3 What Would Bucky Say?

The iconoclastic spirit of the Age of Aquarius initially found its way into the futurist movement. It is an affectation of youth to make light of serious matters, as if to impress others with the easy grace one has with difficult things. This mentality affected the work of futurists in the early years. Buckminster Fuller labelled his creation of a global resources inventory "The World Game", while many of his contemporaries treated their own forecasts like childs' play. The variety and audacity of the predictions that ushered forth was breathtaking.

Nothing seemed impossible. Rand Corporation conducted a Delphi study on space travel involving a wide range of experts who were queried repeatedly on the subject. Eighty-two scientists agreed that a permanent lunar base would be established long before the turn of the century. They also predicted that men would fly past Venus and land on Mars by then. By the same time, planes carrying 1,000 passengers, flying just under the speed of sound, would be commonplace. Hovercraft would be in everyday usage shuttling commuters, 90 per cent of whom would be living in supercities. Rand's experts foresaw seashore aquaculture, a current reality, but overshot the mark with their description of underesea farmers tending huge fields of kelp, living for months in submerged bunkhouses. Though their undersea crop would taste indifferently at harvest, it would be readily treated to taste like anything from steak to kidney pie.

Some of the early predictions have come true. Transplantation of organs from live donors, or the recently deceased, is now a routine medical practise. In the Sixties, medical researchers accurately foresaw the widespread use of in vitro fertilization. Although Dolly the Scottish sheep's clone was still not conceived, they also foresaw the manipulation of DNA molecules in order to tinker with human characteristics like eye color, hair tint and various other cosmetic adjustments.

Too much of a good thing can indeed be intoxicating. This homily was never as true as when it is applied to the technological visions of the early futurists. As a result, much of the forecasting that occurred in the Sixties was the work of over-achievers. Some of it was downright frivolous. A cycle of one-upmanship seemed to take hold of otherwise prudent men and women. For example, GE's TEMPO scientists imagined building a nuclear generating station atop Mount Wilson, above Los Angeles, so that the heat it produced could raise the inversion layer that hangs over the city, ridding L.A. of its smog.

Morris Ernst started one of the longest-running and most emotive swells of expectation in the postwar period with his 1955 prediction that by 1976 the average work week in the United States would be 30 hours. The most errant of predictors attempted to forecast not only technological innovations, but the social change that would follow. Buckminster Fuller's ability to block out all but his own vision was prodigious. No surprise, then, that he was ready to predict the elimination of any need for politics in the wake of the widespread affluence that he saw on the horizon. Fuller was not alone in his optimism. In February, 1966, Time magazine reported that by 2000 A.D. machines would be producing so much that: "everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy".

The truth, as it has turned out, is stranger than non-fiction. The Y2K "crisis" was the ultimate acid test of techno-futurism. Yet its lessons didn't deter millions from mortgaging their futures on the technology bubble that followed.

Despite mounting evidence throughout the Nineties, runaway public and private debt was allowed to undermine Western economies. As an unthinkable result the banking industry, especially in the U.S., has withdrawn from its role as engine of economic growth by refusing to extend credit to viable enterprises. Governments have bought back mountains of “toxic” debt, throwing billions in good money after bad. And now, despite taxpayers having swallowed the poison, there is talk of another major slowdown.

A five-year research project that scanned every available source of techno-futurism from WW11 to Y2K produced less than a handful of volumes that saw this coming. Authors like Lord William Rees-Mogg, of The Great Reckoning, were decried as eccentrics. In another era, people who swam that far from the mainstream would have been locked up.

It’s beginning to look like Robert Heilbroner was right when he wrote in 1992 that the U.S. would lose its global economic leadership. It may turn out to be worse than that. More than losing face, the U.S. may be surrendering its very sovereignty a billion dollars at a time by borrowing from Chinese peasants to support its expensive habits.