YESTERDAY'S FUTURE
If any of you actually look at the "history snippets" part of my
Gopher hole (I'll admit I got a little slack with updates lately),
then you'll probably have noticed that I find the era of the
1940-1960s particularly interesting. Actually it seems to me that
everyone should be facinated by the period that I think made the
last big practical shift in the course of global civilisation up to
today, but they probably aren't. Indeed today the technological,
environmental, and social aspects of the time might commonly be
looked back upon by some with a degree of superiority, seeing the
approaches as naive and destructive. The question of how far we've
come is very subjective, personally I tend not to consider social
aspects all that deeply because I hardly know people anyway. The
attitudes to technology and the environment are facinating though.
In the fifties, as the technological and industrial might that had
been built up in America during WWII was applied ever more
effectively to mass-market consumer applications, a new degree of
faith built up around that technology. There was a popular sense
that amidst all of the rapid new developments in pretty much every
field of science, which established so many of today's fundamental
tools for modern life, every problem they might cause inevitably
had a solution around the corner. The scientists and engineers knew
this because they saw the wide variety of paths that opened up for
development. Electronics magazines were awash with new alternatives
to the electron valve for building amplifiers to suit applications
that were rapidly expanding beyond radio, which dominated pre-war
electronics market. Even while transistors were establishing
themselves, forgotten technologies such as the Ferristor, magnetic
amplifiers, and even applications of new higher-precision
thermistors, were offered as other potential paths. The internal
combustion engine seemed it might soon be replaced by more
efficient gas turbine engines in cars, or even electric cars, which
experienced one of their many short spikes of development in Japan
during the late 40s as a result of petrol shortages after the war.
A hydrogen fuel cell powered tractor was even demonstrated in 1959.
Electricity production was of course expected to move from fossil
fuels to nuclear power, with fusion reactors expected to replace
fission in a decade or two. Experiments to build nuclear powered
aeroplanes were undertaken in both America and the Soviet Union in
the late 50s, to follow the invention of the jet engine at the end
of WWII. Oh and of course where's my flying car?
http://japanesenostalgiccar.com/jnc-earth-day-1947-tama-e4s-47-1-electric-car/
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_687671
(sorry, too lazy to find references for all of that last paragraph)
The path a lot of that technology did end up taking from the 60s up
to today seems quite narrow and conservative compared to the
options that appeared open then. There must be a wide range of
reasons for that, not least how the volume of production increased
so much that the momentum to change a fundamental technology such
as the type of engine in a car would be much more significant than
it might have seemed before. I think that's how the general public
mindset about technology has changed since those times. We no
longer assume that it will naturally advance to avoid larger
problems such as pollution and waste, we sense we have to pursue
alternatives ourselves as consumers, or even abstain from using
certain technologies altogether. What's gone is the faith in
technology (and naturally by that I mean the business decisions
that determine how it is developed and applied) to solve such
fundamental problems that its creators know themselves. Basically
that it will fix its own mistakes.
Here is an interesting example of an environmental film made in,
I'm guessing, the late 40s or 50s (I watch tons of these sort of
old archive films, by the way) and currently sitting, with a
whopping 26 views, at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/51124-conservation-of-natural-resourses-vwr
The start is familiar, shocking scenes and statistics of
environmental damage, surprisingly similar to the sort of
environmental documentaries made today. But it goes on to describe
how technology is solving the problems: the Hoover Dam is presented
as an aid to preventing soil errosion resulting from the clearing
of land for growing crops, the limited resources of timber and oil
are processed in less wasteful ways, new sewage plants will prevent
the pollution of waterways. These are reasonable advances for sure,
if now in some cases visible as rather short-term. But it's not the
validity of the solutions themselves that is of note, but the way
they are presented. The path is certain, and largely
uncompromising. To save oil it doesn't ask you to drive your car
less, or to sustainably source your timber in order to save
America's remaining forrests, that's not the mindset of an America
that's embracing the consumption of new goods and technologies.
It's saying that these issues are already in hand, that technology
is working to solve these problems and it only needs to be applied
in those related sectors of industry to keep the whole machine of
the economy serving you as you are.
That is the faith that we've lost now. Today environmental
documentaries call us to individual action, no longer trusting in
technology to evolve its own way to utopia as we blindly use it. We
only trust ourselves, but actually we rarely live up to our own
ideals. Still consuming much like before, and lazy enough to be
easily swayed by dishonest marketing. The technological future we
believed in back then is failing us, and the only solution that
many still believe in is to try to avoid what parts we can of the
world it has lead us into.
- The Free Thinker
