here's a clip of a Space Ship Two flight with crew members from early 2019.  Space tourism is real, like the flying cars.  But, again, it's nothing like what people imagined would be possible by now, back in the 1970's days of the Apollo missions.

Some of the amazing ideas, dreamed up by futuristic writers and film makers of the 20th century, have actually come trueIf you're really rich.  But they didn't become popular, like so many people predicted.  Why did smart people 40-50-60 years ago predict the future so poorly?  Why didn't they get more things right?  What makes predicting the future so hard?  That's the question I'm exploring here.  Then I'll explain what kind of future I see emerging in the next ten or 20 years, and how and why I came to these conclusions.
Instead of flying cars and land speeders, we got GPS located and tracked, rental electric scooters, which, I have to admit are pretty freakin' cool to have around.  These are super popular in downtown L.A., and in Hollywood, where this group was sitting in late 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording in any of these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020.  I even left in the typos I originally missed.  "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now, after we've been through 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can read more of my thoughts on my Substack:

Chapter 4: Did the Futuristic Movies and TV Shows of My Generation X Childhood Get Anything Right?

,
A look at the 1960's era futuristic cartoon, The Jetsons, from the view of creators Hanna Barbera.  

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

This is where I first saw the idea of a flying car, The Jetsons.  In the lives of Generation X kids, like me, during grade school years, The Jetsons was a funny cartoon watched either in the morning, before going to school, or afternoons when school was over.  Created in 1962-63, just before the birth of Generation X, The Jetsons was a comic look at what the "far off 21st century" might be like.  Even as a kid, it seemed pretty ridiculous.  Funny thing is, mingled in with the crazy flying cars and sky houses, this early 60's cartoon actually predicted several of the real technologies of today's 2019 world better than all the more serious novels and movies of that era.  Video phone calls/teleconferencing, treadmills, personal computers, action sports (sort of), moving sidewalks,video watches, minimalist furniture, big screen TV's, video court appearances, AR fashion shopping (really, here it is), the internet (sort of), cell phone-like communication, and some often used medical technologies, all of these showed up in The Jetsons in the early 1960's.  Crazy.


As a middle aged man of 53 now, I've seen an incredible amount of technological "progress" happen in my life.  It amazes me how different our world is from the future predictions of the relatively low technology era of my childhood.  As I mentioned in the earlier chapters, we don't all have flying cars many predicted, we're not making interstellar space trips, we don't have armies of human-like android robots, and there has been no global nuclear apocalypse.

Most of the main themes of the 20th century sci-fi novelists and movie makers have not actually happened.  We never got many of the high technologies predicted, yet we got many technologies, just as powerful, that were not predicted.  We have smart phones, tablets and laptops and now average individuals can communicate with about half the people on the planet, individually, or collectively.  We have the internet, wifi, and online platforms and social media, so average people can publish text, photos, and video that can be seen, potentially, by a couple of billion people.  We have GPS that can find locations everywhere, and direct us to them.  Then we have a whole slew of other technologies at work in our current world, in addition to communications.  We all know that, though we take nearly all of them for granted these days.

But the visionary writers and movie makers did get a couple of major themes right.  One major theme that runs through the dystopian futuristic novels and movies of the 20th century is the idea of an all powerful, authoritarian government, with surveillance cameras and systems for watching the public's every move.  That idea of all-encompassing surveillance, came true, as we all know, there are now video cameras all over our urban environment.  Our cell phones, tablets, laptops, have microphones, digital photo and video cameras, which can be hacked, potentially.  Our smart phones and our cars have GPS tracking, and cars also have microphones and cameras in many cases.  There are also computers in cars that track where you go, how fast you drive, whether you use your turn signals, and other data.  If that's not enough, a lot of people are now actually buying "bugs," voice enabled devices, like Amazon's Alexa or Google's version, and even putting video cameras in their houses, opening their private conversations up to potential collection, surveillance, and data mining.

  If that's not enough, we fill online platforms, sharing personal photos, comments, stories, on social media, and in blogs, and other online sites and apps.  In addition to all of that, most of us are probably wearing or carrying items embedded with RFID tags, usually that we don't realize.  These tags are the things that set off anti-theft systems at the doors of stores.  They can also ad to the digital data trail we leave behind as we go through our days in today's digital world.  With nearly everything we do, and everywhere we go, we leave a whole bunch of digital tracks, which ad to our metadata files.  George Orwell warned us in his classic novel, 1984, that "Big Brother is watching."  He's right, in today's world, all kinds of people, including Big Brother-type organizations, are watching.
 Not only is Big Bother watching, at Universal Studios, in Studio City, California, a Big Minion is watching.  See him?  Photo by Steve Emig.

Many people are freaked out by this, as I was many years ago.  The reflex action against all this crazy surveillance technology is to "go off the grid."  But even if you go out in the woods somewhere, to get away from it all, you might get your photo taken by somebody's trail cam, looking for deer, coyotes, poachers, or a sasquatch.  If you dodge the trail cams, you might wander under someone's drone flying overhead.  If you manage to miss the drones, there are still dozens, perhaps hundreds, of satellites in space, some of which have cameras that can tell if you need to shave, or get a manicure, from up in space.  "The grid," is almost everywhere these days.


Big Brother is watching... but so is little sister, and she's got faster thumbs

George Orwell, in 1984, predicted the high tech surveillance police state, Big Brother, way back in the 1940's.  What Orwell didn't predict was that almost every person in the future world would also have cameras, digital still and video cameras, connected to communications technology that can access millions, potentially billions, of people.  Yes, Big Brother is now watching, but so is "little sister," and that changes everything.
Cell phone cameras in action, as a member of the street performing crew, The Damn Team, flips over four audience members.  The Hollywood Walk of Fame, Hollywood & Highland, Hollywood, California, late 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig.


The other main technology that dystopian future novels, movies, and TV shows got right is "video phone calls.  I first saw this myself in The Jetsons, as a grade school kid, watching the re-runs in the early 1970's, like most of Generation X.  In The Jetsons, a little video screen would pop up from George's desk, or Jane's kitchen counter, and they would have video conferences with others.  If Jane Jetson was still in her bathrobe in the morning, a sort of shield would come up, and make her appear made up and dressed, as she talked to her friends.  It was something like a filter on Snapchat.

The "video phone calls" also happened on the big screen on the bridge of the original Star Trek TV show, and small video calls happen in Blade Runner, and some other movies and shows.  So many of the 20th century movies and TV shows, predicted the idea of Skype or Facetime, decades ahead of its invention.

If you go through all these movies that I linked above, and all the similar TV shows and movies, you could find little things, little devices and pieces of technology that we do have in today's world.  But by and large, all of these futuristic predictions from novels and movies got most of the future wrong.  The "futuristic" cities, the flying cars everywhere, the hordes of human-like androids, and everyone wearing the same clothes, those things just didn't happen.  That's not the world we live in today.

In Blade Runner, made way back in 1982, set in Los Angeles in November 2019, the big problem was escaped replicants going on a killing spree.  In real life Los Angeles in November, 2019, the L.A. Times just took a poll of residents to see what the biggest problem in L.A. is.  The answer?  95% of people in today's L.A. said homelessness is the biggest problem in 2019 Los Angeles.  H.G. Wells, George Orwell, and other visionary writers didn't see that one coming.
Hollywood, California, the land where dreams, and nightmares, can come true.  Homeless man passed out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, near the corner of Hollywood boulevard and Highland, the top tourist spot in Hollywood today.  The paradox of our modern world in transition.  December 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig.

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed the wording in any of these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020.  I didn't even fix the typos that I originally missed.  "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now that we have seen 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can check out more of my thoughts on my Substack:


43

Chapter 5: Was there anyone in the 20th century who did get "the future" right?


Was there anyone in the mid to late 20th century who actually did predict, to a reasonable degree, the world we now live in?  Yes, actually there was.  The the husband and wife futurist team of Alvin and Heidi Toffler saw, and forecast, many of the major trends that led to our world today.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

More important, they thought those trends through, and wrote about them in several books.  Alvin Toffler forecast a great deal of the more important trends that actually shaped the world we find ourselves in today.  With his first major book, Future Shock, published in 1970, Toffler saw the wave of new technologies, primarily computer based, that were going to sweep through society and radically change our everyday lives.  He forecast that most of us would have trouble dealing with the rapid change coming, and whole swathes of people would simply be left behind in the wake of the new technology.

Alvin and Heidi saw a world coming that would happen much faster, a speeding up of everyday life.  They surmised, quite correctly, that the world created by so much new technology entering our lives would come as a shock to many people.  Their analogy was the culture shock caused by traveling to different country, where life and social cues seemed strange, and hard to understand at first.  They dubbed this idea "future shock," where the pace of change would overwhelm people, shocking them with its unfamiliarity.  The Tofflers were right on the money with the main idea of Future Shock.  A decade later, they went deeper into the idea of technology reshaping society with their 1980 book, The Third Wave, which I will talk about in coming chapters.


"Essentially it (Future Shock) said, that because of technology, change would be so dramatic in society, that we would all find it difficult to keep up... There would be ruptures in society as a result, as some groups were left behind, whilst others struggled."
-Ray Hammond, another futurist, quoted in the clip above, about Toffler's work

Today's political polarization, at its core, is based on people's reactions to technology, and to future shock.  The Republican party "hitched its wagon," in 2016 presidential cycle, to New York real estate billionaire, reality TV star, and blatant racist, Donald Trump.  Trump came out of the woodwork, a populist candidate from the Right, and drew a huge following, a following no traditional Republican candidate could match.  Those millions of people who blindly follow Donald Trump are now called Trump's Base.  Trump's Base is made up, almost exclusively, of the people who have been left behind by the onslaught of new technologies.

As "Red State America" has collapsed economically over the last 30 to 40 years, as most of rural and small town industrial America continues to die on the vine, tens of millions of people simply refuse to learn the new skills, and develop the personality traits needed, to function in the fast-changing, hyper connected, tech enabled world of the 21st century.  Those people, laid off from the factories and mines that closed down 20 years ago, unable adapt the new ideas needed to restart local economies, and very often living off of government checks by scamming Social Security Disability, saw hope in the silver tongued billionaire from New York.   They put their faith in the guy who said it was OK to hate immigrants, anybody with brown skin, and especially Hillary Clinton.

As I write this chapter, on Christmas Eve 2019, Donald Trump has been impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Republicans, who have now given up any pretense of respect for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, are struggling to kill the impeachment effort, backed by the vast majority of everyday Americans.  It's going to be an ugly fight in 2020.  But the pendulum of power and larger social trends, is swinging away from the political Right.  The inmates took over the asylum for a while, and the crackdown is beginning to happen, order from those who still believe in America's underlying principles is slowly being restored. 

We are where we are in today's world, polarized and unstable, in most every way, because so few American leaders took the work of of the Tofflers, and other forward looking people, and the large scale, underlying trends they reported, seriously.  If a lot more of the political and business leaders of the 1970's and 1980's had taken Alvin and Hiedi Toffler's work seriously, this country would be in a much different place today. The focus of the majority of business and political leaders on the short term, the next quarter, the next year, has led to our current tumultuous, and largely preventable, chaos.

Here's the 1972 documentary Future Shock, based on the Toffler's 1970 book.  It's important to remember just how long ago this was made.  To put it in a Generation X context, this documentary came out a year before Bruce Lee's classic Enter the Dragon, and two years before Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon  jump attempt.  That was a long, long time ago, when the world was a much different place.  The Industrial Age was going strong then, and everyone "knew" it always would be.

Here is  my personal favorite interview with Alvin Toffler, from 1980, when his second book, The Third Wave, was coming out.  This is one of the most brilliant interviews anywhere.  Period.  Now 39 years old, recorded four years before the Apple Macintosh was released, the "personal computer for everybody," that completely changed society, this interview predicts a huge amount of what's happened since.  Even more important, most of Toffler's thinking is still relevant today, even if his particular examples now seem very dated.  Nearly 40 years on, three years after Alvin Toffler's death in 2016, his words still have much to teach.  This is a recorded interview, distributed on cassettes,with no video, in effect, it's a "podcast" from 1980.


Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording since I originally wrote these posts in 2019-2020, except for these links at the bottom.  I even left in the original typos I missed.  "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now that we've lived through 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can check out more of my thoughts on my Substack:

Chapter 6: Why care about the future?


The old clips in this video of Disneylnd's Tomorrowland are a perfect example of the thinking and imaging the future at the dawn of the "Space Age" in the 1960's.  It's from that same era of future dreaming as many of the movie trailers I watched.  The monorail looked cool.  But by the time I got there and saw Disneyland, in the late 1980's, "Tomorrowland" was a complete joke.  By that point, the Jetsons-esque design from the 60's looked completely old fashioned and dated.  And "Monsanto's House of the Future?"  Yeah, that corporation's name conjures up different images in today's world.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear


Tomorrowland looked old fashioned and dated by the 1980's, but hey, Space Mountain and Captain EO were fun.  But the whole thing, like most of the movies mentioned earlier, were a product of thinking only about the technology that was becoming possible, but not thinking at all about how that technology would actually affect our lives, and change our world and society itself.  That's what set Alvin and Heidi Toffler apart, they though about how real world humans would interact with all the new technology (back in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's), how that would change our social structure, and what reactions may come from that.  Disney and the sci-fi writers mostly just used straight-line technological projection, which is flawed when trying to determine the future.

Why care about the future?

Why do you check out the weather reports?  Because they give you a glimpse of the future, the weather outside, in your area, in the next few hours, and next few days.  Whether reports give you an idea what to expect.  You check them out, see what's coming your way, and decide whether you need to change plans or take action, since you know what's headed your way, from the sky.  I see being a futurist as the same idea, just for a longer time period.  Futurists give you an idea of what's headed your way, so you can take action, if necessary.  Yet most people, for reasons that baffle me, ignore futurists, and like to be blindsided by major trends.  Then they say, I didn't see that coming," and want to be bailed out.

Since  I was a little kid, I've been fascinated by trying to figure out what the future would be like.  I was a super shy, pudgy, dorky, smart kid who sucked at sports.  Except dodgeball.  I was so afraid of getting hit by those red, 1970's era kickballs, that I got real good at dodgeball.  Anyhow, I was a geek when that was a horrible thing to be.  Geeks didn't turn into computer billionaires when I was a kid.  They just became old geeks, wearing short sleeve dress shirts to work with pocket protectors.  I got picked on a lot, as geeks do, both at school and at home.  Like most geeks, I wanted to be good at sports, or something that mattered in the world of kids.  That didn't happen until I got into BMX in high school, but BMXers were a different type of misfit at the time.
Me at age 18, on the right, running the Ferris wheel and working as manager of a tiny amusement park called The Fun Spot in Boise, Idaho, the summer of 1985.  The three girls on the ride are co-workers Kim, Michelle, and Pam.  At 18, every young person is trying to find their way into the adult world, and into the future.  I was deathly shy, pretty smart, had no money to go to college, and was running a small business with 12 employees to manage all summer.  I was also getting seriously into the weird new sport of BMX freestyle.  Yeah, and I was wearing Op short shorts for dudes.  We thought that's what guys in California wore.  We were wrong.  Photo by Vaughn Kidwell.



My "present" sucked most of the time in my childhood, everyday life was scary and depressing, as it was for millions of kids all over.  So I escaped in a number of ways.  I ran off into the woods and pretended to be a hunting guide or bush pilot in Alaska.  I escaped by reading books, mostly non-fiction.  Or I daydreamed, usually about a future where I would be cool and successful... at something.

Everybody has the things they find interesting, for me, dreaming about "the future" was one of those things.  I mean, it was the 1970's, we were supposed to have flying cars and be able to spend a weekend on the moon by the far off year 2000.  The future just had to be better than my everyday life as a kid.  It just had to.

I was born just outside the industrial city of Akron, Ohio in 1966.  That makes me one of the oldest members of what came to be called Generation X.  My family moved from town to town as I grew up, for a variety of reasons.  I went to a new school nearly every year.  Most people did not move often then.  When I was a kid, the factories in every town in Ohio were thriving.  The Great American Middle Class was in its heyday.  Times were good, if you weren't a geek like me, anyhow.

In those days, if an adult said they were from Detroit or Flint, Michigan, you knew they worked at an automaker plant, and they made MONEY.  There were people making$25, $30, and $35 an hour at a time when gas cost 65 cents a gallon.  Men went to work, women stayed home with the kids, and a single paycheck could buy the average family a decent home, if they saved up for a few years.  The little Main streets in every small town were thriving.  Most families took a week or two off for a family vacation every summer.  In Ohio, the average people went to Lake Erie for the week, and the people with a bit more money went to Florida for a week or two.  The American Industrial Age world was in full swing.  Time moved slow, things were good, they had been good for a generation, since the end of World War II, and always would be.  That's how adults of my childhood seemed to see the world.  Those adults always complained about their jobs, but the jobs paid well, so they didn't quit.  They bit the bullet day to day, and marched on.

Then, in about 1977 or 1978, I heard some adults talking about something unusual.  A factory was closing down in a town not too far away.  That was unheard of then.  Factories just didn't close down.  But it happened, and the workers got laid off.  It was crazy, the owners of the company said they were moving the factory to a place where people worked for much less money.  They were moving to a far off land... called Alabama.  People today forget that the first outsourcing of industrial jobs started with Midwestern factories moving to the American South.  That was the beginning of the factories shutting down and moving.

A couple of years later, in 1979, my dad's company, Plymouth Locomotive Works, in Plymouth, Ohio, had rumors of a buyout, and possible shutdown.  My dad quietly started sending out resume's.  Just after I finished 8th grade in Willard, Ohio, my dad got a job with a mining equipment company in New Mexico.  Plymouth Locomotive Works wound up getting bought out, and shutdown two or three years later.  Meanwhile, my Midwestern gringo family moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico, a major culture shock.  Used to being surrounded by rural Ohio white kids, I was suddenly in a school and town that was 70% Latino.  Hora le ese!

We learned quickly that tamales, enchiladas, chicken fried steak, steak fingers, guacamole, and sopapillas were all really good things.  I hated the summer heat, but came to love the wide open spaces of the western deserts.  I also worked hard to keep from getting my ass kicked by the tough Mexican kids.

Less that a year into that new life, and rumors started circulating that the mining machine company might get bought out and close down.  My dad sent more resume's out, and we wound up moving to Boise, Idaho.  My dad, a draftsman, who had worked his way up to being a design engineer, without a college degree, went to work at a much larger engineering firm.  It seemed like really bad luck that two companies my dad had worked at had threats of being shut down within a couple of years.  The reason it seemed like bad luck was that none of the adults I knew had read Alvin Toffler's books, 1970's Future Shock or 1980's The Third Wave.  Those books were off the radar of the adults I knew then.  New technology coming in and changing the nature of factory work was one of the themes Toffler saw coming.  We didn't know it then, but that was just the beginning of the collapse of the manufacturing sector in the United States.

Me as a BMX freestyler in 1990, carving tile in the Nude Bowl, in the summer of 1990.  The Nude Bowl is an empty swimming pool in the middle of nowhere, in the Southern California desert, outside of Palm Springs.  It's the ruins of an abandoned nudist colony.  At that time, when there were no skateparks in SoCal, the Nude Bowl was the one pool around that BMXers and skateboarders could session without getting hassled.  Still from my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.


These days, the Midwest I grew up in is known as the Rust Belt.  When you mention Detroit or Flint, Michigan, or industrial factories to people today, they most likely picture dilapidated ruins of huge buildings, covered in graffiti.  Those jobs went to industrial robots, and to the American South, and then to Mexico, then to Taiwan and South Korea and other Asian countries, and ultimately to China.

If people like my dad had read books like those Alvin Toffler wrote, they would have learned of these huge trends building, and maybe they would have made some different choices in their professional  lives.  In the case of our family, maybe we wouldn't have moved around every damn year.  Who knows?  Maybe my dad would have learned some new skills, or found a company with better long term prospects for the future.
Pierre Andre' Senizergues, riding on two side wheels, not a Primo slide.  This is a still from my 1990 self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Nearly every week, from `1987 to about 1992, I spent my weekends freestyling at the Huntington Beach Pier with a couple of BMXers and skaters Pierre, Don Brown, and a few others.  At dusk one day, about 1988, I was sitting there watching Pierre practice.  I started wondering where all of us BMXer's and skaters would be years in the future.  Pierre at the time was working with a shoe company in France to make better skate shoes.  He wound up taking over the company, which became Etnies, and then Sole Technology, the parent company of Emerica and E's shoes, 32 snowboard boots, and Altamont clothes.  Who knew?


That's the value of spending some time thinking about the future, and reading and listening to futurists.  This is particularly valuable in an era of rapid change, which is what we're in right now.  Futurists are people who find this stuff interesting, and go out and read, observe, and study the changes happening out in the world.  They look for the larger and longer term trends, and try to make sense of all the different forces of change, and weigh the different variables happening.  They try to make sense of it all, and they write or speak about the trends happening.  Futurists give you a kind of longer term "weather report" about the business and social world.  When you have an idea of the larger trends at work in the world, you can make better decisions about your own life, and your own future.

That's my point in this online "book" as a blog.  I've spent my life reading, watching, learning, and thinking about these major trends and cycles.  There's a huge convergence of ultra-long term trends coming together right now.  This is making for a period of rapid change, even crazier than the last 20 or 30 years.  My own personal research has given me a big picture of what's going on, and I want to share the ideas and trends I see, with you.  You can look at them, from your own perspective, and see if any of this makes sense to you.  If so, it may help you make better informed decisions for your own life.

Pro skateboarder Ken Park, airing over the spine of Tony Hawk's Fallbrook mini ramp, 1989, during a film shoot for the Vision Skateboards video, Barge at Will.  That's me as a 23-year-old, sitting on the rail, on the right, wondering what the future holds.  Still from film by Don Hoffman.  I was Don's production assistant that day, and shot some Super 8 film that wound up in Ken's section.  I never have met Tony Hawk, but I had lunch with hid dad, Frank Hawk, that day.  Don and Frank were talking about "the old days," of skateboarding on that day in 1989.  It was an epic day for me.

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording of these posts since I originally wrote them in 2019-2020.  I even left in the original typos.  "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now that we've lived through 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can read more of my thoughts on my Substack:


Chapter 7: The Power of Creative Scenes (what I did instead of college)


Instead of going to college after graduating high school in Boise, Idaho, in 1984, I rode my Skyway T/A BMX bike when not working, learning tricks on it.  I'm not dissing college,  I simply couldn't afford it, and my intuition and BMX freestyle led me in a far different direction.  A year later, my family moved to San Jose, California, and I wound up hanging out with these guys above, and riding at Golden Gate Parkevery weekend that I could. 

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

 In the summer of 1986, when this clip was shot, we were just a bunch of guys really into the emerging new sport of BMX freestyle.  We had no idea where the tiny sport was going, but it caught all of us, and most of all, it was fun.  The Golden Gate Park BMX freestyle and skate crew, known best for the Curb Dogs and Skyway factory teams, was what I now call a "Creative Scene."  We were a small group of people, all interested in something weird, new, and creative, BMX freestyle, in our case.  We hung out, we rode with each other, we fed off each other, we competed with each other, we pushed each other, and we helped each other.  That's what people in creative scenes do, whether it's a music scene, an art scene, or a tech scene, or any other creative scene.

The thing about creative scenes is that they attract highly creative people, often pretty weird and geeky people,and often shy, at first.  But those people push the limits, they try new things.  They fail often.  And sometimes they succeed, and break new ground in some way.  Ultimately, people in creative scenes progress.  Progression becomes a way of life.  When people progress, they invent new things.  In our case, in the mid 1980's, it was new tricks on BMX bikes, and new types of riding.  But something else also happens.  Us individuals in creative scenes begin to unlock our potential, we begin to learn, and understand, our personal creative processes, and that usually leads to other creative opportunities down the road.

In the NorCal/Golden Gate Park bike/skate scene, BMXer/skater Dave Vanderspek was the visionary leader and chief promoter.  He started the Curb Dogs, a freestyle (and skate) team that was so popular, it ranked right among the BMX factory teams in magazine polls.  Seen on local TV in this 1985 clip, Dave came across a lot like Jeff Spicoli at first, the crazy, stoner, surfer character that put actor Sean Penn on the map in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  It was easy to dismiss Dave as some crazy kid.  But along with founding and promoting the Curb Dogs team, and doing many shows, Dave promoted the first BMX halfpipe contest, the first BMX street contest, and was one of the pioneers of BMX street riding, and brought the punk rock and skateboard influence into BMX.  Dave died unexpectedly in 1988, apparently from pushing the limits in a very negative way.

Maurice "Drob" Meyer, was kind Dave's assistant manager, a solid pro rider for Skyway, though much quieter and less in the limelight.  Maurice went on to build the Curb Dogs website, which tells the story of Dave and this small team that inspired so many early BMX and skateboard riders.  What doesn't come across in these news segments or the website is all the time Dave and Maurice spent talking to and coaching us younger riders, and helping us improve.  At a time when most freestylers were all about themselves, just trying to get sponsored, Dave somehow intuitively sensed the importance of building and nurturing a true scene, a community of riders, and continually worked to make sure everyone was having fun and improving, no matter how good or new they were.  That was another area where Dave Vanderspek was far ahead of his time, and why so many riders and skaters were influenced by him and the other NorCal pro riders.

Maurice's brother Ray was a pro freestyle skater, but the standout skater from the Curb Dogs was young Tommy Guerrero, who became part of the legendary Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade, and one of the first pro street skaters, as you can see in this early clip from 1985.

NorCal's BMX vert guy, and Skyway team pro Hugo Gonzalez, made a name for himself by trying the craziest tricks and stunts no one else even dreamed of doing in those days.  For Hugo, landing was optional, and no one wanted to miss a chance to watch Hugo ride, because we never knew what he would try.  "Huck" should have been Hugo's middle name, as you can see in the clip.

Robert Peterson, another pro on the Skyway factory team, was best known for inventing BMX tricks that involved balancing in one place.  But 'Bert was also an inventive genius type, who designed and built his own hovercraft, and then went on to help invent several BMX parts as the sport, and bikes progressed. 

Maurice Meyer, the focus of the clip above, was a Skyway pro then, and still lives in San Francisco and works in tech now, and is still a great guy and all around solid human being.  He's the only pro rider in the video above, the rest of us were hungry amateurs then.  You can see me (Steve Emig) chasing my bike at 5:07, a trick I learned while riding in parades in Idaho.  A month after this was shot, I got a job at the publisher of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  I later helped put on contests, wrote and shot photos for a newsletter, and made BMX and skateboard videos for the AFA, 2-Hip, S&M Bikes, and self-produced a couple, like this one.

Karl Rothe, who you see at 4:22 in the clip above, went on to become a Mongoose factory rider, and the editor of BMX Plus! magazine for several years.  Chris Rothe, Karl's brother, is talking at 4:34 in the clip.  Chris is now big into electric bikes, and creates huge private parks for ebike riding with his company, Eco Bike Adventures.

Marc McKee, who you see riding in the yellow shirt at 4:43 and 5:05, became the main graphic designer at World Industries, the skateboard company created a year after this clip, by skater Steve Rocco.  World Industries tapped into the emerging street skating movement, of which San Francisco skater and Curb Dog, Tommy Guerrero was a major influence.  Marc's amazing, and often fucked up, but epic skateboard graphics, changed the skateboard world forever.  You can see Rocco and Mark talking about the provocative skate graphics, in the documentary, The Man Who Souled the World, at 37:24.   Their effect is still rippling through the art and design world today, so many other creative people were inspired and influenced by Marc's designs.

My point here is that a Creative Scene, a small group of people stoked on some new idea or creative form, who get together and push each other, can have incredible long term effects, on themselves, and the world at large.  The 8 or 10 riders in this clip above didn't affect the world to the incredible extent that another little Bay Area Creative Scene did, the tech scene of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Apple Computers.  Our little scene was a major influence on both BMX flatland, BMX vert riding, BMX street riding, and street skateboarding, all of which are worldwide sports and industries now.

Look at us then.  Just a weird little crew of guys goofing around on bikes, having fun, and doing tricks for the crowds at Golden Gate Park.  Never underestimate the potential your creative work, and your Creative Scene, can have on the world, and on our collective future.  Throughout history, but even more so in today's world, Creative Scenes think up, and then build the future.

Written by Steve Emig: The White Bear

Blogger's note- 8/27/2023- I haven't changed anything on these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom.  I even left the original typos in.  My thoughts about the 2020's make more sense now that we're 3 1/2 years into the chaos.  you can read more of my writing on my Substack:

Chapter 8: How I became an amateur futurist


The late Alvin Toffler, in the first minute of this clip, explains the role of a futurist.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

"A futurist devotes more time to thinking about the long term future, not just what's going to happen next... And we write books, and we go around the world talking to people who are, in fact, making the future...(It's) an attempt to find out who are the people that are changing, or will be changing, our lives, in the years and decades ahead."
-Alvin Toffler

How I became an amateur futurist

 As a dorky kid , I spent a lot of time daydreaming about the future, as many kids do.  My family was more dysfunctional than most, and our house was always a place of incredible psychological tension.  It was miserable.  To escape the daily drama and misery of life in our house, I would often play and pretend to be somebody successful in the future.  Along with reading and wandering around the woods, "the future" was a form of escape for me, like many other kids.  But I was a really voracious reader of non-fiction, which included my dad's Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, which was not really what "normal" kids did.  I began to focus on the future more than most kids, thinking that the pain and fear I dealt with as a kid must be survived, and that maybe someday, many years in the future, I would do something amazing, that would make the pain of childhood worthwhile.  That's not the most sophisticated thinking, but it gave me a reason to cope with the day to day drama.  So I began to just spend more time thinking about the future than most other kids, as my family moved around rural and small town Ohio.

By the time I started my sophomore year of high school, my family had moved west to Boise, Idaho.  As a high school kid in the early 1980's, I got seriously into the weird sport of BMX racing, and then the brand new sport of BMX freestyle, or trick riding.  Everyone in my life, family and friends, thought I was completely wasting my time learning tricks on a "little kid's bike."  But BMX gave me a place to vent my teenage frustration at life, blow off my anger, and it kept me out of a lot of trouble, by giving me something to focus on.  In addition, after sucking at every sport my whole childhood (except dodgeball), I finally stuck with a sport long enough to get pretty good at it.  Much to everyone's surprise, not only did I wind up competing in national competitions, BMX freestyle turned into a career for me for several years.  

Meanwhile, in school, Boise High students had to take one year of economics.  I found that class really interesting, and turned out to be naturally good at it.  I don't think that was so much academic, as it was something close to the way I thought about the world already, and fueled by much of the non-fiction I had read as a kid.  Officially, "economics" is "the study of scarce resources."  In reality, economics is about the world of money and finance, and how business and financial trends interact.  It's about predicting the future of the financial world, something I was already interested in.  I found the economics class in high school fascinating.  I'm weird like that.  

In the spring of 1984, when I graduated from Boise High School, I didn't have the money to go to college.  I didn't really have a strong direction I wanted to go in, either, except to focus on BMX freestyle.  My high school friends and I were all outdoorsy oriented types, and collectively talked about becoming wildlife biologists.  But that meant needing the money to head north to the University of Idaho, and the money just wasn't there, so I "took a year off."  I did manage to save up $1,000 that summer, while working in a small amusement park, for $2.10 an hour.  But my family ended up needing that money for a family emergency.  As we headed into the fall of 1984, I rode my bike as much as possible, and worked nights at a large Mexican restaurant.  My freestyle teammate Jay Bickel and I did a shows with our trick team, the first BMX freestyle team in Idaho, and we rode in parades around the area. 

In the spring of 1985,  I still didn't have money for college, and my dad got laid off.  He wound up finding a new job in San Jose, California.  I worked my summer job at the Boise Fun Spot, managing the day to day operations of the small amusement park, and 12 employees.  My pay was still low, $3.15 an hour, but it was great experience in management for an 18-19 year old.  In late August, I packed up my ugly, brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose.  I got a job at a local Pizza Hut, and continued riding my bike all day, and working nights.  I started publishing a BMX freestyle zine, and soon met the NorCal freestylers, as I mentioned in the last chapter.  

A year later, I took the job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, and became part of the little BMX/freestyle industry.  At 20 years old, without ever taking a college course, I was suddenly working at national magazines, and responsible for proofreading both magazines.  I quickly began to learn how media works, and the influence advertisers had over the traditional media of the pre-internet world.  The pro riders who had been my heroes a year or two before, became friends and acquaintances.  

At the time, the BMX freestyle world was focused in a few dozen small scenes, small groups where a couple of guys had seen a trick show, got interested in freestyle, and then started a trick team in their area.  Almost everyone had their own trick team, and promoting our weird, new little sport was important to us.  As BMX freestyle grew exponentially over the next 3 or 4 years, I not only saw, but was in the middle of, a new movement.  BMX freestyle was an idea growing and spreading through society.  I saw how small groups, which I now call Creative Scenes, are born, grow, attract others, and spread a new idea.  At the time, I didn't realize what I was seeing, except that I began to sense that there was something important to these scenes.  I saw how some scenes were better than others, and the differences between them.  The Golden Gate Park scene was the most cohesive, the tightest group, and others were a bit more informal.  But all were innovative, creative, and influenced new people, and attracted new riders into our sport, as BMX freestyle sparked into the national scene in its first wave of popularity.  I also noticed the same was true with skateboarding, the older sport of surfing, the tiny (then) sport of snowboarding, inline skating, and mountain biking.  While us BMX guys were wrapped up in our own sport, we often rode with skateboarders.  As the late 1980's rolled by, I began to realize all of these weird action sports had more in common than we wanted to admit.  I began to wonder why all of these individual, session oriented sports, where competitions weren't the most important thing, were happening at the same time. 

Then, at the bicycle industry trade show in January 1989, talk was in the air.  Industry people were walking around, actually saying, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing."  Every company pulled its support from BMX racing and freestyle, and put money into the new mountain bike idea.  Our industry collapsed as the world declared BMX was dead.  But us hardcore riders kept riding.  We got "real" jobs, if we didn't have them already, and scrimped and saved to get to contests.  BMX went into recession in early 1989, a year before the national economy did.  BMX freestyle went underground.

At the same time I was working in the BMX and skateboard industries in the late 1980's, the Southern California real estate market was soaring.  Two different people I worked with bought a house one year, and made $100,000 on it in a single year.  Everywhere in SoCal we were hearing stories of people making fortunes off of real estate.  I was a young guy in my early 20's, not making much money, and every Saturday I'd eat breakfast while "Make Money in Real Estate" infomercials playing in front of me on TV.  I thought that if I could learn about real estate, and make a bunch of money, I'd have more time to ride my bike.  I bought one of the courses about real estate, and began to read books on the subject.  

I was really shy, and didn't have the guts to really try and buy a house, but I began to learn about the Southern California real estate market.  Like my interest in economics in high school, a big part of real estate is predicting where the market and the economy would be a year, or two, or five, in the future.  I began to pay attention to the dynamics of the real estate market, and wondering where things were headed.

By Christmas time 1989, after the BMX world had collapsed, things at Vision Skateboards, the parent company of where I worked, were starting to head downhill.  I worked at Unreel Productions, a video production company that was trying to sell TV shows of skateboarding, bodyboarding,  BMX racing and BMX freestyle, six years before the X-Games started.  The TV industry wasn't ready for those sports yet. 

My parents had moved from San Jose, California to Greensboro, North Carolina, and they wanted to fly me back east to spend Christmas with them.  I decided to not take my bike, though I was staying there a week.  My first night in Greensboro, I went with my parents to the grocery store, and I went to the book rack, looking for a book to read.  I knew I was going to be bored as fuck that week, for the most part, and I needed something to pass the time.  I picked up a book called, The Great Depression of 1990, by economist Ravi Batra.  Yeah, I nice little up lifting book of light reading about economics and a complete financial collapse.  Like I said, I'm weird like that.  

The book explained a lot about long term economic cycles in the U.S. economy, mostly 10 year, 30 year, and 60 year cycles.  Being the geek I am, I found it fascinating.  Now, the reality is that we didn't go into in a Great Depression in 1990, as Batra predicted.  But we did go into a recession, with a collapse in the stock markets and the real estate markets.  It turned out to be a good thing that I didn't buy a house in 1989, which I almost did.  The economic downturn dragged on into a stagnant economy that lasted through 1996.  The mainstream economists called it a "double-dip recession."  While we didn't get the full great depression Ravi Batra predicted, almost everything he predicted did come true, just not to the full extent he was expecting.  

That got me interested in the financial markets.  I began watching them every day in the newspaper, watching to see if the market went up or down, and then reading the thoughts of the business people, investors, and economists on why they thought it went up or down.  By doing this, I began to get a feel of why the stock markets ticked up and down day to day, and a sense of why they moved up or down over the longer term.  Like real estate, I wound up as interested in the dynamics of the market, and wanted to understand it, as much as I wanted to just make a bunch of money. 

In his book, and a follow-up book, Batra also introduced me to a theory called the Law of Social Cycle by a thinker from India, named P.R. Sakar.  This theory says there are four basic mentalities in every society, and one of those mentalities dominates the society at any given time.  This mentality shapes society, and there are ultra long term cycles involving these cycles, which gives yet another way to get a sense of where the world is heading in the future.  This added to the ideas about predicting future trends percolating around the back of my head. I lived in the BMX and skateboard world  of the early 1990's, where top pro riders ate ramen on a regular basis, because sponsorships were few and far between.  The Law of Social Cycle became more influential on my thinking later on, when I realized it explained other trends I was watching happen in the world.  I'll get deeper into that theory in a future chapter.  

Blogger's note- 8/27/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020, except for these notes at the bottom.  I even left the original typos in.  My thoughts about the 2020's make a lot more sense now that we're 3 1/2 years into the chaos.  you can read more of my writing on my Substack: