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:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Chapter 9: "The Blade Runner" future... and the future we actually got

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:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

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