The risky business of looking forward. Does the crystal ball get it right?

Cascade Video Productions CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Usually, in my line of work we only look in the rearview mirror. But recently I was cleaning out a closet and came across an unexpected treat for this historian — a chance to look back and see if the future has panned out. In an old chest, I had saved a New York Times Magazine from September 1996. Why that one in particular? Well, in it are essays on all sorts of topics by all sorts of “experts” who, as the new millennium was approaching, tried to peer into the crystal ball and tell us what life would be like in 100 years, in 2096. The historian in me probably couldn’t resist creating the opportunity at some future date to see if they were right.

Now I realize that in the digitized world where we all find ourselves today, I could simply Google this type of thing. It’s easy to look up an old video or article and see how people were thinking back then about what we might look like now or in the distant future. But I’m kinda old school. I actually prefer to hold the book, newspaper, or article in my hands while I’m reading it. The tactile nature of it just adds to the experience for me (believe me, the irony that I’m writing about this in an online newsletter is not lost on me….). So, to open the chest and feel that “Hey look what I found!” excitement, and then hold the magazine, flip through the pages, make notes in the margins, and put sticky notes here and there made this exercise in prognostication evaluation all the more enjoyable. It felt like a stereotypical time capsule moment.

Maybe 27 years doesn’t seem like that long ago, but keep in mind 1996 was before we had even gotten to the decade of the explosion of social media. That means life without (gasp!) Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok. It was also before the iPhone was invented which of course has made it so that we can all walk around with mini computers in our pockets and the very world at our fingertips. Oh, how beta we were back in ‘96.

But now that we are almost one-third of the way through the century being predicted, I couldn’t resist checking in and seeing how we are doing. Read on for a few excerpts and see what you think….

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Steve Messina in Letters to the Editor:

Although the United States continues to have the broadest protection of free speech, the fewest restrictions on gun ownership and the least Government involvement in business, health care and social welfare of the Western democracies, a small but significant percentage of our population believes that the nation is well on its way to totalitarianism.

I’m not sure what Steve thinks now, but I think that today’s news makes it seem like that “small but significant percentage” may have grown a bit.

Garrison Keillor on nostalgia:

Every American knew Sinatra by sight and by voice, but when you scattered the audience among 200 cable TV channels and 1,000 movies you could watch on the Internet and 10,000 CD’s you could download, there weren’t many true celebrities anymore. People will miss them. There will be new celebrities, thousands of them, but not many people will know who they are.

He said that 9 years before YouTube and 20 years before TikTok. Score one for Keillor.

Michael Lewis on market speculation:

The market will respond by producing ever-more-sophisticated ways for people to divert themselves without leaving home. People will no longer visit foreign places; foreign places will visit people in the form of Disney’s Multi-sensory Package Tours. Disney’s most popular product will enable the consumer to star in his own fictions — movies, music videos, novels, etc. All the most popular fictions will be set in the distant past.

In pharmaceuticals, population growth means a growth in diseases that prey on people. By 2096, viruses will be the biggest health risk. Epidemiology will be the most lucrative branch of medicine. The market will respond to the boom in viruses with a corresponding boom in cures. The tension and drama of 100 simultaneous races for cures will lend spurious meaning to human life.

The biggest challenge for the market will be to meet the demand for meaning in life. Darwinism will spread; God will vanish. Entertainment technology will debase celebrity — fame, like everything else, will have been democratized — so that people will no longer be able to live through their idols. The possibility of being struck down by a virus will bring a good deal of happiness to those who survive. But even the spread of disease will prove insufficient to make life worth living. Man will increasingly be thrown back on his self to justify his existence. From a distance of 100 years, therapy stocks are looking pretty cheap.

In the whole magazine issue, Lewis was really the only one to mention a virus as part of our future (human health, not computer). My friend Jonathan, who is an epidemiologist, was happy to see his career choice is on the right track. Lewis also seemed to have seen the looming mental health crisis (buy therapy stocks) and V.R. If I’m gonna gamble with my money, I think I want Lewis to be my broker.

John Tierney about future pessimism:

No matter how much better we’re doing than our ancestors, we’re always doing worse than some of our neighbors. And no matter how much our life expectancy increases, we know that it is finite. We’re prone to that literary pitfall in which the poet believes that Nature is reflecting his own mood. We think the world is getting worse because our bodies are deteriorating. It’s conceivable that something in the next 100 years will cheer us up. Perhaps drugs or genetic engineering will tame our rogue hormones and make us more blissful. Maybe someday we’ll live forever by downloading our brains into synthetic bodies. Would the conquest of death be enough to make our cybernetic descendants content? Or would they sit around reminiscing about how much happier and healthier everyone was when bodies were made of mortal flesh? I know where I’d put my money.

Tierney’s essay reminds me of my own about the “Golden Age” of the past. The rearview mirror always seems to have just a hint of rose-colored tint. It seems in 100 years humans will still bitch about the present and long for the “good ole days.”

Paul Krugman on the economics of the environment, higher education, and creativity:

Today [in 2096] of course, practically every environmentally harmful activity carries a hefty price tag. Once governments got serious about making people pay for pollution and congestion, income from environmental licenses soared. License fees now account for more than 30 percent of the gross domestic product and have become the main source of Government revenue.

In the 1990’s everyone believed that education was the key to economic success. A college degree was essential for anyone who wanted a good job as one of those “symbolic analysts.” But computers are good at analyzing symbols. Therefore, many jobs that once required a college degree have been eliminated. Eventually the eroding payoff in higher education created a crisis in education itself. Why should a student put herself through college to acquire academic credentials with little monetary value? So enrollment in colleges and universities dropped almost two-thirds since its peak at the turn of the [21st] century. The prestigious universities coped by reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one — a place for children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and befriend others of their class.

[Back in 1996] While business gurus were proclaiming the new dominance of creativity and innovation over mere production, the growing ease with which information was transmitted and reproduced made it harder for creators to profit from their creations. Nowadays, if you develop a marvelous piece of software, everyone will have downloaded a free copy from the Net the next day. If you record a magnificent concert, bootleg CD’s will be sold in Shanghai next week. How, then, could creativity be made to pay? The answer was already becoming apparent a century ago: creations must make money indirectly by promoting sales of something else.

As a college/university educator, I can vouch for Krugman’s insight here. The devaluing of higher education is already well underway — and sometimes for good reason. And even though the Internet was around (barely) in 1996, I doubt Krugman knew that the entire thing would sit on a foundation of ad revenue. Maybe the one thing he didn’t realize is that with the advent of big data, the “something else” being promoted and sold is all of us.

Ronald Steel on whether the Information Age will knit the world together:

Russians gobble Big Macs. Children in Bangladesh wear Chicago Bulls T-shirts. CNN beams America around the globe. English is the universal language and the Internet the tribune of the people. Now we will all be one. Right?

Wrong. The notion of a global village is a product of our self-congratulation and worship of technology. We assume that if everyone sees the same programs they will espouse similar values. And since we provide much of the world’s pop culture, won’t everyone adopt our values? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. When we see our products and images abroad we think of it as Americanization. For others, it is just modernization. Eating pizza and playing soccer doesn’t make us Italian any more than drinking Coke or playing baseball turns the Japanese into Americans. Sometimes the more people know about one another, the more they find to dislike. Take a feuding family or a civil war to use a couple of examples. The telephone doesn’t make us love one another. Why should the Internet?

James Gleick writes, “Big Brother Is Us: Our privacy is disappearing, but not by force. We’re selling it, even giving it away.”

Like any gossip, we trade information to get information. Over in the advanced research laboratories of the consumer electronics companies, futurists are readying little boxes that they believe you would like to carry around — not just telephones but perfect two-way Internet-connected pocket pals. They could use GPS satellites so that you always know where you are. They could let the Network know too. Surely, you don’t mind if the Network knows all this….

On the Internet, surprising numbers of users insist on a right to hide behind false names while engaging in verbal harassment or slander. The use of false online identities has emerged as a cultural phenomenon. Changing personas like clothing — is that what the demand for privacy will come to mean?

[Online] our reach is thousands of times longer. We meet people, form communities, make our voices heard with a freedom unimaginable to a small-towner of the last century. But we no longer board airplanes or enter schools and courthouses secure in our persons and effects; we submit, generally by choice, to the most intrusive of electronic searches. We submit to what used to be called surveillance.

We turn those cameras on ourselves. Then we beg for more gossip. We invent technologies for encryption, but we rarely bother to use them. If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the 21st century, perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the 19th century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it’s just better not to ask, and better not to look.

Boy, oh boy did he hit the mark! And we’re barely one-third of the way through this century. I think I found his essay to be the most chilling of all.

Stanley Crouch on the future of race and diversity:

I am fairly sure that race, as we currently obsess over it, will cease to mean as much 100 years from today. In our present love of the mutually exclusive, and our pretense that we are something less than a culturally miscegenated people, we forget our tendency to seek out the exotic until it becomes a basic cultural taste, the way pizza or sushi or tacos have become ordinary fare. This approach guarantees that those who live on this soil a century from now will see and accept many, many manifestations of cultural mixings and additions. In that future, definition by racial, ethnic and sexual groups will most probably have ceased to be the foundation of special-interest power. Ten decades up the road, few people will take seriously, accept or submit to any forms of segregation that are marching under the intellectually ragged flag of “diversity.”

I wonder what Crouch thinks about the 1996 obsession with race turning into the “woke” movement? Seems like one of those issues that had to get worse before it gets better, but I for one hope that his vision for 2096 is correct on this one.

As a runner, I couldn’t help but include the description and prototype image of the future running shoe, as imagined by professional shoe designers…..

Before another century passes, the sneaker will have its own self-powered sole. The sneaker of the 21st century will be made of an inorganic, animated material wired with a flexible film. The film collects the energy generated by the motion of the foot and converts it into an energy source to power all the other functions of the shoe: preventing injury, enhancing weak or damaged parts of the foot and promoting overall peak performance from each tendon, ligament — in fact, every atom.

We have all this smart technology now, and it’s only seeming to make us dumber. And now they’re coming for our shoes? I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

The Dalai Lama on the future of the planet:

The world itself is nature. The sun, the moon, they are nature. Even if there were no more animals, nature would still be here. For those religions that believe in a creator, they would have to find reasons to explain why our beautiful blue planet became a desert. In the Buddhist tradition we believe the whole world will come and disappear, come and disappear — so eventually the world becomes desert and even the ocean dries up. But then again, another new world is reborn. It’s endless.

The historical cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Past, present, future. Inescapable.

Okay, so there you have it. How do you think we are doing so far?

The prediction game is and always has been a risky business. After reading the magazine cover-to-cover, I was struck by how many of the issues we are still grappling with but also the feeling that we’ll adapt and find our way through. The crystal ball says the future will look different, but we’ll still be here. Here’s to hoping this time it’s right.