Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline

by speckx • 6 months ago

226 355 6 months ago

anovikov• 6 months ago

Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away. That was about it.

Many people don't get the origins of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.

ahazred8ta• 6 months ago

In 1965, Clarke, Asimov, and other science writers were at NASA watching the first images appear. "Craters. Duh, it's right next to the asteroid belt, of course it has craters. Not that any of us thought of it beforehand..."

eesmith2• 6 months ago

Do you have a reference for that account? I hadn't heard it before, and it doesn't sounds quite right.

They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required.

I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence.

Digging around through archive.org I found https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944

The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50:
“The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have been pointed out:
“I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon; therefore, craters exist on Mars.
“2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and number of comparable lunar craters.
“3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases,
“4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent, indicating that the canal system was adapted to this haphazard arrangement.

The reviewer of the above points out

“Why didn’t someone think of the crater theory sooner? The answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa, Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic origin.

We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon before the 1960s.

BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_Stories_v07n03_1942-05... .

I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000rich/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to shadows have ever been observed along the terminator—the line dividing daylight from dark—such as would be produced by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know astronomers were already considering there might be craters on Mars as there are on the Moon.

mrec• 6 months ago

Yup. One early Arthur C Clarke story had plants growing natively on the Moon.

Animats2• 6 months ago

It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now.

Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.

There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale

thomasguide• 6 months ago

FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

tialaramex7• 6 months ago

Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about.

Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?

Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.

NooneAtAll3• 6 months ago

so... it might be a marketing problem?

no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it, you'll get ignored" or smth?

rybosworld• 6 months ago

A bit of an off-topic observation:

Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.

stavros2• 5 months ago

Wait, what's the play on words in The Martian?

flohofwoe5• 6 months ago

The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass produced trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.

datsci_est_20152• 6 months ago

I wouldn’t expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.

Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.

But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.

Timshel• 6 months ago

Like none of The Expanse books would appear...

masklinn3• 6 months ago

Not one of the culture books either, even though several have spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton books. And I reckon a single Polity book.

masklinn3• 6 months ago

science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.

And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.

notahacker• 6 months ago

Yep.

In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...

a3w• 6 months ago

The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is speculative fiction:

- mystery, - horror, - fantasy, - and sci-fi have lots of overlap. - And XKCDs What-If-Books even.

But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.

Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.

yazantapuz• 6 months ago

I was thinking that, for example Caves of steel, Childhood Ends, Spin and many others have no starships or space related terms in their title.

EdwardDiego• 5 months ago

All I know is that sci-fi is still producing some great ideas from talented individuals.

wiredfool2• 6 months ago

Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there.

Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal.

To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.

Freak_NL2• 6 months ago

And you're not even getting into Baen and Tor books territory, where the hard military scifi lives (David Weber et al).

(Scalzi is always fun.)

mygrant• 6 months ago

Maybe 50% of my audiobook listening is the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson. So dumb, so much fun, and all spaceships.

Maultasche• 6 months ago

Yeah, that's a good one. "Dumb and fun" is a good description.

Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.

delichon• 6 months ago

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sideways into fantasy gained the popularity lost by escapes into the future.

I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.

Den_VR• 6 months ago

I still find myself quite taken by some sci-fi writing. Iain M Banks works, Rajaniemi, and Joan Slonczewski. The “problem” is that they are not popular the way Harry Potter or isekai are.

jrmg• 5 months ago

I’m also a fan of Banks - but he’s hardly current. He died thirteen years ago.

chasil11• 6 months ago

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.

Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).

We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.

It is not an encouraging line of thought.

lotsofpulp• 6 months ago

we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible

Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?

foobarbecue• 6 months ago

Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.

Alex-Programs• 6 months ago

This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression through scientific and engineering arguments.

pfdietz8• 6 months ago

and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).

Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding.

A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.

bot403• 6 months ago

Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?

Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.

sandworm1012• 6 months ago

There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations.

When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.

HoldOnAMinute• 6 months ago

That's true, but stop to consider all the things we ARE doing...

* Space Station that lasts 25 years

* 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service

* Mars rovers that run for 10+ years

* Flying helicopters on Mars

davedx2• 6 months ago

the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.

Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero

MagicMoonlight• 6 months ago

You don’t need to go faster than light. Once you approach anywhere near the speed of light, time slows down so much that journey time becomes irrelevant.

WalterBright17• 6 months ago

And yet we still have a solar system, empty of life other than Earth, we can expand to. Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?

Two things baffle me:

1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.

2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.

nephihaha10• 6 months ago

I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would have to be big but they could more easily be built on the Moon due to the lower gravity.

PaulHoule8• 6 months ago

With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets.

A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth.

I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.

threethirtytwo• 5 months ago

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.

This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.

It rarely has to do with the possibility of the genre actually happening in reality. A story is good because it is riveting and the backdrop (whether sci-fi or fantasy) is just icing on the cake. Look at Harry potter and practically every fantasy story out there.... none of those stories have any chance of happening in our current reality... yet they are popular.

I think the answer for as to why there's less interest in sci-fi is pretty mundane. It's like genetic drift, but this one is cultural. For no reason at all our interests just shift because of luck. There happened to be more good stories written in the fantasy genre and that's the direction everything shifted.

Tbf though the MCU was more sci fi than anything and that every genre out of the water in every medium all the way up until endgame. Say what you want about it but the popularity of that universe dwarfed everything else in the last decade... which goes to show that it's likely mostly just drift.

BobbyJo• 5 months ago

Optimistic views of the future see those as problems that can be solved, which helps the consumer engage with the story.

Pessimistic views see those as insurmountable problems that shouldn't be bothered with, making the stories seem more ridiculous.

nrds• 5 months ago

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible

I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I've no doubt there's a handful of works but this is hardly a plausible explanation for a _recent_ decline in these topics.

zozbot2342• 5 months ago

The weird thing about this is that interstellar space ought to actually be very hospitable to cold, highly efficient computational substrates. (This is for standard thermodynamic reasons: reliable computation must be free of noise, and low-temperature means low noise.) So there might be 'life' of a sort in interstellar space that's extremely smart and naturally long-lived compared to humans or even ordinary room-temperature AIs, but just can't do all that much in the outside world (i.e. has very low agency), except very slowly and with exceptional effort.

(Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)

perilunar• 5 months ago

the vast distances to other habitable planets

We won't be crossing interstellar distances to look for habitable planets — we'll do it to mine material to build more of our own habitats, to spread further. We don't need to find planets to live on.

danielheath• 5 months ago

Acceleration at 1g lets you get to another galaxy in a single human lifetime (although earth will have been swallowed by the sun by the time you arrive). Relativity is pretty counterintuitive.

ted_dunning• 5 months ago

This is a very strange argument.

Are you seriously saying that people realizing that FTL travel is impossible makes people more interested in stories about magic?!?

pfdietz8• 6 months ago

Stated with a different spin, the detached-from-reality takes of Campbell-era SF finally became too strained to enjoy.

flohofwoe5• 6 months ago

I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally murdered during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror of then-current society transported into the future to escape state censorship.

Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden messages written between the lines ;)

nephihaha10• 6 months ago

There are some brilliant SF writers from the eastern bloc. They had to write to get around censorship and the official line. Stanislaw Lem is great.

HPsquared4• 6 months ago

Why did people want to escape Earth though? Maybe they felt Earth was past saving.

DennisP• 6 months ago

A lot of the old stuff isn't so much about escaping Earth, as outgrowing it. A feeling that it's our destiny to expand to the stars, just as it was life's destiny to come out of the oceans.

The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty, the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.

mlinhares• 6 months ago

I kinda have the same feeling for music as well, the best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit. When everything looks bright and good the music just doesn't have the same quality, people are not angry all the time.

ninalanyon• 6 months ago

best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going to shit.

Now should be a productive time for music in the US then, and possibly elsewhere if things continue on the same trajectory.

hinkley• 6 months ago

I think I would argue that we already see the sea change in the later Dune books

The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.

nearbuy• 6 months ago

This doesn't explain why pessimistic and dystopian sci-fi has declined.

Also, Foundation takes place in a future where society is about to collapse and regress into dark ages. It's a borderline dystopian world.

YurgenJurgensen• 5 months ago

YA Dystopia novels probably had a hand in that. They almost certainly sucked all the air out of the genre, and it’ll take a long time for serious authors to see a viable path forward with publishers with anything that vaguely resembles them.

CGMthrowaway2• 6 months ago

Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer.

Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)

riffraff• 6 months ago

Neuromancer is currently in development at Apple+ :)

FWIW, Amazon made a show based on "The Peripheral" by Gibson which is way more bleak than Neuromancer, and it was crazy good, but they canceled it after one season.

problynought• 5 months ago

Starships are a boring transport layer, implementation detail.

Being a part of a Q continuum, a disembodied consciousness that can appear wherever whenever, while still retaining a memory/sense of "self" is a far more interesting a dream.

Starships titillate people who tinker with machines. Not very optimistic if we are dragging along service jobs to explore the cosmos.

alexitorg2• 5 months ago

There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots of dragons, were-wolves and vampires for sexy reasons. The professional fiction publishers are 70-80% women publishing for a majority female fiction reader fan base. Even old best selling men's action authors like Clive Custler and Tom Clancy would probably have to self publish if they were writing today.

majormajor• 5 months ago

Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises.

(Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.)

Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.

throw4847285• 5 months ago

That doesn't add up. Plenty of Philip K Dick novels and stories have spaceships, while also being existential nightmares of the collapse of human identity. Ursula Le Guin, the quintessential new wave sci-fi author, mostly wrote about space travel (though usually as a mechanism for doing cultural anthropology).

boznz• 5 months ago

Many of us authors are still trying to write optimistic Sci-Fi, we are just getting lost in the noise, and the algorithm. Look harder :-)

popalchemist• 5 months ago

Fantasy is not a downgrade from sci-fi; the genre serves an altogether different purpose which is equally valuable, if not moreso - the development of spiritual faculties of perception. It is the neglect of those faculties which leads to societal decay -- the current nadir we are in is STILL the fallout of the "death of God" (as Nietzsche put it) -- man's recognition that the Sky Daddy myth is no longer enough to explain the world led to a vacuum of a cohesion between metaphysics and morality. In its absence, materialism - hedonism in the realm of the senses - is all that that there is to derive hope or reason for living from.

Without fantasy -- Lord of the Rings being the chief example -- the "post-God" world has no means of developing said faculties outside of fantasy (the genre), and art - which, as a whole, is a form of fantasy.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 months ago

starships left with the optimism

How does the Three Body Problem fit into this? On one hand, it’s Chinese. On the other hand, it’s literally mocking optimism.

NuclearPM• 5 months ago

Athwart? These posts really bring out the try-hards.

jhbadger• 5 months ago

Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer.

Although remember that Neuromancer, despite kicking off the generally spaceship-free cyberpunk genre, did have spaceships and even orbital cities!

PaulHoule8• 6 months ago

Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.

JuniperMesos• 5 months ago

This is way too reductive; there was plenty of fantasy anime in the 80s, and they're still making Gundam today, among other sci-fi shows.

doctorhandshake2• 6 months ago

My theory about this aligns with my theory about the disappearance of ‘futurists’ from the popular conversation - we’re living in science fiction. The future is arriving every day. It no longer feels necessary to speculate about a changed world - you need only look out the door.

I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.

eesmith2• 6 months ago

The 20th century was a period of wild change. Someone born before the first powered airplane flight in their lifetime could have flown on a jet plane to Europe and watched the first moon landing live on TV.

Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was once a death sentence.

The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles, cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies transformed how most people live, including white flight into suburbia.

Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and polyester transformed the clothing industry.

esafak• 6 months ago

Futurist Michio Kaku once gave a talk at my company five years ago and though I forgot the details, I remember the audience found his vision quite dystopian.

TheOtherHobbes2• 6 months ago

9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic vision of the past.

It's still possible to imagine new bright futures, but that kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that's fervently regressive and nostalgic.

chasil11• 5 months ago

The original "futurists" were Italian, eventually under Mussolini.

That is a loaded term.