New York Prophecies

We're on to the next session - with Richard Barbrook from the University of Westminster. His talk is about imaginary futures. The way we conceive of the future is actually an old idea, and some decades old - artificial intelligence is a good example, based as it remains on ideas like Asimov's work or even older concepts. Like communism, the arrival in such futures is always 10-20 years into the future.

Barbrook references the world expo of 1964 in New York, which envisaged possible futures, an expo run not least by the major (US) corporations such as General Motors (and he has a picture of himself as a boy at the world expo...). This expo marked the last hurrah of unbridled US enthusiasm for the future - one year before the start of the Vietnam war, notably.

A typical future promise: by 1990 there will be people holidaying on the moon. Other big ticket ideas included nuclear fusion energy production, and of course computing. (IBM's 360 mainframe was launched a month before the expo opened.) However, computing is of course not promoted to the general customer yet (in 1964, PCs haven't really been invented yet), but rather robots are seen as a major future application. The computer is presented as working like a human brain, and 'the present is hidden behing an imaginary future'.

Barbrook now tracks back even further to the Crystal Palace exhibition in London. Its major item to be exhibited was the steam engine, shown there as driving cotton processing machinery, but of course also applied to many other less benign forms of work. Also, there is an absence of people (much as in the 1964 world's fair with its robots) - the pictures from Crystal Palace show many visitors, but virtually no labourers. 'You see all those fantastic goods, but you don't see the people making these goods.' Plus, the goods aren't even on sale here, what is on offer is a way to (in the case of the 1964 expo) interpret the present through the future, or (in the case of Crystal Palace) a way of presenting modernity as already antique.

In the case of Crystal Palace, high tech is covered with a traditionalist facade - technology is disguised by old-fashioned forms of display, while in the case of the 1964 expo modernity is disguised as hypermodernity. In addition, a very significant purpose of many of these devices is hidden - war (hot or cold), and the doctrine of mutally assured destruction (MAD). Other uses are largely spin-offs...

Of course the prediction that computers would become more intelligent misses the effects of the mass-production of computing - networking and large-scale information exchange. What companies sold was the idea of a Fordist digital panopticon, but what we got was a highly networked mass computerised society... Put another way: they suggested that computers would remain the size of a room but become more intelligent - what happened was that their intelligence (or otherwise) remained the same but size shrank and speed increased massively.

Barbrook's comcluding thought:

The future is what it used to be
We must invent new futures