Here's another look at the future acclaimed movie director Ridley Scott predicted for our time, Los Angeles in November 2019, as predicted back in 1982.
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
When the idea for this writing project came to me, three months ago, as I type this blog post, I didn't realize that I was living in the time period and location that the 1982 movie, Blade Runner, tried to predict. I didn't see that movie in its entirety until years after it was released. I knew it was considered a classic futuristic sci-fi movie for its day. In 1982, as a high school kid in Idaho, a far off distant future, with flying cars, weird, stream-lined buildings, and lots of human-like androids, was a common vision of what our future might be like. That Blade Runner world, and similar dystopian scenarios like it, were the future us Generation X kids were shown growing up, in movies and TV.
Now we're in that exact time period, myself, and ten million other people in the L.A. metro area, the initial setting of Blade Runner. But the real world of late 2019, and now early 2020 as I type this onto the internet, is much different than Ridley Scott envisioned. It's also much different than the world we lived in, back in 1982. In a word, today's world is crazy.
Our society, by and large, has shifted away from a mass market, mass media world, into world of millions of niches. But masses of people, everyday, average, working people, in the streets, was a dominant theme around the world in 2019. Populist movements sprang up or grew, around the globe, and not a replicant to be found. So much for the Blade Runner world.
These days, most everyone is rushed, we all have trouble finding enough time to get everything done. Most people work long hours at a job, then commute, then drive the kids around, and do the work their home requires. At the same time, people walk around, ride buses, and drive their cars, staring at a small screen on a device, their smart phones. These devices have more computing power than the mission control center of the Apollo space program had in the 1970's. In all the futuristic movies and TV shows of the 1960's, 1970's, and early 1980's, no one I remember predicted smart phones, the internet, and wifi taking over, like they have in our actual world today. Of all those programs, the cartoon The Jetson's, was the closest to reality, in that respect.
Yes, in the original Star Trek TV series, Captain Kirk and the crew had "communicators" when they went down to the planets. But we never saw Kirk or Spock watching cat videos, ball games, playing Candy Crush, ordering from Amazon, or watching intergalactic porn. The Jetson's, the original Star Trek TV show, Blade Runner, and other shows did have tele-conferencing, like Skype or Facetime in our real world.
But all the great writers and directors 40 or 50 years ago didn't foresee the mass adoption of smart phones or the internet, the most influential technologies of real world 2019/2020. In addition, no one back then expected the widespread political polarization, except Alvin and Heidi Toffler, he mentioned the possibility in an interview in 1980. No one back then predicted the hyper-connected, phone and internet-based world, the intense political polarization, that a ten year old could make a million dollars a year making videos about giant gummy worms (over 140 million views), the rise of the Kardashians, that one man named Jeff Bezos would be worth more than GE and Ford combined, that there would be 30,000 homeless people in downtown L.A., the rise of quadcopter drones, proximity flying, or that Bruce Jenner was really a chick in an Olympian man's body.
How did things get so crazy and weird? How did our society get to where it is now? Where are we headed? A lot of people ask these questions, particularly older people who remember a pre-tech world that moved at a much slower, and had a much more stable feeling pace.
I've come across three social theories that I believe describe different aspects of today's world, and how we got here, really well. My own thinking adds to these. I believe I can give a larger context, where today's chaotic world actually makes some sense. So let's take a look at these three theories.
In the 1970's, being sent to our rooms as kids was a punishment. No one then predicted that 40 years later getting kids out of their rooms would be a much bigger problem. A drawing I made for my nephew, on his game room door, last year.
Blogger's note- 8/27/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I originally wrote them in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom. I even left in the typos I missed. My ideas about the 2020's make a lot more sense now that we are 3 1/2 years into the chaos. You can check out more of my writing at my Substack:
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