retrofuturism - Dreams of Forgotten Futures
Let's imagine the future as people in the past imagined it. Machines would do the housework, cars would glide along elevated highways, and science would solve most of life's tedious problems. We would presumably spend the remaining hours enjoying ourselves.
Today's plutocrats are still selling us this dream, albeit with rather different machinery. But it's worth looking back at how previous generations imagined the world to come, and what their visions reveal about the times in which they were made.
In 1939, Westinghouse unveiled Elektro, a seven-foot mechanical man who could walk, speak, count on his fingers and blow up balloons. He could even smoke a cigarette, and boasted that “my brain is bigger than yours”. He had a vocabulary of around 700 words, played from prerecorded records. He could move his head and arms, and shuffle forward on wheels while bending one knee. Elektro wasn't about to take over the housework, but he embodied a growing conviction that machines would become increasingly capable, and that the future would be full of wonders.
Design for Dreaming (1956) seen below, takes us into a Technicolor fantasy of the future, where a woman in a pink gown is whisked into a world of futuristic cars, automated kitchens and elaborate musical numbers. Made to promote General Motors' Motorama exhibition, it presents technological progress as a kind of song-and-dance routine. The cars are spectacular, the appliances do everything short of making the tea, and the future looks suspiciously like a showroom. It is a world in which even domestic chores seem poised to become glamorous.
But beneath the surface glamour, something feels strangely sterile. Everything is immaculate, and in its proper place. The film's vision of the future is not just one of abundance, but of perfect conformity, where even human beings seem to have been designed to fit the surroundings. Their optimism often depended on a very particular vision of society: orderly, affluent, technologically advanced and reassuringly uniform.
There is a curious echo of this in Elon Musk's vision of a future where AI and robots make work unnecessary. Once again, technology promises to liberate us from toil, as though the end of work would naturally usher in an age of leisure and abundance. But whose abundance, and on whose terms? The old films rarely troubled themselves with such questions. Their future was a showroom, not a society: a world of complex socioeconomic problems reduced to a series of technical challenges awaiting a solution.
To New Horizons (1940), seen below, made by General Motors to accompany its Futurama exhibition at the New York World's Fair, offers a vision of America transformed by highways, motor cars and carefully planned cities. Its future is one of expanding horizons, where engineering promises to bring prosperity, freedom and a better standard of living. The world of tomorrow looks remarkably like the world of today, only bigger, faster and with more road space. It is a future imagined by a car manufacturer.
Yet human beings are complicated, and their problems more so. Technology can solve particular difficulties, but new ones emerge, often in unexpected places. It can transform our psychological landscapes, alter how we relate to one another and change what we want from life. But it cannot reconcile our competing desires, or make us agree on what a better life should look like. We are not always even consistent in what we want for ourselves.
Perhaps this is why our faith in the future has become less certain. We have learnt that progress does not necessarily bring us closer to a common ideal. Utopias tend to assume that there is one way of living that would make everyone happy, when one person's paradise may be another's prison. Human beings have a habit of finding complications in the most carefully designed arrangements.
The difficulty is that imagining a future and selling one are two very different things. A convincing vision can promise abundance, leisure and freedom without having to explain how these might work in the lives of actual human beings. A genuine solution to human problems would require an understanding of what people want, including the contradictory things they want, and how those desires change. Yet we often don't fully understand ourselves. The problem, in a sense, lies within us. It is much easier to sell the promise of a solution than to understand the problem.
The old films could imagine the machines more easily than the people who would have to live with them. In that sense, the future being sold today isn't so different from the one being sold in 1956 and will probaly feel just as quaint to people of the future.
Watch below a short film on retrofuturism that i made for my youtube channel as a part of a series on constructed meaning.
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