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:
No comments:
Post a Comment