Riot shock

This blog has been quiet for a while, but seems worth waking up momentarily if only because everyone else is commenting furiously on the England-wide riots. So I’m joining in.

My comment is oblique, and reprises a point made here before. Although Toffler’s Future Shock 40 years ago popularised a memorable phrase, sold millions, and seems to work for many people as a useful shorthand for disorientation in the face of accelerating change, I’m unconvinced.

This is due to advancing age combined with a historian’s temperament, I think. There seem to be two options as you grow older. Either you decide everything is getting worse, change is speeding up, the young are far worse behaved than they were in my day, and the world is going to hell in a handcart. Or, more simply, you conclude that there’s nothing new under the sun. I’ve gone for the latter option, obviously.

So the two dominant news stories of recent days can both reinforce a feeling that while some things do change, old verities remain. One is that, if you want to get the attention of ruling elites – for better or worse – taking to the streets, hurling stones, and setting fire to a few things works unbeatably well. Hard to think of a time when that wasn’t true, since cities were invented anyway. And the basic behaviour seems to accommodate very well to new contexts (wheelie bins are easy to set on fire, bottle banks provide a ready supply of ammunition) but stays the same.

Meanwhile, markets bounce around and central banks try to shore up debt ratings by pouring money in and making positive noises. The technological infrastructure has changed, and some of the markets are new, but is this really much different from trying to shore up confidence in banks in, say, 1900? No doubt it only dates from the establishment of mutual interdependence rooted in really big international flows of capital, and that has become more complex, but the underlying dynamic looks pretty similar to the lay observer. So does the fact that no-one seems to have any very convincing idea what to do about the uncertainty which follows, least of all one likely to be implemented. Economic theory has got more sophisticated, too, I guess, Is any of it any use? Seems not.

Look closer, and there are differences, of course. The way the riots spread does seem to have changed – though I suspect old-fashioned TV had as much to do with it as BBM messaging and twitter.

But the main impression is still of familiarity – with the phenomena, and with the instant reactions and search for explanations and solutions. I’ve not done the research, but I’d bet the solutions proffered would be familiar to a historian of these things, too.

And the common personal reactions to riots and market turmoil have an unarguably classic quality: lock the shutters, get a baseball bat, and buy gold.

So shock, yes. Future shock, not really .

(top pic: Detail from mural depicting 1831 Queen Square riot by Scott Barden, near Paintworks, Bath Road, Bristol, 2011. See www.scottbardenart.com. Located via Eugene Byrne http://eugenebyrne.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/bristol-and-riots/ )

William Gibson (aka @GreatDismal) on the future in fiction

Fascinating discussion from William Gibson in Bristol last night, ranging over his whole career. The future naturally figured prominently. I wasn’t taking notes, but a few points that caught my attention, and didn’t quite seem to fit together… At various points, he said that science fiction is not trying to predict the future – though the culture keeps trying to insist that it is (check) – and that when you read old SF, as he did as a kid, you have to refer to the history of the times when it was written to understand the authors’ preoccupations (check again).

His wonderfully wry and self- analytic take on the early cyberpunk novels included that the style of, say, Neuromancer was largely a product of trying to learn how to write a novel by doing it – having previously written nothing over 2700 words long – but also that it was a determined attempt to depict an optimistic mid-21^st century future. Optimistic in the context of the cold war, as it was a future which had avoided nuclear holocaust (there was nuclear war but it kind of fizzled out, and then the corporations took over to make sure it didn’t happen again – deeply implausible but necessary, in other words).

Consider, then, his take last night on the question which people keep asking: why don’t you write about the future any more? (The last two novels have been set in the year before they were published, so the action in Zero History takes place in 2009).

He had two answers. One was that there are so many problems now that imagining your way past them defeats him. (“In 2050, did we solve global warming? How? I don’t know…”). You can sort of see that, though it doesn’t seem to me harder in principle than “solving” the nuclear arms race, at least well enough to achieve suspension of disbelief for the time it takes to read a novel.

Then there was a longer answer. It argued, if I have it right, that when “realistic” near –future science fiction, including his own, was being written – up to the 1970s, say – the present was longer than it is now. That is, things stayed discernibly the same for years or even a decade or so at a time. This stable present – he even called it the “long now” at one point, though the sense then is different from the other promoters of that tag – offered a kind of firm foundation for extrapolating a future of some complexity which hung together, he suggested.

That’s the part I don’t quite get. Some things must be changing, or you don’t get to extrapolate at all (the modern idea of the future as different doesn’t really get going until people can see change in their own lifetime as the industrial revolution gathers pace in the 18^th century). And to me it’s really hard to see that things changed more slowly in the decades after World War 2 than they have since the turn of the century. After all, Future Shock, which is as good a way of summing up what I think he was arguing as anything, was the title of a book published in 1970. I don’t buy the thesis of Toffler’s book either as it happens (watch this space), but it does seem to argue against a radical difference in rates of change then and now.

Maybe I’m missing a key quality of the contemporary present – which a keener observer like Gibson (and he’s keener than most) perceives more clearly. Or maybe perception of passage of time and rates of change is largely subjective and says more about the age and stage of the observer than tapping any larger social or historical truth. Guess which way I’m leaning here…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Future – a Recent History (continued…)

Having started out exploring recent futures here publicly, as it were, a tad embarrassing to discover that I missed a book published in the middle of last year – Future, A Recent History, by Laurence Samuel (University of Texas Press) -  especially as Adam Gordon reviewed it thoughtfully on his blog when it came out.

If I’d known, I’d have got someone to ask me to review it as well, but too late now. It looks pretty good, being an examination of changing notions of the future in the USA in the 20th century, and what the changes mean/helped bring about.

So, job done? Not sure yet. Will have to read properly and consider. But first must finish David Gelernter’s 1939 – The Lost World of the Fair – a rather brilliant reconstruction-cum-cultural history of the New York fair of that year and the cultural milieu in which it sat. He and Samuel – who has also written at book length about a later World’s Fair – confirm the impression that they are crucial sites for investigating all this. There’s also quite a literature on them, though I doubt if much of it is as readable as our astonishing computer science guru-cum-cultural critic Gelernter. His book has what I realise is a characteristically idiosyncratic (and not, I think, ultimately persuasive) interpretation of the significance of his Fair, its era, and the impossibility of recapturing the spirit in which it was viewed at the time. I need to say more about that, too, but must find time to finish the book before commenting further – a recommended procedure for critics, I gather.

Future shock revisited

Wanted to go to a local screening last night, but indoors with ‘flu or some viral relative – so obviously I looked for the main attraction on YouTube, and of course it is there: Future Shock (1972), in five jerky parts.

It is a pretty fair attempt to convey the themes of the book on film. Much added value from the commentary voiced by Orson Welles in his portentious prime. The effect is slightly undermined by the fact that, on screen, wreathed in cigar smoke and solidly handsome, he never looks even slightly shocked himself.

Anyhow, here’s part one in all its glory.