The Future Ain't What It Used to Be
Apocalypse, Techno-Futurism, and An Agricultural Robot at the Smithsonian
During the opening monologue of the Z-movie auteur Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space, the announcer solemnly intones, ‘We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.’ The Amazing Criswell (whose own predictions of the future, his stock in trade, were, let us say, less than accurate, probably by design) goes on to describe, in a decidedly confusing manner, the future events to be depicted with such lack of cinematic finesse in the movie as taking place both ‘in the future’ and as having already taken place, past and future tenses mingling freely. Incoherent, to be sure, but on reflection not entirely so: all descriptions, dreams, and fears of ‘the future’ are also about the past and the present, and are as much ways of talking and thinking about the shape of the world as a whole and our place in it. By looking into the future we make sense of ourselves and our world now, we delve its structures and significance and determine what we ought to do (or perhaps justify what we are already doing, as the case may be). Criswell was indeed right about the future’s hold on our imagination, in both hope and fear: perhaps uniquely among sub-lunary creatures we humans have (or can have—whether we apply it or not is another matter) a strong sense of future possibilities, of the need to forecast and prepare for the contingencies we cannot foresee. But we also shape our visions of the future through more abstract frames, looking not just for Criswell’s events but for an overarching pattern, a directionality to the future, which can give past and present meaning they would not otherwise possess.
To over-simplify a little, human reflection on the future—the distant future that is, which depending on one’s time horizon might be ten years down the road, a hundred, or in the meeting and transformation of temporal time by eternity—have tended to take some kind of apocalyptic form, with the expectation of cosmic transformation lying at the end of history (or, in Indic and Buddhist permutations, the end of this cycle of history at least). The end of the world in most forms of apocalyptic thought and theology does not necessarily have much in common with the meanings now associated with the term ‘end of the world’: while destruction and chaos might be involved, the central concept is that of the ending of the present world and the beginning of the new world, with destruction and judgement the prelude to transformation. The apocalypse is both an end and a beginning, it is a revelation of the heavens and earth transformed, and demands not despair or fear but the preparation of the self and perhaps also of wider society. The details will, to put it rather mildly, vary—that preparation might involve personal repentance and purification, or it might involve a mass violent rising against the present systems of corruption and injustice—but there is a widely shared vision of the future and of the present’s relation to the future that tracks across apocalyptic theologies and systems.
Modern thinking about the future certainly inherits and reproduces aspects of apocalyptic, eschatological thought and practice, but in a less coherent way. We might say that modernity has dis-aggregated the component parts of ‘traditional’ thinking about the future, taking the apocalypse as understood in Western Christian theology and sourcing it for parts. To over-simplify again, we see in contemporary thought-worlds two broad trends, both with roots in apocalyptic and eschatological thought: on the one hand, the utopian, expressed in myths of continual ‘progress’ (be it social, technical, cultural, etc), in revolutionary visions of society transformed through purifying violence and upheaval, or in dreams of some technological ‘revolution’ that will usher in utopia, often by tackling some great crisis or quelling a looming catastrophe. On the other hand, and sometimes bound up with the utopian, is of course the dystopian, manifest in everything from cinematic visions of zombies, alien invasions, pandemics, and asteroid strikes, to fears of social and other forms of collapse due to climate change, political totalitarianism, or other factors. The dystopian might have a terminal point, an actual literal end of the (human) world in which we all actually cease to exist, but like the utopian more often it has a type of crisis point, a transformation beyond which all is bleak and terrible, judgement without a judge stretched on interminably.
What does all of this have to do with the agricultural robot at the Smithsonian promised in the subtitle of this essay, you are not doubt wondering? While I’ve been interested for a long time in the history of apocalypticism and of human approaches to time more generally, what precipitated these reflections was a brief visit to the ongoing (until July at least) exhibit at the Smithsonian’s recently remodeled Arts and Industries Building, ‘Future(s).’ My kids and I stopped by the exhibit last month, during one last visit down to the Mall and its museums before our move south. I had been motivated by a desire to see the interior of the building, and it is quite magnificent—soaring domes, abundant ornamentation, the kind of optimistic grandeur typical of much late nineteenth century architecture in America. The exhibit housed there now deals with, as one might guess, visions of the future, and as such offers a view of present thought-worlds and relationships to the past as well as a range of secular eschatologies—which in sum total are about as coherent as Ed Wood’s futurism, making them all the better to interrogate.
The incoherence—or, more charitably, tension—starts at the beginning of the exhibit, which features in de rigueur fashion a text wall of land acknowledgements and long paragraphs about racial justice and equity, the kind of so-called ‘woke’ boilerplate that has become so typical of American institutions in recent years. Like most of its other manifestations, it is essentially tacked on, a way of signaling proper political orientation and propitiating for sins past, present, and future. It would be a little unfair to say that the inherently troubled and troubling sense that underlies land acknowledgements, confessions of racial injustice, and the like simply disappears further along in the exhibit—rather, in incoherent and sporadic fashion elements do reappear, in a way. But the average visitor is not really here to think about the native peoples who once lived along the Potomac, they’re here to see cool futuristic stuff. And there is plenty of it, with abundant and unapologetic corporate sponsorships on display.
We are treated to the spectacle of a helicopter-airplane hybrid sort of vehicle, the taxi of the future we are promised, the stubborn dream of the flying car apparently still alive and kicking; it is big and glossy and quite frankly ridiculous looking. The video explainer hails it as a solution to traffic gridlock or something, which I suppose is more inspiring than describing it as another plaything for the rich, the more likely reality should such technology ever actually—pardon me—take off. A prototype of Elon Musk’s fever-dream train re-invention, the Hyperloop, is a major center-piece; appropriately, spectators can walk up a ramp to peer inside the sterile white pod, but cannot actually enter it. We are promised that the tiny pods will one day traverse the country at high speeds, and that prices will plummet, making the levitating eggs affordable to everyone—travelers will be able to speed from one city center to another, though whether individual cities will have their own smaller hyper-loop networks is unclear to me (perhaps it was explained, but viewing with children precluded a close reading of all panels of text). The kids are more interested in running up and down the access ramp than the boring white egg thing on tracks. They’re not wrong.
Across the hall a looming agricultural robot—the work of the ominously and rather ridiculously named ‘moonshot’ entity X, a subsidiary of Alphabet, i.e. Google—stands alongside a metal sphere with seeds inside, an art piece functioning as some kind of commentary on climate change and ecology. The robot at least is kind of cool looking, with a bit of a Star Wars aesthetic contrasting with the frankly dull and dystopian vibe of the helicopter-plane taxi, the Hyperloop pod, and various other futurist fantasies on display elsewhere in the exhibit. We watch the video showing the mechanical creature in action: according to experts, the text on the screen tells us, we must vastly increase world agricultural production by 2050, which means we need robots built by semi-secretive research wings of giant corporations, naturally. The video takes us through various agricultural fields, stretching off into infinity, lumbering green machines equipped with a formidable AI-directed surveillance and maintenance apparatus. Everything is divided into neat little grids (as in the example in the header above, lifted from somewhere online), for as far as the digital eye can see; there are neither wild creatures nor even humans, only the machines monitoring and manipulating huge monoculture fields. Here at the actual interface of land and life there are no land acknowledgements in sight, in fact there are no humans in sight, the past really has no presence at all, unless one deeply probes. Despite the solar panels presumably powering the machine, such vast industrial scale fields still depend upon massive fertilizer inputs, fertilizers derived from the same ancient fossilized sources lending the actual literal power to futurist dreams for the past century and a half.
While there are other, less overt and spectacular visions more or less submerged in the exhibit—one case of objects asks if the future might well be handmade, for instance—overall the vision of the future here is weighted towards a rather techno-utopian one, brought to us by various corporate actors (even Marvel gets a display case) and mediated to no small degree by screen interfaces. There is a VR station, of course, that specter of a future that just keeps refusing to arrive; I hurry the kids past, hoping to forestall their full exposure to such things for as a long as possible. At the center of the exhibit is a contraption that with wires and colors and screens, it attracts the kids’ attention, and they are excited to find that there is a touch keyboard on the screen, and so of course type a wild sequence of nonsense letters, giggling happily. The device is supposed to ‘speak’ the words the participant types, saying ‘My future is…’ the coda completed by whatever has been typed onto the screen. But my children’s nonsense letters do not compute, and the machine is foiled, it remains silent. We leave the exhibit and cross the Mall to the National Museum of Natural History.
Is there a particular vision of the future that can be gathered from these objects and ideas on display? Does the Hyperloop, or Google’s mechanical farmer, fit into an apocalyptic or eschatological frame? The answers are not entirely clear: on the one hand, as noted above, the techno-utopian is a strong element, but it is not the same dream of technological utopia that animated twentieth century dreams of the future. For one thing, there is a certain modesty, intentional and otherwise, to many of these technological dreams, which are really just modifications to existing technologies, and struggle to promise large-scale social transformation. The Hyperloop, for instance, is both a quite old concept—it arguably dates back to the late eighteenth century—and would simply do differently what existing technologies already do, albeit with somewhat different spatial configurations (granting for a moment the unlikely prospect that Hyperloop trains will ever connect America’s cities). X’s fleet of robots would not revolutionize agriculture, but would merely continue existing trends but on an even larger scale. And so on. As many other commentators have noted, the techno-progressive future seems to have stalled over the last couple of decades, with no equivalent of the railroad or the internal combustion engine or personal computers coming down the pike. Artificial intelligence is probably the one area in which dreams of an apocalyptic utopia still arise, but there is an abstractness to AI that makes it hard to channel into more than a few iterations of apocalyptic—positive or negative—vision.
But perhaps more apposite, the utopias struggling to emerge in objects like the Hyperloop or helicopter-plane taxis or VR headset stations cannot but help to have dystopias and ‘secular’ apocalypses running through and behind them. While the farming robot may not have any interest in racial equity or decolonized spaces, concerns about agricultural crisis and looming climate change disruptions are hardwired into it. To be sure, previous generations had their own dystopias against which to fight, their own animating apocalyptic visions, most notably the prospect of nuclear war (which we still have, albeit very much in the background, even if we are probably closer to the prospect than any previous period barring the early years of the (First?) Cold War). But if one could somehow separate the development of nuclear weapons from the mainstream of technological and social ‘progress,’ it’s very hard to do so with the crises of today. Climate change is the result of the last two centuries of technological transformation, not simply one trajectory of that transformation. If it has long been true that new technology is often developed simply to deal with problems caused by previous iterations of technology, the objects displayed in Future(s) especially fit into that paradigm, with climate change and proposed technological fixes looming over everything. The vibes are off, and no one really knows what to do.
At the same time there is enough of the myth of progress and the dream of techno-utopia, for all the dystopian and apocalyptic counter-currents coursing under the surface, to effectively forestall alternative dreams and trajectories. To return to the agricultural robot: the vision of the future is essentially a deeply conservative one, contingent on simply cranking up current trends to eleven, increasing scale, increasing intensity of artificial inputs, with AI-directed robots the mechanism permitting this intensification. The presuppositions, the past visions of the future and the past apocalyptic utopias that forged those presuppositions and animating myths, are no longer even visible. They’re not even assumed, they’re built into the DNA of the thing as it were. It simply would not occur to the engineers at X that agriculture and indeed human society globally is headed down an extremely dangerous road and that the proposed solutions aren’t just unsustainable, they’re utterly bleak on multiple levels. The old utopian dreams may be gone, and the total apocalypse put on hold (in techno-optimist iterations at least), but instead incoherent, fragmentary remnants of those old dreams and myths remain, lodged deep in the machine as it were, and perhaps for that reason are all the more dangerous and hard to shake.
The vision of the ‘future’ Ed Woods articulated—though that’s perhaps too strong a word—in Plan Nine was an incoherent and bizarre one, cobbled together from B-movie conventions of his day, somehow combining vaguely futuristic aliens with zombies, with the action taking place in a confusing mish-mash of future and past, events yet to come reported upon in a past tense and set in the present. The results are unintentionally hilarious (to those who with the refined taste for such things at least) and revealing of cultural presuppositions, cinematic conventions, and so forth. Z-films ingest the stuff of their world and time, stuff that has already gone through multiple cycles and is approaching exhaustion, reassemble the morass into some idiosyncratic yet culturally identifiable form, and spit it back out. There is both a weirdness and a transparency to the whole process.
Perhaps the visions of the future on display not just at the Smithsonian but in so many spheres of life today are akin to Z-movie futurism in that sense: our futurism is a copy of a copy of a copy, a regurgitating of half-understood, half-believed myths from the golden ages of progress and technology and forward-looking utopias, generously bathed in contemporary doomer apocalyptica, in au courant political postures, and largely thought and mediated through the products of that last great industrial revolution, the digital. Our techno-futurism asks no genuinely hard questions, no more than Ed Wood could be expected to probe the depths of the human condition (at least not deliberately or consciously!), and it articulates no novel visions nor promises fundamentally new structures to life. There is a dis-ease at the back of everyone’s mind, with land acknowledgements, solar panels, and Black Lives Matter signs attempted superficial salves. Yet like the Amazing Criswell and his not-so-amazing prognostications, techno-futurism tends to retain a great deal of confidence in forecasting the future, a future shaped of course by technical interventions which our prophets assure us will save us from the dystopian and apocalyptic currents welling up from below.
But unlike the vision of the Z-movie maker or the predictions of a mid-century showman, the visions and roadmaps our techno-futurists lay out are not confined to obscure little cinemas in two-bit towns: they are the guiding principles of powerful and important people and entities, even if they do not have the monopoly for which they might wish. We all inhabit the visions of the future of the past, the projections turned to physical infrastructure and social constructions, realities now all but locked-in, and liable to generate their own apocalyptic frames (though, I would argue, we should resist such frames—climate change is bad, but it’s not the Eschaton). If we are to articulate alternative visions—if the handmade pottery of the Future(s) exhibit is to displace the looming agricultural robot, say—we must grapple with those futures past, their place in the current order, and their continued resonances in the Z-film of contemporary capitalism and social order. Not an easy task but also not—or so we must hope—an impossible one.