Guest Post by The Zman
About ten years ago, you could find any number of sites that focused on the future in one fashion or another. Futurism was a cottage industry. Ray Kurzweil and others, who made futurism a specialty, would get interviewed by big shot publications. Kurzweil was even hired by Google to be their professional futurist. The field was full of predictions about how we were on the cusp of the singularity or that we were about discover the fountain of youth. We would live forever in the robot future.
All of that petered out in the last few years. The futurist bloggers closed down and either moved to Twitter or disappeared entirely. The sites that pushed whiz-bang technology stuff have fallen out of favor. We seem to have run out of road on the technology side of things, as all of the low hanging fruit from the microprocessor revolution has been picked and turned into mobile devices. There has not been a killer app or killer device in a long time now. The future is not so promising.
One reason for this sudden lack of interest in the future could be that we are living in a simulation, specifically a quantum simulation. The beings running this simulation decided we needed to focus on other things. Alternatively, this simulation inevitably results in a lack of interest in the future. Having overcome the Malthusian limit and reached the post-scarcity world, the future is not all that interesting. The recent obsession with the future was just an echo effect.
Alternatively, the corresponding simulation to our simulation is now focused on the future, so we are focused on the past. Maybe in this quantum simulation, another version of us exists in another universe. If you spin around clockwise in this universe, your other self spins counter clockwise in the corresponding one. Perhaps when our alternative universe gets romantic about the past, we will see a new burst on interest in the future here in this version of the quantum simulation.
The main argument against this being a simulation is that a race of beings that sophisticated would not have created a simulation this stupid. They would put us in a much more interesting experiment or throw the whole thing in the trash. On the other hand, this simulation could be a child’s experiment. This world in which we exist is sitting on a child’s dresser like an ant farm. The last few decades were the result of the cat getting into the experiment and breaking some things.
The people who claim to know about public sentiment used to claim that movies and television shows about the future were a reflection of the public’s anxiety or lack of it about the present. If dystopian shows were popular, it meant the public was worried about current events. If the shows were more positive, then it meant people were feeling good about things. Presumable the lack of movies about the future would say something as well, but no one mentions it.
That is something that gets little attention about the multicultural paradise our rulers have planned for us. The business model of Hollywood is built on the assumption of a white middle-class. Devouring that white middle-class in order to create a multicultural paradise leaves Hollywood without an audience. South America has never been a great market for mass media. China and India are capable of producing their own computer-generated crap. The future of Hollywood looks grim.
That may be why the focus on the future has faded of late. Twenty years ago, the Matrix could promise a mulatto future, because it seemed so implausible. The tan future imagined by Hollywood seemed as implausible as space ships. Now, people are increasingly aware of the realities of demographics. Imagining a universe that is full of mystery meat people is just going to press the wrong buttons. Maybe that’s why Hollywood interest in the future has waned over the last few years.
That also raises another issue. Very few people, even in dissident politics, like talking about the multicultural future that awaits us. All of the commentary is either directly or indirectly about how to prevent it. Since there is no stopping the transformation of America into a majority-minority society, the most fertile ground of futurism is about a world where hostile tribes, rubbing shoulders with one another, are monitored by high tech corporations. That’s the future that awaits us.
Maybe that’s the reason futurism is no longer popular. Dystopian futures were intended to be warnings about the present. Whiz-bang futures are about current trends, or imagined ones, advancing to their natural end. Since no warning about multicultural future will make a difference, there’s no point in it. Because that future will be awful, there’s no point in thinking about it now. For people who sense they have no future, there is no market for futurism.
On the other hand, that means there is a market for dissident writers to create fiction that is positive about the fight ahead. The trouble is the people who make movies don’t want white people to be positive, so they instead make movies about gay comic book heroes and mulatto girls running the world. Still, it is an untapped market that some clever dissident could mine. Maybe the next turn of dissident politics is dissident samizdat fiction about the tribal wars to come.
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The mulatto future is the end of the human race, wiped out by one genetic plague.
I went to see “Ford vs Ferrari” and that was the first time I enjoyed going to the movies in decades.
Normally I can capture Z-man’s point by reading the just last paragraph. Not this one. Can someone explain what he is trying to say here?
That is, no one today wants to pretend that tomorrow does not suck. Because tomorrow sucks.
This is nutty. The reason folks are no longer gung-ho on futurism is that the reality of creeping energy- and resource-depletion combined with overpopulation is starting to sink in.