.Jonathan Last, reactionary.
Refugee from Tomorrowland Of all the betrayals of childhood, one that still stings came at the hands of the Weekly Reader. Every six weeks or so the teachers at my progressive little Quaker school...
...But at least I'm not alone in my disappointment...
...I discovered a soul-mate reading Daniel Wilson's Where's My Jetpack...
...Between 1910 and 1960, indoor plumbing, electricity, and automobiles became common...
...From Walt Disney's stillborn "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow"— gasp!—to the predicted miracle economics of the new millennium—"By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S...
...The space program went from nonexistence to the moon in 11 years, but today the best we can do is orbit the earth the way the Gemini astronauts did in 1965...
...Where once they dreamed of advanced food pills, we're shopping for heirloom tomatoes at farmers' markets...
...Previous generations conquered disease, went into space, and split the atom...
...In 1938, you could travel from New York to Chicago by train in 16 hours...
...will, in effect, be independently wealthy," predicted Time in 1966—the future isn't what it used to be...
...As I've gotten older, though, I've become a sort of antifuturist, believing that the future will be basically like the past, only louder and slightly less pleasant...
...in robotics, inspects the wreckage of futurism, from cryogenic freezing to the space elevator to moon colonies, and explains how the dreams began and why they petered out...
...I suspect the prominence of the United Nations in the Reader's pages was part of what made it acceptable to my teachers...
...Actually, it's worse than that: In some areas, the opposite of the futurists' predictions has come true...
...As if that weren't dispiriting enough, my friend Phillip Longman tells me that progress is actually slowing down...
...I read the other day that a company called Hydroplois is trying to build undersea luxury hotels in Dubai and China...
...We came up with the iPhone...
...In fact, the kelp industry would be so vital, the Reader reported, that underwater cities would spring up to house the workers, complete with hotels which lucky, landlubbing children might visit...
...Few of the Reader's promises were delivered, of course, and modern futurism generally proved a flop...
...I'm no longer impressed by the notion of a bright-and-shiny, incredible tomorrow, or even very interested...
...In the 1930s, Americans rerouted the Colorado River and built the Hoover Dam in 5 years...
...If the Weekly Reader had told me that in the future it would take more time and effort to do less work, I wouldn't have believed it...
...But from 1960 to 2007, little changed...
...The Reader was a short magazine printed in color on newsprint, and nearly every issue led with a story about an amazing technological development just about to burst forth...
...In nearly every case, the problem was not inadequate technology but lack of will...
...Nuclear power, plastics, lasers, and computers—the stuff of science fiction in 1910—all had been developed by 1960...
...Over the years, the Reader told of many wonders...
...For some reason they haven't been able to begin construction yet...
...Every six weeks or so the teachers at my progressive little Quaker school would distribute copies of the Reader, and we would seize on it as an alternative to school work...
...The 1,472-foot Empire State Building was built in 410 days in the Depression...
...Boston's Big Dig—which rerouted 3.5 miles of highway— labored to official completion in 2006 after 15 years...
...Today on Amtrak the trip takes 21 hours...
...Construction of Philadelphia's tallest skyscraper, the 975-foot Comcast Center, began in January 2005 and isn't scheduled to be finished until this coming fall...
...to its grade-school audience as yet another bit of whiz-bang futurism...
...The ocean's kelp farms were on the verge of ending world hunger...
...Memory fails, but I'm pretty sure that in this innovation, as in many others, the United Nations was to play a sizable role...
...can help...
...Should we ever decide to go back to the moon, I doubt we could do it in less than II years...
...It gets worse...
...I don't know what the problem is, but maybe the U.N...
...Wilson, who has a Ph.D...
...Superconductors were going to change rail travel so that soon trains would be hovering above the ground, zooming along at hundreds of miles an hour...
...With the exception of the Internet, on which the jury is still out, most of the advances of the last 50 years are merely improvements on existing technology...
...In that sense, I suppose, the future has surprised me...
...Jonathan V Last...
...Jet airplanes were invented, and a space program was begun that in a few short years would put a man on the moon...
...Then as now, Turtle Bay was revered by the Society of Friends on theological grounds, though the Reader sold the U.N...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 42
