(This is written for Russell Davies’ Lyddle End 2050 project. The photos are all of models I made for it, and you can also see them as a set on Flickr).

We’ve lived through a lot of futures and most of them, we didn’t see coming. We’ve imagined many more, and I have a lot of affection for those visions, so Lyddle End 2050 was both amusing and exciting when I first heard of it. While scrolling down pages of schmaltzy English village architecture, several decades of absorbed science fiction blurted out of me in shorthand.

A lonely house on a hill, brutally cut up to accommodate a flyover, with self replicating robots spilling from the windows and marching off into the countryside. A church up to the eaves in water, bioengineered tentacles coming out of the windows and parishioners cowering on the roof with a huge and mildly ironic “S.O.S.” cobbled together from driftwood. A tank tracked building industry fabricator, munching bricks off a 20th century house and extruding a new one behind. A plastic dome covering a building, signposted “Lyddle End Heritage Museum”. Buildings extended upwards into shanty town high rises. “BNP OUT” graffiti on the front of a house, with a flying car parked outside and doused in paint stripper.

I was polluted with too many futures to pick one. I didn’t want to make the open source, creative commons, fabbed up Shangri La that I’m hoping for. Dystopianism is also an easy cliche. The number of tropes floating around got me thinking about futures in general, the way we predict, and that these visions are popularised more by the terror or succor they contain than by their likelihood or accuracy.

Imagined futures are like the mumblings of a brain damaged Janus. Just as our present contains assumptions about the future, our visions incorporate massive yet sometimes hard to see traces of the time in which they originate. None of them are pure, they all receive scads of cultural contamination from their originators. This contamination is difficult to spot in our own visions; there are things we just assume will carry on.

For other reasons, the newspaper kiosks really caught my eye. They seemed like a challenge, given the past 10 years, and the most obvious ideas would only be possible with clumsy exposition, if they hadn’t already been made redundant by the past and present.

Yes, those then. Two of them arrived and sat in the blister pack. I carried them to work every day to put on my desk and look at. I came up with silly ideas, and joked around with them like this:

The green they come in is a symbolically British shade that makes them inherently classic, more so than the other Lyddle End stuff I looked at, and it lends them a peculiar resonance for speculative modeling. As far as I’m aware, that green is one that proliferated for a few decades then all but disappeared in the 1970’s. I presume this had something to do with army surplus paint. My memories of the past are reconstructions from media, cracks nicely filled by assumptions like that.

After assuming the newspaper kiosks would die out, I reconsidered. I’m actually pretty sure that, when I’m strutting my septuagenarian stuff in 2050, something like these booths will still be around even if newspapers aren’t. They’re a niche in fast, street-level retail, which will always have passing trade for something, even 3D prints if they’re good enough. I have a feeling though, that it will probably be a snickers bar, or a fizzy drink, or a pancake.

This pattern of street level trade is older than the political and technological landscapes I find myself in, but maybe its age leads me to make assumptions and lack imagination. Maybe we’re reaching an epochal change beyond my capacity to imagine.

Every future is projected with a hook. Often visual, sometimes moral, sometimes economic, but there’s always a hook that makes them remarkable. We tend not be interested in the mundane future of sustenance and socialisation, because they’re biological currents older than our species. I like thinking of things with comparative timescales. Genes: faster than geology and cosmology. Slower than politics and technology.

When it comes to speed and accuracy, predictions are like a full auto blunderbuss. Everyone tends to aim in the same direction and be substantially wrong. With hindsight we can generally see a lot of understanding is just missing. Meals in pills. Spaceships with steering wheels. Conventions have been hammered out that make steering wheels look ridiculous in that context now, but those conventions didn’t exist in the popular psyche before air travel was an industry. Pretty much all futures, even the dystopian ones, become as naive and quaint as an unaltered Lyddle End looks to us now. Projections tend to have an aesthetic dimension rather than an appreciation of technological, economic and social mechanics, and when they do step into more functional realms they make mistakes.

At the same time, because certain things are so very old, and in the case of human needs because we can meet them largely on autopilot, we project them automatically and tend not to think of them. A dude buying a chocolate bar in an underground station isn’t very interesting, unless it’s magic futuristic nanotech chocolate that grants transhuman augmentations.

I grew up with science fiction, but 1930 – 2000 were compressed into 2 decades. I see a charmingly naive 1950’s vision of the future, punctuated occasionally by sensationalist horror. The 60’s seemed like everything was going to blast off on a wave of optimism, and from this I think we can see an important post-war assumption: That the pinnacle of technology developed by the nation state will trickle down toward civilian consumption. Again, I assume that post-war army surplus helped to reinforce this notion of progress.

The idea of the military industrial complex feeding into consumerism neatly and progressively was a nice, comprehensible pattern that told us what was coming next: Rockets, space stations, supersonic commercial passenger jets. All for you and me. The glamour of air travel was just a beginning.

It took quite a bit in the way of political tensions, wars, disasters, and economic shocks to take the shine off all that whizz-bang and we-won, but it did and as far as I can see, by the 70’s dystopianism had emerged as a popular current in SF. It carried right on into the 80’s, and by the 90’s it was biting hard.

While new technologies still got mulched and turned into seductive World Of Tomorrow hokum, dystopianism was becoming a more compelling vision, especially on the heels of 80’s excess. Films like Blade Runner, Alien, Total Recall, and games like Syndicate showed us a grimy, disgusting skullfuck of a globalised corporate world. The flying cars would definitely be infested with rust and body filler. Noone would care about anyone, concerns would all be local, egotistical, and power would be unassailable.

It was much like a caricature of the last decades of the 20th century, when global shipping was ascendant, environmentalists were just a bunch of hippies rather than the entrepreneurs and technologists we have now, and corporations didn’t need to do much greenwashing. We were on a fast track to free market fascism, open source would die and there definitely wasn’t going to be another bubble of enormous greed followed by a banking crisis.

It’s still not completely impossible for some of these forces to take hold and dominate, but the aggregate of these fictional privatopias is a future in which biological and social needs, behavioural patterns older than our genome, have ceased to operate. Homogenised poverty and violence are unlikely without bigger forms of tumult and other forms of social organisation emerging from them. Even when they maladapt, people tend not to tolerate disconnection and anomie.

In the face of even minor currents in a given direction, cultural counterpoints occur. Even if a powerful body can keep communities small and suppress cultural fringes through indoctrination and peer pressure, it’s impossible to eradicate resistance.

By the turn of the 21st century, the assumption of how-progress-happens had broken on a wave of conspiracy theories, cyberpunk, and corporate morality tales. Consumerism and the military had been decoupling; funding for moonshots was long gone and Concord was an anomaly. Right now, the US department of defense is trying to give away to museums one of the incredibly expensive stealth boats that, upon it’s public unveiling in the early 90s, seemed like a chunk of the future made incarnate. The Sea Shadow is an arguable case of folly since the technology gained from research and prototyping with it has been used elsewhere and it makes sense not to waste money mothballing it, but there are people using much cheaper means to have massive effects.

Guerillas are knocking the shit out of Nigerian oil production using speedboats, mobile phones and RPGs coupled with efficient, open source social organisation. You could win speedboats like that on game shows when I was a kid, and some states have factories that will sell RPGs to just about anyone they can ship them to.

The Cold War arms race proved to be more about one opponent bankrupting the other, and the capitalist, globalised future of multinationals and long distance shipping reached it’s apotheosis sometime around the turn of the millennium. The 90’s were the last turn at which most people saw the future as such a physical thing, with no hint of the massive streams of data that were going to change things so much. Late 90’s shipping is a nub of a future, a stillborn world of Weyland-Yutani, superceded before it ever really took hold.

Every decade has had it’s future, and bespoke, spontaneous fabrication is the ascendant vision right now. As pointed out by the trinity of Sterling, Doctorow and Stross, everything has an increased tendency to become data, and not with the pizazz of The Lawnmower Man, but in a very mundane way. The way things are designed and produced is shifting beneath the notice of most people, the result being useful data from which physical things can be constructed rather than just inferred.

We saw hints of this from the 60’s and 70’s on, with our green wireframes, neural interfaces and holodecks. Oh my User, those wireframes were cool, but these visions scream nothing but ALL DATA, ALL THE TIME. Everyone was going to get a piece of this. In these visions, we also tended to not see the differences between data, simulation, and utility, with the result that some people bang on about the 3D web to this very day.

Another thing we tended not to forsee was that, due to complexity, the transformation of objects into data meant that specialist castes of designer and engineer would largely be the ones to deal with it. Luckily, some of the tools are pretty open, and we seem to be on our way to some form of manufacturing that doesn’t involve such dependence on a military industrial teat. We’re moving beyond consumption and into something else.

Things are going to be smarter, tougher, smaller. Nanotechnology will be widespread and open source; De Beers’ monopoly will have been consigned to history and silicon based semiconductors will be primitive in comparison to the high temperature, ultra miniaturised diamond based electronics we’ll all be using. Brownian motion, field effects, toxicity and sustainability will all have proven to be surmountable problems in the construction of things from the atomic level up. Every home and business will have a fabricator.

Laughable? Surely not…

The universal fabricator, as we see it from here, is a cleaner, bright green alternative to the muck of industry, the fumes of aviation, automotive and rail networks. We need it, it’s our hope in the face of rising temperatures, rising prices, diminishing resources and a series of financial bubbles. Yet the fabber we visualise is a slow, filthy handed, distant cousin of the Star Trek replicator. These theoretical engines of production could easily look to our descendants like a spaceship with a steering wheel does to us.

Those RepRap guys have made astounding progress, but look deeply at their blog and you probably won’t want to build one. RepRaps aren’t for people who want the utility of 3D print, just as alpha versions of software aren’t for people cranking out work. I wonder if the utility of 3D print will ever be worth the hassle of maintenance rather than outsourcing it to Kinkos. Inkjet printers are troublesome and flawed enough as it is, thanks. While the world may be flattening and increasingly open source, and that’s a very good thing, centralisation is not devoid of benefits.

I want things I don’t necessarily expect. Constructing the future is a long-term act of fabrication, designed and directed but full of impurities and randomness, just like real chemistry when compared to the platonic ideals of theoretical chemistry.

While they’ve always been hung between sending dystopian and utopian signals, nowadays our models seem to have a keenness that’s both frightening and encouraging, like they’re only a little bit further on from the surreality of what we’ve gained in the past few decades.

The 3D print, automatic disassembly, bespoke futures fostered by futurists are a lovely, bright green, positive vision of things to come that’s not far removed from the ingredients and prototypes we’ve already got. I have a lot of respect for the Viridian and Worldchanging views that technology is what will solve our problems, and that we have the tools to do that already if we’d just put the thought and effort in too.

Project a bit further though, and you’ll find more universally negative and terrified visions. People racing to dehumanising forms of transhumanism while Rossum’s replicating robots, grey goo, and assorted biological terrors nip at their heels. Life will go on, but we’re terrified it won’t be us.

Back when, I’m given to believe, England looked more like Lyddle End, the apparent simplicity of purpose for a rocket or hydroponic farm made it easier to project technology centuries into the future, into space opera and colonisation dramas. Nowadays, the increased flux, complexity and sheer uncertainty of the world contract and diversify our projections to apocalypses, paradises and singularities occurring within the next few decades.

We’re going to carry all of our futures there with us, and I look forward to seeing how we’re mistaken. Who’s to say green paint won’t make a comeback?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 22:13 and is filed under AI, Conflict, Culture, Design, Economics, Environment, Media, Psychology, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.