Peter Thiel is wrong about the future, Virginia Postrel argues:
The obstacle to more technological ambitions isn’t our idea of the future. It’s how we think about the present and the past.
Americans in the mid-20th century were not in fact sanguine about the future. Anxieties about the march of technology were common. In February 1961, a statistics-filled Time magazine feature warned that automation was wiping out jobs and, worse, “What worries many job experts more is that automation may prevent the economy from creating enough new jobs.” At least nine episodes of the original “Star Trek” series were about threatening or out-of-control computers. (Still others involved menacing androids or ominous artificial intelligences whose exact nature was vaguely defined.) Movies such as “Colossus: The Forbin Project” (1970) and, of course, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) picked up the scary-computer theme. Nor was the space program as universally popular as we nostalgically imagine. Americans liked the moon race, but only in July 1969 — the month of the moon landing — did a majority deem the Apollo program “worth the cost.”
Meanwhile, back in those good old days people were already voicing worries about technological stagnation that sound a lot like Stephenson’s and Thiel’s. “Before 1913,” Peter Drucker wrote in 1967, economic development “was taken for granted, but since then we’ve apparently gone sterile. And we don’t know how to start it up.” He noted that “with the exception of the plastics industry, the main engines of growth in the past 50 years were already mature or rapidly maturing industries, based on well-known technologies, back in 1913.”
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The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future wasn’t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel. Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on only a small slice of the public. (Nobody else in my kindergarten was grabbing for “You Will Go to the Moon.”) People believed the future would be better than the present because they believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories — not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories, real-estate stories, medical stories — that reinforced this belief. They remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of going on airplane trips.
Then the stories changed. For good reasons and bad, more and more Americans stopped believing in what they had once viewed as progress. Plastics became a punch line, convenience foods ridiculous, nature the standard of all things right and good. Freeways destroyed neighborhoods. Urban renewal replaced them with forbidding Brutalist plazas. New subdivisions represented a threat to the landscape rather than the promise of the good life. Too-fast airplanes produced window-rattling sonic booms. Insecticides harmed eagles’ eggs. Exploration meant conquest and brutal exploitation. Little by little, the number of modern offenses grew until we found ourselves in a 21st century where some of the most educated, affluent and culturally influential people in the country are terrified of vaccinating their children. Nothing good, they’ve come to think, comes from disturbing nature.
Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in technological progress. It reflects it.
