The Inevitable Flying Car (USA Today)

You may have noticed a certain paleo-futurist quoted in yesterday's USA Today:

Matt Novak, however, remains unconvinced. The host of Paleofuture.com, a blog that looks at past predictions of the future, says flying cars look even further away these days.

"We had this sort of optimism in the '50s and '60s, a feeling that things were inevitable because of technology. And flying cars were on the short list," Novak says. "I don't think we're going to have freeways in the sky any time soon."

Read More:
What the future didn't bring
New Hampshire Public Radio (Jan, 2008)
Paleo-Future in the Wall Street Journal
Streamlined Cars of the Future

Brussels Girl Geek Dinner

Peter Van Wijnaerde recently emailed me and asked for my opinion on various paleo-futuristic topics. He was doing a presentation for the Brussels Girl Geek Dinner and was looking for some insight. I felt bad that I didn't have much time to contribute but he was able to put together a rather interesting presentation which can now be viewed online:

| View | Upload your own

Peter was kind enough to post the first draft of his presentation as well:

| View | Upload your own

One Year of the Paleo-Future Blog

It was a year ago today that I started the Paleo-Future blog. With that first post I warned of my smarmy, cynical attitude toward the future.

I still believe everything I wrote in that first post so out of laziness, my first blog post appears below. And I sincerely thank you for reading.

I first came across the word "Paleo-Future" in a Flickr group of the same name. However, the topic first sparked my interest when I visited Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center, (now Epcot), and realized that Disney's version of the future was based upon what they thought the future would look like in the 1980s. As is important when depicting the future, your opinions must change with the times, unless you happen to be omnipotent, which means you have no need to revise your vision of the future and have probably used your powers for such noble endeavors as guessing my weight at the local carnival or writing horoscopes that tell me, "you should find time for yourself tonight."

While I might poke fun at the outlandish ideas of 1950s America, corporate puffery, or Jules Verne I do it with an admiration for the idealism we seem to be losing in our post-modern society. The belief that technology has the potential to improve the lives of everyone on Earth seems rare. Just remember that an optimism for the future and the attempt to better the world for all humanity is hidden somewhere within each sarcastic comment about flying cars and space farms. In that same vein, I will always remember that the dystopian societies depicted by George Orwell or Alan Moore are just as plausible if we surrender freedom in the name of security. Here's to a "great big beautiful tomorrow."

Thanks for reading,
Matt

See also:
Hello and Welcome

New Hampshire Public Radio Interview (Jan, 2008)

You can listen to an interview I did with Virginia Prescott at New Hampshire Public Radio here.

See also:
Paleo-Future in the Wall Street Journal
Article for MungBeing
Sincerity and the Paleo-Future
Postmodern Paleo-Future

New Posters

Two new(ish) posters are up at the Paleo-Future Online Store. The first is a new version of the 1934 Gigantic Robots poster. The second is a smaller version (11x17) of the Future Travel poster.

See also:
Paleo-Future Online Store
Futuristic Air Travel (circa 1900)
Gigantic Robots to Fight Our Battles (Fresno Bee, 1934)

Paleo-Future Online Store

Do you love the Paleo-Future but don't know how to properly express that love? Buy some buttons. Or a poster. Or print your own.

The 45 button set includes every flying machine featured in this post from August.

You can check out the Paleo-Future Online Store main page here.

See also:
Flying Machines (circa 1885)
Futuristic Air Travel (circa 1900)

Meet George Jetson (Wall Street Journal, 2007)

Jason Fry has a very interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal about those who long for the Jetsons' version of the future. The November 15, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone also has an article about paleo-futurism, although I haven't read that one yet.

An excerpt from the Wall Street Journal piece appears below but just to clarify, there were only 24 episodes of the original 1960s version of the Jetsons. New episodes were produced in the 1980s.

I doubt the creators of "The Jetsons" ever imagined how they'd influence kids growing up in the 1970s. The last episode of the original "Jetsons" aired in the spring of 1963, but its real heyday came in syndication, with the show playing on what seemed like continuous loop in the late 1970s. Amazingly, there were only 24 "Jetsons" episodes --- it's a bit frightening to imagine how many times I must have seen each one.

And I'm not alone. Rolling Stone just released another anniversary issue, this one interviewing 25 big names about the future of the music industry, global warming, politics and the like. Turns out a fair number of Rolling Stone's famous interviewees spent their childhoods the same way I did: watching George and Jane and Judy and Elroy.

Kanye West and Bruce Springsteen would like their flying cars already. The future was "The Jetsons," George Clooney recalls -- it "meant getting into a silver costume with a ring around your neck and riding around in floating cars. It was antiseptic and perfect." Chris Rock also grew up expecting airborne cars and moving sidewalks. Mr. Clooney finds it "funny that none of it really came around," but Mr. Rock notes that flying cars aside, "The Jetsons pretty much came true. My kid even has a mechanical dog that does flips." (Who's right? I'll get to that.)

See also:
Paleo-Future in the Wall Street Journal

Paleo-Future in the Wall Street Journal

If you read today's Wall Street Journal you may have seen a piece by Lee Gomes, which mentions the Paleo-Future blog.

Another way to follow evolving social attitudes about computers is through the "concept videos" made by computer companies. Analogous to Detroit's concept cars, these videos are designed to show a company's visionary idea about what computers might be one day, without obliging it to actually build them.

The best place to look at these videos is at PaleoFuture (paleo-future.blogspot.com), which allows an amazing look back at visions of the future, starting back in the 1880s. The exhibit is curated with great wit by 24-year-old Matt Novak of Minneapolis. Most of these retrofutures are full of optimistic technology, like what you'd see at a World's Fair or Disneyland's World of Tomorrow.

Computer-company concept videos tend to be set in the immediate future, a happy time of well-dressed people who spend their days either running small businesses or preparing sales reports. PaleoFuture has two videos from the early 1990s, one from Sun Microsystems and the other from AT&T, telling us about life in 2004.

These videos avoid the silliness of similar efforts from the 1960s, such as the 1967 movie from Philco-Ford showing moms in 1999 pushing a button to make dinner. Still, they manage to blur easy engineering problems with very hard ones, which results in their being off by miles in some of their predictions. In most of these videos, for example, the computer understands casual spoken English well enough to be able to act as an ever-alert concierge, dialing up business associates on the phone and yanking reports on demand from its memory, then cheerfully saying something back to their owner after finishing a task.

Mr. Novak says that since then, the computer industry seems to have gotten smarter about how dumb computers can be and what they're really good for. "Computers of the future were to be artificial humans," he says. "At some point, we realized that we didn't care to talk with machines. We wanted to communicate with humans more efficiently."

See also:
Article for MungBeing
Sincerity and the Paleo-Future
Postmodern Paleo-Future

Flickr Group: In the Year 2000

The Paleo-Future blog and Boing Boing Gadgets have started a Flickr group called In the Year 2000. As Joel over at BB Gadgets has noted, there is already great interest in the group (211 members so far) along with some great images. I hope to see this community grow because I've already found many images that I've never seen before.


The image above is from 1969 and taken from the Soviet magazine Teknika Molodezhi. Flickrtarian Avi Abrams added it to the group.

See also:
Year 2000 (Tag)

The Comfort of the Paleo-Future

LiveJournalist Blayne has an interesting analysis of why we may long for yesterday's future. His take on paleo-futurism seems to be rooted in the comfort of the nostalgic.

After the romantic innocence of retro-futurism is stripped away, you can see what drives our contemporary longing for imagined past-futures: Nostalgia, and a sincere desire for a return to familiar images of our past. It is in these familiar icons that we cope with our uncertain future. In my idle moments, its this desire "to return to a world that never really existed" that puts me at ease, regardless of what the buildings look like.

Paleo-Future Wallpaper

A few blogs mentioned that they liked "Going to the Opera in the Year 2000" so much that they were using it as their desktop wallpaper. With that in mind, I've uploaded 3 different wallpaper designs in a variety of sizes. I haven't yet blogged about the first image but it may be one of my favorite paleo-futuristic paintings ever. Enjoy.


Flying Machine (circa 1900)
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Going to the Opera in the Year 2000 (circa 1900)
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Robot Battles (1934)
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See also:
Going to the Opera in the Year 2000 (1882)
Gigantic Robots to Fight Our Battles (Fresno Bee, 1934)

Futurism's Past Littered With Faulty Forecasts

John W. Schoen over at MSNBC recently wrote an interesting piece about paleo-futurism. An excerpt appears below but you can read the entire story here.

To make a bold prediction about the future, you have to think outside the box. But as the history of these predictions shows, when you try to stare too deeply into the future, it’s all too easy to end up way outside the ballpark.

History, in fact, is littered with Big Ideas that went nowhere. From the paperless office to teleportation; flying cars and undersea cities, predicting the future can be a perilous business. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

See also:
Is Futurism Dead? (New York Times, 1982)

Power Macintosh Ad: Fighting Spacemen (1994)

Continuing our series of ads from the 1994 Power Macintosh campaign, this one involves fighting spacemen of the (paleo)future.

See also:
Power Macintosh Ad: This Future Belongs to the Past (1994)
Jet Packs and Macs (1994)

Digital Rights Management (April, 2007)

Much like jet packs, flying cars and moon colonies, digital rights management was to be the movement of the future. Back in April of 2007, organizations like the MPAA and RIAA held hilariously paleo-futuristic views on how to prevent piracy. These organizations were convinced that they could have total control over how creative works were used. From the distanced perspective of May, 2007 we can laugh at it now, but I'm sure there are still people insisting it can be done.

Jet Packs and Macs (1994)

Like the teaser ad for the new Power Macintosh in 1994, this ad reappropriates images of the paleo-future.



See also:
Power Macintosh Ad: This Future Belongs to the Past (1994)

Power Macintosh Ad: This future belongs to the past (1994)

In 1994 Apple Computer ran a series of ads that were essentially reflections on the paleo-future. The idea was that with the Power Macintosh the real future had arrived.

See also:
Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987)

Paleo-Future Forum

If you look to the sidebar you'll see that I've included a link to a new forum on Google Groups dedicated to Paleo-Future. This forum will hopefully allow for more interactivity and allow readers of Paleo-Future a place to discuss paleo-futurism and present-day futurism, share resources and bring attention to important links.

I've started the group with a handful of topics that I often discuss here on the Paleo-Future blog. Your input is always welcome, whether it be here on the blog or on the newly created message boards. Thanks for reading and let me know what you think of this new experiment.

-Matt

matt@paleofuture.com

Postmodern Paleo-Future

Lately, I've been trying to organize my thoughts around this idea of the postmodern paleo-future. That is to say, when did a certain level of self-awareness about futurism outweigh the sincere, optimistic brand of futurism?

I might suggest that the first great postmodern paleo-futuristic film was Woody Allen's Sleeper from 1973. Allen was not so much reflecting present-day anxieties and dreams of the future but rather those of generations before him.

In a world of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Meet the Robinsons, and the Futurama TV show, (not the General Motors exhibit from the 1939 World's Fair), where do we go from here?

Is a return to sincerity the answer? Is such a thing even possible, let alone desirable?

Despite what some may have argued at the time, irony did not die on September 11, 2001. In fact, it was the only way Americans knew how to deal with tragedy. Yet, there continue to be moments when a sincere reverence for the future and its possibility poke through, as though asking if it's safe to come out and play.

As usual, your thoughts on this topic are more than welcome.

A Glimpse of the Year 2000 (New York Times, 1982)

"'You will definitely see this returning to a more human scale society,' said Hazel Henderson, a freelance futurist, from her post in Gainesville, Fla. 'It will be more effecient [to] do things locally. It won't make sense to buy Wonder Bread baked in Illinois'"

That prediction couldn't have been more wrong. Today our food travels further than ever.

If you have a TimesSelect subscription you can read the entire article here.

Syd Mead

As a robot designer for Short Circuit, concept artist for Tron, a production illustrator for the first Star Trek movie and a "visual futurist" for Blade Runner, Syd Mead has contributed to the paleo-future through some amazing movies.

Flickrtarian Michael Heilemann recently posted a set of Syd Mead concept art. Be sure to check out the Paleo-Future Flickr group started by trixiebedlam.