Culture

Cool Futurism: We’re The Foundation, and Not In The Asimov Way

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“Such was the delusion. We wouldn’t have to do any actual work to get rid of all those terrible problems that didn’t actually have technological solutions, like class warfare (or actual warfare). All we had to do was wait for the tech to evolve to the point where those problems would wither away, where money and jobs (at least, as we currently understood them) would become irrelevancies.“

In response to my analysis of the Omni Cool Futurism and how disunity set in in social trends, Serdar noted one of the big flaws that occurred was that we relied on technology to solve problems. The problems that we needed to solve in many cases were the problems of US.

Now Serdar notes that he thinks 9/11 more finished demolishing the sense of a bright high-tech future that had been slowly eroding. I’m not sure that’s the case as I felt it was more a catalyst/opportunity for some of the forces and trends out there to be unleashed. That may be something to address further down the road (or specifically). The demolishing of the idea of a bright future was one, in short, that I think benefited some people not in a conspiracy sense, but more in that pressing their own advantage harmed us.

However, he hits on the simple point that we thought technology would solve our problems and it didn’t because sometimes, we’re the problem.

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The Personal Is Always Important

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So Rob showed me RWBY, a CGI animated series that fuses video game and anime styles. It’s by Monty Oum, and thus has quite a pedigree. I found it enjoyable if needing fleshing out, and did enjoy the use of game stylings a great deal – there’s a very definite Suda 51 vibe that appeals to me.

But what was weird in watching this fan production by a fan favorite is that I found my reactions were odd. How was I to judge it considering its pedigree? Considering it’s audience-friendly involvements and previews? Considering it wasn’t from a big company?

It reminded me when I saw Pacific Rim, which is a giant love letter to mecha films (both military and super). I mean I knew I liked the idea of it, I like what I saw, but my reactions felt strange. On one level it was totally targeted at . . . well me. On the other I wanted to judge it as I would any film.

Then I thought about Rogue Legacy, which I noted “spoke” my language. It was also a personal experience, and one that made judging the game different because that was the very goal.

I was not judging these things based on artistic merits entirely. I was evaluating them in a series of contexts like who did them, focus on the audience. It was very personal. Oh sure there were merits I could note, but in many cases they came down to merits that existed in a personal/social context.

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The Loss of Cool Futurism: Disunity

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Serdar and I were recently’ discussing the revival/return of Omni magazine. If you’re not familiar with Omni then you’re . . . probably younger than I am.  So stop playing your music so loud and get off my lawn.

Anyway, Omni was one of those publications that had a theme of what I call “cool futurism”, of the amazing stuff we’d see, of soaring cities and great technology and a better world. It was hip and happening and often positive. Cool futurism is the kind of thing you see in Star Trek TOS, in speculations on future architecture, on imagining how we’ll solve disease or poverty – not naive, but, well, “Cool”.

It’s cool to make things better. Cool to imagine awesome things we can make.

It just doesn’t seem to be that popular anymore in America. So I began asking what happened, and you’ll be utterly shocked to hear there’s a blog post about it to follow. Probably several.

First of all, I think Cool Futurism is gone because there’s no sense of unity or potential unity.

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