I want you to know that I did not pick the focus of this issue. In fact, I became an associate well after this theme was decided on, and if I had decision-making power enough to do so, I would have axed it outright. I think that predicting the future is futile, passé, and, well, predictable. In these hard times (especially for those of us desiring a career in journalism) it is very easy to focus on the future because it does not involve facing the present. There is, in fact, a whole genre of thought dedicated to predicting the future, and a revival of the term ‘futurist.’ Ray Kurzweil, for example, has become famous by predicting that human beings will merge with machine consciousness by 2045 (Google him, he’s very interesting). A lot of thought has been put in to what life will be like in 20 years, so when I heard about this theme, I thought we would be just another drop in the bucket. Consequently, all of the possible bad things about the future popped in to my head: cliché, hubris, kitsch, etc. Well, I was wrong. This issue is proof enough (we’ve got articles that look critically at our future and our present, plus some funny stuff that’s actually funny), but something else really changed my perspective.
Rummaging through some of my grandparents’ old books, I came across a little gem called Here Comes Tomorrow: Living and Working in the Year 2000 written by the staff of The Wall Street Journal and published in 1967. My first thought was that they must have gotten everything wrong. And, yes, there are mentions of robot maids, food pills, and moon dwellings, but there are also a number of claims that are surprisingly astute. The chapter on communications pretty much sums up the Internet: “By the year 2000, you will be able to do just about everything but shake hands or kiss your wife via electronic communications.” And the chapter on computers envisions a world in which every office, if not every home, has its own terminal, what the book refers to as “teletypewriters.” There is even a discussion of the antisocial consequences of a digital lifestyle, and the possible dangers of digital surveillance. This is pretty surprising, until you realize that the Internet was already being developed in laboratories in the United States as part of the arms race. The first ARPANET connection—the military-industrial prototype of the Internet—was made just two years after Here Comes Tomorrow was published. But who was thinking about this type of radical change in the 1960s? Apparently, Cold War engineers and paranoid journalists.
Paranoia is another thing that comes up in Here Comes Tomorrow, which connects the book to this issue of The Varsity. The book’s preface explains that “of necessity, all the articles but one were written on the premise that the world would not be engulfed in a nuclear holocaust; the one exception is the article on military developments,” which stands in stark contrast to this issue, which pretty much assumes that global warming will end human civilization. We’ve got an article on the end of travel, another on U of T’s inability to become environmentally sustainable, and even a joke end-of-the-world scenario flow chart. There’s a piece on the decline of the artistic professional, and another that pretty much asserts that monogamy is a thing of the second millennium. What does this say about us?
Well, it appears that in 2009, the future looks a little more grim. The late ‘60s were fraught with violence, hatred, famine, and corruption, but it seemed like the ongoing march of progress would provide technological solutions to the world’s problems. Now, here we are, a decade after the turn of the millennium, we still have all the above problems, and we know that technology is not going to save our asses; in fact, it will probably just take them over. We’ve got a recession, a war in Afghanistan that might just go on until the next century, Stephen Harper, Facebook, newspapers about to fail, a municipal workers’ strike that helped nobody but right-wing politicians and photo-bloggers, a guiding document for the university that wants to cut the number of undergrads on St. George campus by the year 2030 (seriously, see Hilary Barlow’s report on page 10), and lots and lots of condos. So grab a nice hard drink and let’s find out what the future beyond 2030 has in store.
Love,
Dan Epstein
Associate Features Editor
