VIRGINIA POSTREL: The world of tomorrow. When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?
As the grassroots backlash against urban renewal schemes grew, however, it inspired laws that choked off the very dynamic processes Jacob had celebrated. Citizens, it turned out, often simply wanted to preserve the status quo. Historic preservation laws limited demolishing or in some cases even renovating old buildings. Where once city governments razed whole neighborhoods, now procedures for citizen comment shifted the default toward blocking even small private projects. The shift gave small groups veto power, overriding both democratic representation and market processes.
Using planning hearings and lawsuits, homeowners turned participatory democracy into a powerful defense against change. Sometimes they blocked projects altogether. Sometimes they simply delayed them until they became financially unviable. Many of today’s obstacles to building new housing and environmentally friendly infrastructure originated in the backlash against the hidden costs of modernist progress glamour.
Since the 1980s, technological progress has enjoyed a few flickers of glamour, notably around the singular figure of Steve Jobs, who brought computing power into the everyday lives – and eventually the pockets – of ordinary people. Jobs fused countercultural allegiances with modernist design instincts, technological boldness, and capitalist success. Most important, he gave people products that they loved.
The outpouring of public grief at his death in 2011 demonstrated his power as a symbol. As Meghan O’Rourke wrote in The New Yorker, ‘We’re mourning the visionary whose story we admire: the teen-age explorer, the spiritual seeker, the barefoot jeans-wearer, the man who said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”’ Jobs embodied a new ideal of progress, at once uncompromising and humanistic, a vision of advancing technology that artists could embrace. (That the hippie capitalist could be a tyrannical boss and neglectful father were details obscured by his glamour.)
Jobs also helped to deliver on one of the touchstone technologies of twentieth-century progress glamour, a technology almost as evocative as flying cars. The twenty-first century kept the promise of videophones, and they turned out to be far better than we imagined. Instead of the dedicated consoles of The Jetsons, Star Trek, and the 1964 World’s Fair, we got multifunctional pocket-sized supercomputers that include videophone service at no additional cost. ‘I like the twenty-first century’, I tell my husband on FaceTime. But, like refrigerators, videophones aren’t glamorous when everybody has one. They’re just life. We complain about their flaws and take their benefits for granted.
Today’s nostalgic techno-optimists want more: more exciting new technologies, more abundance, and more public enthusiasm about both. Mingling the desires of the old modernists for newness, rational planning, and speed with those of the old nerds for adventure and discovery, they long for action. Their motto is Faster, please, a phrase popularized by Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds and the title of James Pethokoukis’s Substack newsletter.
Read the whole thing. 20 years ago, James Lileks wrote:
Sometimes I think you have to be middle aged to realize how cool things are. You grow up with MP3s and iPods, as my daughter will, and it’s the way things are. If you remember the KUNK-KUNK of an 8-track tape, having a featherweight gumpack that holds a billion bits of music is really quite remarkable. (Metheny was followed by something from the “Run Lola Run” soundtrack, which was followed by “I Apologize,” by some nutless 30s warbler, followed by “Dawn” by Grieg.) And then there’s the cellphones and the tiny cameras and the widescreen TVs and home computers that sing to each other silently across the world; wonders, all. This really is the future I wanted. Although I expected longer battery life.
We live in an age of technological wonder, and yet we take it all for granted. (Which itself is a very Jetsons-like response to being surrounded by all this technology.)