🎦🌌 Dystopian Hollywood vs. a tech-optimist, Up Wing future
But the prevalence of sci-fi depicting a dark tomorrow also says something worrisome about us
Quote of the Issue
“Toward the end of the plague, yellow journalism had spread a cancerous dread of vampires to all corners of the nation. He could remember himself the rash of pseudo-scientific articles that veiled an out-and-out fright campaign designed to sell papers. There was something grotesquely amusing in that; the frenetic attempt to sell papers while the world died. Not that all newspapers had done that. Those papers that had lived in honesty and integrity died the same way.” - Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised
“With groundbreaking ideas and sharp analysis, Pethokoukis provides a detailed roadmap to a fantastic future filled with incredible progress and prosperity that is both optimistic and realistic.”
The Essay
🎦🌌 Dystopian Hollywood vs. an Up Wing future
Hey, I love movies. Movie award shows, less so. So during the Academy Awards last night, my dog and I rewatched the first two films in the 2010s Planet of the Apes trilogy: Rise of the Planet of the Apes from 2011 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes from 2014. Turns out I had forgotten a key plot element concerning the experimental drug that gives chimpanzees their human-level intelligence. It’s a viral-based compound, called ALZ-112, intended as a cure for Alzheimer's disease. (Didn’t recall that bit.) Although ALZ-112’s intelligence-enhancing effects on chimps are permanent and pass genetically from parent to child, its curative power on humans proves temporary. Even worse: A new iteration of the drug — one that may permanently cure Alzheimer’s — also causes a virus that’s 99.8 percent lethal to humans. So kind of a tough trade-off there.
The irony of a supposed cure actually causing humanity’s downfall was also a key story element in a film that came out just a few years before Rise of the Planet of the Apes. In 2007’s, I Am Legend, the latest Hollywood reimagining of the influential 1954 novella of the same name by Richard Matheson, the measles virus is successfully genetically engineered into a complete cancer cure … before mutating into a strain that kills 90 percent of the global population, with the other 10 percent either immune or turned into feral vampire-zombie hybrids. Another tough trade-off.
The idea that some new technology, whether a genetically engineered cure or artificial intelligence or advanced power source, will turn out to hurt, rather than help, humanity is a common trope in popular science fiction. So much so that the excellent TVTropes website identifies several different variants of this theme, including New Technology Is Evil, Science Is Bad, and Ludd Was Right.
Of course, this isn’t a newsletter of film criticism and review. Yet I often focus on both the future-optimist, Up Wing and (far more common) risk-averse Down Wing nature of science fiction because it plays a role in molding societal attitudes towards the potential of future technologies — and the challenges they may pose. Too often, science fiction fails to depict technology as capable of solving problems and helping create a future in which we would want to live.
As I document and analyze in The Conservative Futurist, the decline of optimistic futurism in popular culture since the 1960s, replaced by dystopian and pessimistic visions, has diminished our collective ability to envision and work towards a better future. Science fiction, once a source of inspiration for technological progress and societal advancement, now often warns of existential dangers and encourages fatalism. It’s a shift that both reflects and causes a broader cultural malaise and lack of confidence in our capacity to shape a brighter tomorrow.
From The Conservative Futurist:
Underlying the rapid advance of human progress over the past quarter millennium has been a powerful optimism about tomorrow combined with what the sociologist Elise Boulding has described as a “utopian sense of human empowerment.” We really used to believe we could invent the future. Now, not so much. According to Boulding: “In eras when pessimism combines with a sense of cosmic helplessness, the quality of human intentionality declines and, with it, the quality of imagery of the not-yet. Societies in that condition live bounded by the present, with no social dynamic for change available to them.” …
When [conservative futurist] Herman Kahn wrote on how to transition to a world of mass abundance and opportunity, he argued that perhaps “the single most important thing that could be done would be to substitute reasonably accurate positive images of the future for the depressing images that now prevail, especially in the Advanced Capitalist nations.” Ideally, such an image would be vivid enough that we could picture a version of it in our minds. Researchers Andrew M. Carton and Brian J. Lucas find evidence that organizational leaders can inspire employees by communicating “a vision of the future with image-based rhetoric—words and phrases that are readily envisioned in the mind’s eye.” They point out that Bill Gates envisioned a “computer on every desk and in every home,” and President John F. Kennedy challenged NASA to land “a man on the moon.”
On the point of whether the movies we like or dislike really do say something about us and our attitudes comes the new working paper “Movies” by economists Stelios Michalopoulos of Brown University and Christopher Rauh of the University of Cambridge. The researchers ask, “Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs?”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Faster, Please! to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.