 My name is Andrés Martinez. I'm the editorial director of Future Tense, and I'm also a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State. Future Tense, for those of you who haven't been with us before, is a partnership between New America Slate Magazine and Arizona State University. We are a citizen's guide to the future. We publish content daily on Slate's website, and we do a lot of convenings such as this one. We're animated by big questions, and we don't pretend to have all the answers, but we really look at the impact of emerging technologies on society. That's kind of what excites us. We want to democratize knowledge about the future. And so today's event is very much in keeping with Future Tense of Spirit. We wanted to look back at how we used to look forward and take that opportunity also to think about how we're looking forward nowadays and whether we're doing it in a way that's sufficiently creative and perhaps even optimistic. In terms of housekeeping notes, I would like to remind you to silence your cell phones. I didn't silence mine, which is over there, so hopefully nobody will call in the next 10 minutes. And also during the Q&A, please await a microphone to ask your question and also identify yourself as this is being webcast. So the way we've organized today's event is we're going to have a series of very short lectures, almost provocations or presentations, and that will be followed by a broader conversation. And then at the very end, I'll have some thoughts on how some of this connects back to Washington and the current moment. But before we get to that, we're going to have a lot of fun. We are going to look at the ways in which people envision that we would be living today, whether it's through entertainment, how we would work, where we would live, how we would get around. So to start things off, I am going to ask Neil Gabler to come to the stage. Neil. Neil is the author of Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination. He's a visiting professor of MFA Creative Writing and Literature Program at SUNY, Stony Brook. I have a cold, so I hope you'll excuse me because in the future there will be no more colds, that's my hope at least. Now I was asked to sort of set the stage here, and that's what I'm going to try and do in a very brief way. The notion of history of the future is, when you think about it, it's oxymoronic, a history of the future. I think we're so acclimated to the notion of a future, and we have that idea in our heads that I don't think we generally take a step back to look at how odd the concept is. The future is not temporal. There is no such thing really in terms of as an entity of the future. We've got the past, that's an entity, we know it's already been experienced. The present is what we're experiencing now. But the future hasn't happened yet, so it's not a temporal thing. What it is is basically our speculations about what might happen or projections into what might happen. So instead of thinking of the future as temporal, I think we have to think of it as imaginative. Which means that the future, unlike the past and unlike the present, is an invention, a human invention. And when you think of it, it's a rather recent invention. It hasn't lasted for all that long. You know, there are scholars who look at the history of the future, and some of them dated back to Mesopotamia, where people would read the stars and see if they could determine what might happen. But that sense of the future was a circular one. The idea was that things, cycles, repeated themselves. So there was no linear vector to the future. It was just a sense of what happened in the past, when might that happen again? And when you think later on to the early Christian period and the Jews, the sense of the future is not anything like what we have today. The notion of the future was almost a function of religious destiny. As far as you would project is something like, you know, Judgment Day or some sort of Armageddon or an afterlife. But it wasn't necessarily placed within life, and there was very little human agency involved in that notion of the future. And so when you think of the history of the future in any modern sense, you really have to go back to the Enlightenment. Because that's the first time that several things came together. One, that the future was a linear thing. There was a vector to it. It wasn't circular, and it didn't end, you know, with the last judgment, but it would keep on going. Two, that there was human agency involved. We could affect the future, not just God, not just the stars, but we were agents of the future in determining what that future might be. And three, that the vector in the agency frequently would lead, this is a very much a part of Enlightenment thought, to a notion of progress. So this idea of the future was, this is a vector in which human beings can control the future, or have some impact on the future, and in which the end result will be some sort of progress. And that last part, by the way, means that the future is really a narrative thing. And because the future is an invention, and because it's a narrative, I think when we're talking about the future, one way of getting a handle on it metaphorically is to think about the future almost as if it were a movie. And there's a reason why I think the movies and the future have such an affinity for one another, and why there's so much futurism in movies. It's because they kind of do the same things. And if the future is a kind of movie, borrowing the elements, the narrative elements, it also functions, as most commercial movies do, it also has another component, which is just like the movies, is the product of a sensibility, whether it's an individual sensibility or cultural sensibility, and it refracts our hopes, our dreams, our fears. It's one of the reasons why so much of future thought is binary. It's either dystopian or utopian. It comes out of the sense of culture, a culturally determined future. And because it's culturally determined, the future, as we conceive of it, is a variable thing. There are many different versions of it as we all know, because there are many different elements in the culture. Number one, and number two, because so often it's not just culturally determined, but it is the product of a sensibility. Later on, during our discussion, we may talk about Walt Disney, about whom I wrote a biography, and talk about how Walt Disney's vision of the future was determined by his experiences and his own personal needs, and how he then projected those things onto what he thought the future would be and how he thought he could be an agent for that future. And because the future is culturally determined, and not, in my estimation, as many people think, not to refute one of the engines of this conference today, technologically determined, there are several consequences. One consequence is that I think when we talk about the future, we often talk about the wrong things and focus on the wrong things. We have a macro sense that the future is about technological change. When I was a little kid, it was all about flying cars. You know, I couldn't wait to see a flying car when I was five years old. I'm still waiting to see a flying car. Those are the sorts of things that we have in mind, that there is this technology, and our main concern is the way the technology is going to impact us. And that's so much of the discussion of the future, is about technological change that will result in a change of consciousness, cultural and social change. Now, I think that's kind of got it backwards. In my estimation, technology is culturally determined. And by that I mean that almost everything that happens technologically doesn't come out of thin air, or you know, pop out of Zeus's head like Athena, but it's the answer to some felt need, something we feel culturally that we want, and technology comes along to answer that. Which is why I say that I think technology is more culturally and psychologically determined than the other way around. I'll give you an example in my own area in which I've written quite a bit the movies. Now, when you think about the technology of movies, it's a very simple technology. It's a bunch of flipping pictures. That's a very simple technology. Why did it take so long for us to get the motion picture? I mean really, the technological know-how should have been there. But what wasn't there, in my estimation, was the cultural demand. When life spans get longer, when we have a greater sense of mortality, when our lives and culture generally get more democratized, there is a sense that you want to be memorialized. Now in the past, before these things were democratized, you had pyramids and all sorts of things that would serve as monuments to the existence of this monarch or whatever. But we didn't have those monuments. You know what we had? We had motion pictures that were basically a technological embalming method. And it came along with the Kodak and other things at a very moment when we felt we needed it. Now there's obviously reciprocity between what we demand and how technology affects us. But I think it's, to me, much more compelling to think about the future in terms of consciousness, in terms of social engagement, in terms of community, in terms of psychology, because those things almost always get short-shripped. So we take kind of the easy way out, which is to talk about flying cars and replicants and all of these other things and genetic engineering. But the harder way to think about the future is who are we going to be? How are we going to be different? How is our world going to be different? Not because we can fly, but because we engage differently. And I'll leave you with that. Thank you, Neil. And if you would love to tweet about this, I should have mentioned that you can follow Future Tents on Twitter at Future Tents now. And I think we are encouraging the hashtag history of the future. So now I'd like to welcome to the stage Joey Estridge, whom I should mention is the man responsible for this event today. He is the intellectual author of Why Don't We Do Something About the History of the Future? To which most of us in a meeting were like, huh, what's that? So here we are a few months later. Joey is our great friend and my good colleague at ASU. He is the editor and the program manager for the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University. He's actually taught courses on the history of the future. He's also our assistant academic director for Future Tents. And now here with you is Joey. I'm going to start with a video clip, correct, like a supercut. My entire talk hangs on the concept that you see this video. So the video we just watched is a reminder that in Hollywood the future of transportation tends to be glamorous, right? G-Wiz, high tech. And that's no huge surprise. Largely because many movies about the future have lucrative luxury car sponsorships. So hence the zooming Magnetic Lexus in Minority Report or Will Smith's very aerodynamic Audi in iRobot. And indeed the films featured in this clip represent important ways that we like to imagine getting around in the future from sleek personal cars to highly efficient public transit. But I want to talk about a deeper tradition in futurism of suspicion of transportation technology and infrastructure. Because really like who likes getting around? We really just want to get where we're going. That's where the truly exciting futuristic things are happening. In his visionary non-fiction book Anticipations in 1901, H.G. Wells begins his painstakingly thorough account of the future with an essay on transportation. It's the first chapter in the book and it's the most boring chapter in the book. Which will go on to predict a one world government and the death of all but four human languages and much more. For Wells, a robust transportation system is fundamental for the growth of cities and the advancement of knowledge in commerce. It's a grimy business and not very romantic. So he starts there. He knows it's absolutely necessary but he wants to just like get it out of the way as quickly as possible. So he can hold forth on the truly interesting stuff about science and sex and war. Proceeding Wells by just a few years in 1898, the British bureaucrat Ebenezer Howard proposed what he called the Garden City. A model for a slumless, smokeless, went the advertising copy, community designed to eliminate the social ills of increasingly dense, dirty and socially stratified cities like London. Howard designed the Garden City to balance the convenience and vitality of urban living with the charms and healthful properties of the countryside. And the thing to understand about Howard is that he was a social reformist but he was not a socialist. So he saw this Garden City which was more pleasant and kind of calming and fun to live in as a solution for escalating tensions at the time around economic inequality. He didn't want to see socialism so he thought this new urban form would give rise to a sort of more peaceable social order. The Garden City is structured as a series of concentric circles coming out from the urban core. It features roads radiating out from the city center in usually like eight directions. Think of it as kind of a x y axis and then diagonals. There's an encircling railway for delivering goods and then there's high speed rail connecting various garden cities to one another. His idea was that the entirety of England would be filled with these things eventually. So there is transportation infrastructure. But Howard's vision is that it would be quite unobtrusive. Garden cities in his mind are compact and walkable with wide clean streets again a contrast to London. And pedestrian thoroughfares that are segregated from road and rail lines. They feature oodles of public space including verdant parks and a giant covered crystal palace of arcades. The circular design of the city makes forests farms and waterways easily accessible by foot. So this is a city that's designed to reduce transportation time. Howard segregates transportation infrastructure from living spaces shopping spaces from education. He untangles the mishmash of different vehicles and people crowding London's narrow streets. It's tidy and that's the key thing. Everything is in its own little place. This gives the illusion of a countryside just lightly dotted with human inhabitants. So if you think like the Shire from the Lord of the Rings but designed by somebody who's like really obsessed with geometry. Like he really worked the protractor to get the city built. You should look at an image of this city by the way. His book which is called Garden Cities of Tomorrow features all of these really great maps. So you should check them out for sure. Ten years earlier in 1888 Edward Bellamy a socialist from Massachusetts published his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy's vision of the future is quite different from Howard's. Bellamy was a Marxist with a deep faith in the power of technological ingenuity and rationality. He didn't share Howard's emersonian love for the countryside. But his vision of Boston in the year 2000 also tries to cure the maladies inflicted upon cities by industrialization, urban growth and poor planning. Bellamy basically avoids talking about transportation entirely although he does lavish attention on nearly every other detail of life in his technocratic socialist utopia. There are trains and wide streets like Howard. But Bellamy's vision really doubles down on walkability with neighborhoods designed so that work and shopping and schools are all within five to ten minutes. Walkability is so important to these future Bostonites that they deploy a full sidewalk all-encompassing rain canopy anytime the weather turns bad. When people shop they visit a neighborhood warehouse five to ten minutes away, place their orders and have their packages delivered home almost instantaneously by pneumatic tubes that snake underneath the city and even into the surrounding countryside. For Bellamy with his puzzle box mind, this is much more rational than cars and trains and buses. So both in Howard's English village vision and Bellamy's slick rationalist vision, transportation infrastructure is pushed to the side or underground or transmuted into tubes. Meanwhile, H.G. Wells tells us how important it is but tries to get past it as quickly as possible. These men are like all of us, they're just trying to get where they're going and they don't want to prattle on for very long about how. This line of thinking isn't just an early 20th century thing, it persists throughout the century. So in 1962, for example, Lewis Mumford published The City in History, which was a National Book Award winner and continues to be really resonant today. Mumford was a friend of Frank Lloyd Wright and of Clarence Stein who actually brought and popularized the Garden City concept in the U.S. In 58, Mumford wrote, the purpose of transportation is to bring people and goods to places where they're needed and to concentrate the greatest variety of goods and people within a limited area in order to widen the possibility of choice without making it necessary to travel. And today, this focus on reducing the time and complexity of transportation is still quite relevant. In 2013, for example, Tony Shea, the CEO of Zappos, moved his company's headquarters to the dilapidated urban core of Las Vegas. He vowed to revitalize the city as a cultural and economic hub and importantly as a walkable hub in the midst of a city suffering from an extreme of urban sprawl. Meanwhile, at the same time, top real estate websites like Zillow and Redfin used walkability scores to help buyers find homes and areas where they can avoid using cars in public transit. We're still mostly a car culture but traces of these dissonant futures from the turn of the previous century are with us and they might even be surging back to the forefront. So in conclusion, it's hard to think about transportation missteem. It's exciting, really, if you think about it. You know, in road trip movies, cars and trains are machines for self-discovery and adventure. But on a day-to-day basis, it's just friction to get around. It's lost time between the places we want to be and the experiences we want to have. We all suddenly had flying cars like from Blade Runner. It would be a week or a month or maybe a year before we started getting bored of them and figuring out how to automate them or avoid them entirely. And this sentiment is something that Wells Bellamy and Howard would have understood all too well. Thank you very much. Thank you, Joey. So up next, we're going to have a short video and talk about envisioning how we would work. So to do that, Yatasha Womack, please come up. Yatasha is the author of Afrofuturism, the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture and post-black. Her new generation is redefining African-American identity. She's also the director of a newly released film that involves a lot of experimental dance. It's called A Love Letter to the Ancestors from Chicago. Please check that out too, Yatasha. Now, well, this is really exciting and really intriguing because looking at the history of the future of work, in many respects it inspires our imaginations, but it also makes us look back at labor and how labor has really functioned in the creations of our society. And what I found really intriguing when I'm looking back at some of these predictions, say, moving into 1900 about where we would be as a society, say, in 100 years, one of the things that really strikes me, and we noticed in some respects in this video, is there is an element where people were really spot on. There's this real understanding about the fact that we would be communicating around the world, that we would be able to connect with individuals and while they didn't quite say the internet, there was a wrestling with satellite technology and this desire to cross boundaries and to build bridges and to create some level of efficiency through communication. There was also a recognition that we would have technology that would make our work lives easier. And many of those individuals who made these predictions, say, moving into the 1900s, were very excited about this concept of being able to have more leisure time. And something that really stands out to me when I'm looking at these assessments of having this kind of leisure time on the basis of work, it makes me think about kind of this labor class, this leisure time and leisure time for who and leisure time based on what, right? And it's really difficult for me in one level to get around historically because when we look at technologies, there's now much of a recognition that race is a technology when you talk about Afrofuturism and that the concept of being black and white was very much created to justify the transatlantic slave trade. And a lot of these social imbalances that were created as a result that we now fight against were enforced through law and violence. And so that is a technology of sorts when we think about culture and when we think about meeting the demands of change. And I think about that often when we talk about work because when you look at a lot of our sci-fi narratives, the predictions around looking at robots as this labor class who are now supposed to facilitate a lot of the same menial work or the difficult task becomes really interesting. One part that I thought was really, was one prediction that was slightly off but nonetheless rather fascinating was this belief moving into the 1900s that was still rather popular in the 1960s or so that we would be able to domesticate more animals to provide a lot of the work for us and they were looking at whales as transportation, looking at seahorses even as modes of transportation, looking at dolphins, looking at even chimpanzees or more sophisticated primates and how we could use them to facilitate a lot of our day-to-day working tasks and we see this obviously in movies like Planet of the Apes and then even if you look at films like Westworld because at some point there is this sort of revolution where whether it's the animals or it's the robots themselves they come to a sense of self and say, hey we don't want to be this labor class that is working for other individuals to live happy lives and so what's rather fascinating when you look at some of these predictions around technology I think that a lot of our science fiction today really looks at the ironies between these often utopian predictions and then the fallout of how our societies try to deal with some of those predictions and even in our own personal lives while we work with any number of technologies obviously from cell phones to we're skyping, we're on our computers we're flying across the world and we can argue that we have opportunities and that we're doing things let's say our grandparents and our great grandparents were not able to do we certainly have more flexibility in one sense in our day but one thing that often happens when you have so much technology that makes your life easier when you're in a society that places more of a demand on you to either achieve or excel you tend to not have more leisure time but rather to try to cram all of those activities into one day and that is a part of what we're really wrestling with in some cases we're talking to dozens of people in a day we're having conversations with people around the world we're emailing people from all facets of our lives simultaneously and the question becomes how does that impact us? how does that transform our day-to-day activities and what are the supports that are really in place for that? and when you look at some of these predictions about work and work life that's where the gray area comes in it's funny I was looking at something that Arthur Miller the author was predicting in the 1960s and he was talking about investigating more animals for work and then he said well at some point then they'll want to unionize and that's that right so it's really interesting when we look at these predictions around work life that's supposed to be facilitated by these technologies and then on the other hand some of the challenges that maybe on some level people thought about but what are we really putting in place to help facilitate the rapid change that some of these technologies are creating in our lives and at the rate that we're moving right now we really have to actively think and bond more and discuss and work diligently to create those supports in this time of change there was a recent study where they asked Americans did they feel like technology was going to transform their jobs in the next 50 years and about 80% of the people said absolutely but that same group of people also argued that or stated rather that they believe their job would exist in 50 years there was a recent study that showed that about 40% of those in the in our workforce are working jobs that they don't necessarily think are stable jobs and so it's really interesting and I encourage all of us to really look at supports to help us manage and navigate our societies and really look at how we can build bridges to really create the kind of world that will value humanity thank you Thank you Natasha I'm going to spend the next few days trying to wrap my mind around the whales helping us with transportation before the union is next up Katherine Manga Ward she is the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and a future tense fellow here at New America and she's going to address how we envisioned how we would live you look at visions of the future and it's always either like utopian plenty or like everyone lives in a basement where the pipes are leaking and those are the only two futures that seem to exist and I think actually you will not hear me say this too terribly often but Nancy Reagan basically gets it right in that lovely commercial we saw what the future of life at home really looks like is more or less what life at home has always looked like people have a way of kind of muddling through to a messy humanish middle ground no matter what resources they're given and I just want to kind of tick through a bunch of visions that we have had fever dreams, nightmares, hallucinations and talk about the ways that they trickle down distill into reality in our homes, in our everyday lives I want to start actually by talking about something that happened this Halloween I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old so Halloween is kind of a thing in my house and we knew two different kids same age, kindergarten age, who wanted to be robots who doesn't love robots, be a robot for sure so one of the kids was the robot that you know from the mid-century science fiction vision of the robot so we're talking about a cardboard box, rapid and tinfoil little flashy lights, me some dealie boppers what are those called? Antenna and she was adorable and everyone said oh you're a robot, I love it second kid, her parents buy a roll of tinfoil set out to make her this costume we're talking about halfway through it and she is eurious, they are terrible costume makers how could they possibly give her this garbage she wants to be a real robot and what she means by that, if any of you live in DC and frequent 16th street, the post-mates delivery robots, have you seen those? so for those who aren't familiar with them they're food delivery robots they look like a cooler on wheels they have a little orange flag that pokes up so you don't bump into them and they just deliver Chinese food and they're an absolute regular feature in my children's lives that's what robots look like that's what she wanted to be so we actually saw the costume, it was fantastic it was this little post-mates robot kid you know, Josie the post-mates robot and this is what being a robot means to god what generation are these humans generation alpha I think we're calling them it's a thing that they just see around the place but it's not a solution to everything it's not a replacement for humans it's just like the thing that brings take out and I think that is the kind of the vision of the way we live which is so often absent from from our attempts to project into the future it's just kind of ordinariness of it the other attribute of this attempt to look into the future is that it is nearly always a centralized vision it's nearly always this idea that someone somewhere is going to figure it out and they're either going to figure out how to enslave us all or they're going to figure out how to create the perfect society in which we all willingly partake and it doesn't really matter which of those visions you buy into they're both totalist visions they're centralized visions socialists specialize in these one of the greatest versions of these visions is from the early 70s in Chile the cyber sign project which I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of this but it's the Star Trek control room but orange if you can sort of envision that and the idea was this is the room in the presidential palace where Ande would control the entire economy of Chile and it had screens it actually looks quite cool until you know that those screens were actually just Kodak slides sort of put up by humans who had made them by hand on like a telex machine so it looks like this vision of the future where there are computers and you can sort of say we need more grain and then you know the grain gets grained but in fact it's A it was a fantasy it was a myth it was not a thing that ever really existed but it could be the very first thing that happened the first thing the junta did when they got inside the presidential palace was destroy this room thus kind of symbolically destroying the decentralizing vision of socialism and also this kind of particular post war vision of cybernetics same very quickly with reproduction we think we had this you know we all have these ideas of this matrix style cavern where do they get those caverns to keep the human you know artificial wombs and it's never clear where they are but you know we have this vision of humans in artificial wombs you know brave new world running down the assembly line and that kind of thing in fact reproduction still looks kind of messy and human and we have you know incredible ability to keep babies that wouldn't have been able to survive alive we have 22 weaker that make it but it's still just kind of in a box doing our best with needles and tubes it's not it's not the matrix vision though we have recently been gestating lambs in giant baggies we can talk more about that so frequently the vision of the future as we actually live it it's that's our reality but we often have a little bit of the totalizing dramatic vision too we do actually have artificial wombs although they're imperfect we do actually have replicators they're 3D printers that exist they kind of suck people mostly use them for novelty but they exist nonetheless what our actual supply chain looks like is just the giant pile of Amazon boxes that I'm always trying to like fold up in my trash compacter our homes are full of tiny robots they're our servants it's fantastic I personally employ Arumba dishwasher or microwave camera to babysit my children when I'm not paying attention to them you know hopefully a driverless car any minute now because dear god I'm a terrible driver I think the person who gets the vision of the future the most right is Ray Bradbury if you've ever read there will come soft rains it's an incredibly accurate and powerful vision of the home of the future in which the robots whisk around doing all the work for those of you who have read it you will remember there is a twist which is that all the humans are dead in the nuclear apocalypse I guess we we gradually have to clap that so now to look forward to how we'd entertain we have an expert of which he speaks Patrick Varone Patrick is a writer and producer Futurama as many of you know and he's a future tense fellow here at New America Patrick so I bring you greetings from Hollywood where the future of entertainment is one in which a day goes by when no one is accused of sexually deviant behavior sadly it is a distant future I am tasked with discussing the history of the future as it pertains to how we entertain or more precisely how we are entertained I'm going last because I believe that entertainment is perceived to be the dessert portion of the history of the future meal I would take exception to that characterization bear in mind I'm also someone who thinks the piece of birthday cake is a suitable meal yes you've all done it I also think how we entertain and how we are entertained is a vital part of our understanding of our understanding of the past history of the future for one thing there is a very long history of entertainment as a means to express futurism going back to Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame his 1705 novel The Consolidator included a device called The Cogitator which allowed the subject to delve visually and emotionally in an internalized world that was wholly a creation of his or her imagination it was an 18th century version of what we now call virtual reality for the next 200 years all the great writers of futurism dabbled in devices designed to amuse and entertain in ways that were well beyond contemporary means Jonathan Swift described the form of television Edward Bellamy foresaw radio simulcasting Jules Verne predicted everything from newscasting to audio books to Tivo and to paraphrase Arthur C. Clark the difficulty with predicting the future is that it has to have some grounding in the present or your audience will laugh you to scorn Clark was Scottish in order to make a lasting impact therefore entertainment futurists have to take baby steps in their predictive descriptions as such they tended to work with a technology of their day but with a single new dimension what I'm going to call tech plus one Verne took the familiar book and gave it the ability to talk Bellamy took a musical concert and gave it the ability to occur at multiple locations throughout the city movies are full of these examples we saw the Elmer Fudd experience of very high tech for 1944 concept of television with one more added dimension to create the futuristic year 2000 version of smellivision added dimension is artistically and literally the form of futuristic enhancement when dealing with the motion picture going from two dimensions three dimensions is the natural progression for the Jaws 19 segment that we saw on back to the future part two 1989 prediction of what the world of 2015 would look like now that we are actually in 2017 and have IMAX 3D the next step is interactive holograms which is in addition to the $22 movie ticket the next step in movie development in Blade Runner 2049 in fact this summer future entertainment was described to 2017 consumers including interactive holograms of casino lounge singers like Elvis Presley Marilyn Monroe Frank Sinatra very interesting that 30 years hence we will be nostalgic for the future past of 60 years ago the advent of television gave the future of entertainment two new directions and dimensions first the personalization of media now with television you can have a live show in your own home in your bedroom in the shower second bigger and bigger screens look there was Walter Cronkite in my house and he's 20 feet tall in reality for the record Walter Cronkite was only 6 feet tall recently digital media followed one of those edicts but reversed the other personalization has become not just the entertainment that you bring into your home or your car you bring it into your hand or as we saw in that Futurama clip your own body someday ideally directly into our own minds meanwhile however the screens themselves instead of getting bigger and bigger are getting smaller and smaller to accommodate the internalization something which should entitled the Tracy's creator Chester Gould with royalty payments for the Apple Watch after he created the two way wrist radio some 80 years ago so aside from the tech plus one of future entertainment there is something else that seems to be consistent throughout it all although the technology is futuristic the content is not it relies on the same basic tenets of storytelling that has existed since cave paintings and the two biggest components of that storytelling violence and sex violence makes sense the essence of drama is conflict future drama becomes dystopic in order to be dramatic and the entertainment therein has to reflect that drama you saw the clip from Running Man which was essentially futuristic gladiators a very cynical form of ratings grabbing rollerball, satirized corporate society that channeled its concealed imperfections and insecurities into a violent sport a clockwork orange made ultra violence a form of entertainment and entertainment a form of ultra violence especially when forced to watch nauseating films with your eyes pride open the sex component of future entertainment is a bit more subtle we saw in Sleeper the orb and the less visual orgasmatron were entertainment devices that reduced sex and pleasure to very impersonal and mechanical means in the interest of comedy in Star Trek the next generation the holodeck was both a means of entertainment and problem solving in the interest of plot development I wanted to show a clip the initial appearance the holodeck used some pretty sexually evocative imagery I believe it would make Judge Roy more blush the simplest explanation for sex and futurism is well it's Hollywood then again the very first appearance of futurism sex is actually in the movie Metropolis where the robot Maria made human is used to seduce a roomful of men with an erotic dance as the metaphor for class oppression it wasn't Hollywood it was Weimar Germany possibly the only society more decadent than Hollywood my final thought is to answer the question of what is the future of the future of entertainment and I would direct your attention to the BBC network Netflix series Black Mirror which is the dystopic future du jour combining relatable tech plus one with ample amounts of violence and sex to explore our innermost hopes and fears about technology and society watching it undoubtedly evokes the 21st century version of Daniel Defoe's cogitator thank you very much thank you so now I'd like to invite all of the presenters to join in a conversation on what our future predictions say about us and this conversation will be moderated by Joey well thank you all so much that was wow okay I'm going to get control of this soon it's always funny at these tech events always some of the technology breaks at least for me 100% of the time alright well thank you all I filled this page with tons of notes which we may not have time to get to but I learned a lot from all those presentations so thank you so much and thank you all for coming today I did teach this class twice and had a lot of fun with it and this is showing that I think the idea has a lot of legs so I would forward to talking more about it I wanted to actually just start with your presentations a little bit if that works because we were each kind of assigned a technological arena to talk about or a sort of arena of human life I wanted to kind of just get everybody to tell us what their favorite vision of the future was whether that's defined as like the one you'd want to live in or like the most creative I was thinking as I was writing this question like well if you're a woman or a person of color like it's not very fun to live in like most visions of the future except for maybe a few here and there that I came up with relatively recently so I want to give you a fork there it's either like where would you want to live or like something that you thought was particularly vivid and creative and that's stuck in your head any order you'd like I would have been fond of the Neil Stephenson visions of the future both for their moderate plausibility but also for their for the fact that they do what I was talking about in my talk which is that they mostly don't go full dystopia in in a kind of unthinking way the Diamond Age is probably the closest vision of a future economy that makes sense to me and that's often a place where science fiction falls down so tragically is the like and I don't know people will buy the things somehow or just have them so I like it when authors try to do a little work on that I think I'm a writer it might not be all that enthusiastic about many of them which is why I create to create other narratives that again look at progress beyond technology as Neil had stated earlier and to really look at just how we create other kinds of societies and what we're valuing so I guess as a creator I would default to the new works to come in preparation for this I revisited the book from a long ago 1970 seems long ago and that was Elvin Toffler's Future Shock which was the best selling book at the time in which he wanted to provide a kind of primer for the accelerated changes in society to prepare us for you know the temporal equivalent of culture shock and what's remarkable when you revisit that book is how dead on it is that book is so contemporary that is a work of science non-fiction it's rather remarkable in point of fact because it doesn't deal overwhelmingly with technology though technology runs through the book but because it deals with the way in which psychologically, emotionally our quotidian daily lives all of these things are going to change in the future our relationships with one another our consciousness it's a rather remarkable book it's not necessarily a vision I want to live in it's a vision I am living in and that's why it's remarkable that 40 years ago his predictive capacity was extraordinary and terrifying and much more terrifying than dystopian views of science that we get you know Catherine addressed the kind of centralized this is decentralized what screwed us over is not some well one might beg to differ with me in America today but is not one single monster but the kind of monster of technology which is changing you know that I have a particular favorite when you look at the future in dramatic presentations what you like about it is the beginning with the story the setup it's inevitably before things go wrong and it's fresh in my mind because on the flight out I watched Planet of the Apes which of course is a really bad vision of the future unless you're an ape then it's pretty good but it actually begins although the astronauts do crash land on a planet it's very idyllic it's the future after the world has been destroyed the nuclear holocaust I'm sorry if I'm giving away the end of Planet of the Apes I'm not going to see that movie now yeah well anyway the point is that until things go wrong the future is great yeah so I have two and one will lead me into my next question so one is it's from the period I was talking about here Charlotte Perkins Gilmans Hurland which if you saw Wonder Woman and you liked the Themyscira parts before all the Chris Pine stuff started happening then you should read Hurland because I think it's a huge it's actually a huge influence for Wonder Woman actually Gilman was connected with the group of people who conceived of Wonder Woman in the first place so it's this really vivid Themyscira utopia from the early 20th century so I wouldn't be able to go categorically but I think it's beautiful and amazing I mean they wouldn't want me there you can crash land there in a plane as we learn and that's actually what Wonder Woman borrows to the kind of contrivance of a plane crashing into the island the other thing I always say when I'm lobbed this question is to do a classic side step and say that it's not so much that I have an emotional connection to Star Trek but that I really love how they emphasize people's leisure habits it's something that you don't see in a whole lot of science fiction actually in the Diamond Age you do see a lot of it so that's an example but I think a lot of science fiction emphasizes technological development in the old Golden Age there were a lot of engineering stories about engineers and so they work a lot but I really like it when you get to see how people spend their leisure time in the future I think Star Trek has always in all its incarnations made sure to give you a little bit of that and that leads me into my next question so thank you what do you all think is what parts of human life or society are often left out of our visions of the future what aspect should we spend more time imagining than we currently do really looking at how you use culture or art to enhance our resilience or our sense of self I don't know that we're always talking about as communities you know how we share and grow and looking at what we want of value and preserve and how to move that forward I'm always keen on the human futures I think it's of course we have a tendency to want to read stories about the future where somebody who even vaguely resembles us is still around and frankly I don't think that's all that likely so I like the kind of E&M banks I like you know Werner Vinge like people who are looking at okay well what happens after we make ourselves unrecognizable to ourselves and it takes a really talented writer to write a novel that's still beautiful about that someone and so it's that's a tough trick of things because I was thinking about this issue as you can I already mentioned social engagement friendship friendship as you all know there have been so many studies on it recently it's a dying it's a dying part of life less and less friendship than ever before community I mean how dramatically social media and I'm not talking in the most obvious way of how one person could deploy social media I'm talking in more subtle ways in which social media has atomized us, centralized each individual at the expense of the community how it's basically disenfranchised truth delegitimized information all of these things are so important and they're all future directed so politics and the way what politics is going to look like in the future it changes very rapidly now art as Natasha said literature I mean how is Twitter affected literature dramatically I think yes that's right we're up to 280 race athletics information how information is changing constantly and above all the word I referenced earlier consciousness how is our consciousness going to be affected by all of these impingements and I think that's the revolution the revolution is a machine the revolution is us we're the revolution history is written by the victors and I think the future is true in terms of we portray the future we tend to want to see and among the things that we don't want to see are a lot of the things Neil described including all the internalized thoughts that we have that we don't want to share or just don't haven't thought out yet and I think it becomes a case where a lot of writers and futurists just don't want to face those things partially because to a certain extent they're boring and so we the the drama is real life with the dull parts cut out so here in the future that's the stuff that we're not being all dull parts in a way of something the British science fiction of fantasy writer China Meeville said that we are living in a utopia it's just not our utopia you know we have to deal with all the messy parts but somebody somebody out there is living in a utopia so Natasha if you don't mind I kind of actually wanted to ask you specifically about Afrofuturism because it was you didn't necessarily address it in your presentation but I think it's an emerging kind of way of thinking about the future and I was hoping you could kind of just talk briefly about it just so folks had that idea that there was a kind of another dissident you know kind of line of thinking about the future sure Afrofuturism is a way of looking at the future or ultimate realities but you're looking at black cultures African diaspora cultures African continental cultures as the lens or the reference point it's a intersection between black culture the imagination liberation technology and mysticism and it is a it differs in some ways from other futurisms and in some cases even science fiction because it does value kind of the divine feminine which kind of gets into this kind of mystical conversation in some respects but it values intuition it values looking at emotions as the basis for knowledge as well and it's a it functions as an artistic aesthetic but it's also a epistemology you know it's a way of kind of looking at the world so in that it's highly intersectional and it it differs also from other futurisms in the sense that it acknowledges it looks at time a little differently where the future the past and the present are really all one and it looks that it acknowledges that race is very much a technology and looking at dismantling that in various ways so I think it's exciting for a lot of people because it helps to re-establish the contributions that people of African descent around the continent have made to future thought but it also projects that image into the future and so our representation you know in science fiction films and literature you know is really important beyond that it's a lot of the ideas that have come out of these cultures that have helped us to really shape humanity and look at resilience a little differently and that's I think one of the reasons it's exciting or interesting to people because it's a way of looking at other perspectives people like to start with one book or piece of media where would they start with that well besides my own ha ha ha definitely Afrofuturism but also I think one that's pretty interesting if you like looking at time is a book called That Quantum Futurism by Rashida Phillips who's with the Afrofuturist affair and it really looks at this idea of time when you're looking at quantum physics and then African traditional approaches to time Thank you, I wanted to make sure that was in there so do we have time for one more question before we go to Andres's before we go to Q&A Tonya, cool Alright so one thing that we didn't indulge in so much here but frequently happens in these conversations about futures is that people just talk about dystopias that's a really common way to go and as Patrick gestured to in his presentation there's a reason that dystopias proliferate so much in our entertainment culture that have to do with the way we metabolize stories and the way they're marketed but these particularly dark dystopias like the Road or Mad Max which we saw in my transportation video are usually not the most realistic in terms of prediction and some people say they're unhelpful they're just paranoid and they give us a defeatist sensibility about our own prospects this is something they'll students have talked a lot about but do you all think dystopias can be constructive and helpful? I mean nobody focused specifically on dystopias in their presentation but do you think a lot of us talked about kind of either things that felt a little more realistic or things that were kind of visionary and hopeful where did dystopias fit into this whole picture of trying to change the way we think about the future? I think we're looking for dystopia in young adult fiction in particular right now I think and sort of maybe the ur text is too fancy pants but The Hunger Games is basically like the kind of modal version of that and I think the mid-century kind of Isaac Asimov Heinlein Lucky Star young adult science fiction that dystopia has in it lucky protagonist who saves the day and reform society through his good intentions and you don't see that a lot now the protagonist is kind of lucky to make it out alive frequently they probably reflects a kind of dark political tone that's hanging around in at least the United States at this moment but I think you know for an awful lot of like if there's anybody who's more dramatic than futurist teenagers and so they they feel that everything is a sort of high stakes battle between good and evil and I think their dystopias are appropriate here's what it looks like when evil wins kids do your best you know I mean it's a little silly but I think it's also I know an awful lot of people who wound up as writers or technologists or futurists of some kind who read Ender's Game I mean you know that version of dystopia where individuals are not irrelevant is ultimately a hopeful one I think dystopias tell us a lot more about the people who promulgate them than just about anything else I mean liberals are afraid of centralization, surveillance and all of those things conservatives are afraid of the future I mean that's why they're conservatives they're holding on to the past I think you know to Catherine's point earlier I think much more interesting than dystopia I don't think that I mean things are not binary and you think of the original Blade Runner for example and there's a film in which on one level everything is technologically you know at the cutting edge we have replicants we have flying cars and yet how do people live I mean they live in slum and that to me is a much more prophetic realistic vision more instructive vision to your point of what's more instructive I mean again you're looking at dystopias you just read back into who promulgates them and you'll wind up at the same place you know with the same biases we spent an enormous amount of time like really scrutinizing the people who created the dystopia or created the visions of the future and in the case of things that aren't fiction or policy reports or government documents like trying to understand who pays for things is really important too right and you know who publishes them like that stuff matters a lot and I think sometimes that falls out we pull these things out of history and say is this a good prediction or not but like not thinking about what powers that Patrick could talk about I don't want to over describe the sort of process of creating dystopic fiction but for the most part as I do alluded to what I said it's done in the interest of drama and dialectic between good and evil and to a certain extent almost all of them have been dramatic and that if there is any kind of resolution it tends to be personal to the to the star of the movie or the protagonist of the of the book of play I spent 12 years working on Chichurama which was suitably a comedy the unstated mantras giving away something here that the tragedy tragedy of life is a comedy because it has a happy ending and the sense with comedy is that you have hope and that you have something optimistic that comes out of that dystopia and that's not typically the case in drama that is in comedy which is why you tend to see a lot of comedy in the future you know what I wonder though I agree with Patrick having dystopia does lend itself to a big heroic arc or not right but I wonder if there's a lot of interest in dystopia because it compels people to contemplate their own agency you know what would they do if they were in a dire circumstance why would they take these actions what actions would they not take and really sort of wrestling with that the hero dynamic one thing that makes heroes interesting in storytelling is that they do things that the average person would not do and so we champion them on they take the risk the average person wouldn't take and so in dystopia sometimes they're looking at people who are making decisions that maybe many people connect with more but wouldn't really want to publicly admit that they would make those choices if they were in these tough scenarios so I think that that's probably more of an internal contemplation okay so we have time for just a few quick questions and then Andres is going to come up and actually do one more yes hello my name is Igor I'm a student in Georgetown University I came from Spain to study English so I have a question to Mr. Vairon I'm a huge fan of Futurama and thank you very much for such a wonderful show I think the police read it for you yep like for the old for all the police so my question is I truly a positive person so will Futurama continue in the future it is a mobile app game right now that you that you can download and play on your phone which the original creators of the show work on regularly but I don't know as David Cohen the creator is fond of saying every time we say no it's not coming back that's when we get invited back so it's definitely not coming back I'm supposed to say my name hi Lucy Ann Walkwich I'm an astronomer at the Library of Congress I wanted to pick up on a thread that both Natasha and Catherine brought up Natasha you brought up Labor and Catherine you made this comment about the chain of production being Amazon boxes when of course the chain of production is what it always has been people who are usually working with very little protection for their rights and I wonder if you can comment on how some of these frameworks of thinking about the future can impact how we deal with human rights which robots or not will continue to still be something that we have to deal with in the future a robot in Saudi Arabia was just awarded citizenship and then the Onion immediately did an article that was like Saudi woman robot has hands cut off is stoned to death by Saudi authorities and I think I'm an optimistic person my inclination is to say that the actual trajectory is a sort of expanding circle of humanity that we are in fits and starts admittedly and perfectly getting better at seeing more people as people and maybe not whales unionizing quite yet but and that our science fiction reflects that I think part of the reason that we're always trying to mechanize our visions of the future is because the labor problem because the humans in the humans who do work in the world is a difficult problem that writers want to wave away they want to make it not be a problem in their future society because maybe kind of like transportation it's like the most important thing and also just like a sticky wicket that can be boring in the wrong hands so I think I think the actual trajectory is pretty good the trajectory in fiction is maybe less good and I think it's something that's I would like to see more visions of because I think it's a thing that we still need to be better at thinking about yeah I think that we're more connected than ever before and that surely you know people are in many respects growing by weeks and bounds and so I really do credit people who have went above and beyond kind of throughout history to value humanity and I think we're at a space very much where there are moments and there are things that can be discouraging but generally speaking people are really kind of communicating and sharing in ways that they weren't before I was sort of fascinated by certain films there's a film called Born in Flames that Lizzie Borden put together or directed rather and it talks about a kind of peaceful revolution of sorts but in the aftermath there is still a contention amongst women who feel like they don't have equal rights and then there is sort of a woman's army and attempts to really sort of deal with a lot of women's issues and the film came out in 1983 it was very much an independent film but what it made me think about and what the film questioned were a lot of these frameworks that we look at if we put this framework in place then it will address all of these problems in social and whether you're looking at democracy capitalism or socialism any of these frameworks all of which have been applied in a lot of different societies you still have some of these core issues around the core isms that have not been eradicated and so I think that one of the opportunities we have been looking at talking about things like afro-futurism or looking at other futurism is to really focus on what are some of these societal patterns or habits or ways of engagement that can really fundamentally change and enhance human life and experience and connectivity I don't want to be pessimistic but I will be because we've heard how we're more engaged and more connected I don't know how many of you read the article in the Atlantic cover story about the eye generation all of these kids who just communicate on their phones all the time theoretically they're more connected than any generation has ever been the study demonstrates that they are the happiest people in the history of surveyed America we're talking about this generation completely disconnected from one another so I'm extremely pessimistic about the directions that we're going into in terms of social engagement and just in terms of work anyone who lives in America knows that automation has wiped out whole segments of America and so much of the discontent in this country right now is due to what one might call technology so I don't want to be dystopian about it but I want to be realistic about it the iPhone doesn't bring us together necessarily social media does not bring us together and certainly automation hasn't done us any favors if you're one of those people who's been displaced and will never find a job again we have time for one more question before we go to Andres and we'll do it really quick hopefully my name is MJ I teach at American University thank you first of all you've been talking a lot about kind of continuity so ways in which narratives of the future have sort of been prescient but in the studies that you've looked at so in the different representations that you've been thinking about are there any ruptures so things that people were really preoccupied with in the past that sort of fell out that's hard you don't have the individual the inventor in the future who I believe is going to get the most credit is the one who developed levitation that doesn't go like this levitation that's just gyroscopically said I really look forward to that I think the biggest perception is faith all of mid-century science fiction is desperately preoccupied with moving the surface of the planet and you can tell a bunch of different stories about why that didn't happen but the fact is that many of our current billionaires are billionaires because they were very very angry when they discovered that they were pretty rich and still couldn't get a ticket to space and so then they got way richer and started building rockets and that is the real story of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and a few other guys and so I guess I think rocketry and space colonization is probably one of the biggest answers there and those are seeming harder and harder even though we have more technological sophistication we see more reasons that it's going to be difficult and so else totally poisonous like you couldn't even touch it without it and we're like always 18 months out from being able to hop a ride on the virgin galactic I've been covering this issue for 10 years and we're always 18 months out the two I'll quickly add I think there was an enormous paranoia about a population bomb I mean there's that air lick I think the guy's name is Buck and there's certainly mouth is but we know now more about birth rate tracks to basically women's rights and education but that understanding wasn't there at the time and so there was a sense that overpopulation is going to be the biggest problem on earth and that we were literally not going to have enough space and that actually powers some of this need for an intergalactic civilization the other thing is one world government like a one world government almost all of these like especially in the early 19th century they felt like something like a strong lead of nations would be at a minimum something or perhaps we have an integrated world democracy or republic of some sort and that's not in I think we have a stronger sense of the power of fragmentation now and so you do see in the last 20, 30 years you're not seeing a lot of that outside of like really overfeated dystopias and there is an impact product called Soylent and as far as I know it's not people as far as you know there was a lot of predictions about the eradication of disease and you know that's something that we're still kind of wrestling with yeah and that one persists in Elysium you know there's those pods you can pop into and they'll heal all your ills that turns out to be much harder than it seems we did a totally garbage job of predicting the internet except my boy Neil Jefferson and nobody saw global warming it's very true it's not it's not here yet all right so unfortunately sadly I have to cut this off so thank you so much for your questions and thank you so much to our panelists for being game and for your amazing presentations what this all means for Washington so hopefully it won't be too jarring or too depressing having visited these very creative spaces where we've envisioned the future and by these spaces I mean industry and culture and society I now want to take a moment to ponder the future of the future in our politics and in Washington and to start off and in the similar vein to the previous conversations I'd like to start talking about the history of the future and the political context and I'd like to start by citing a presidential speech from the past and ask if any one of you can guess the president who said this and this is the segment from the speech to all the peoples of the world I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration we pray that peoples of all faiths all races all nations may have their great human needs satisfied and that in the goodness of time all peoples will come to live together in peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual love and respect any guesses as to who that was the president the president FDR no Wilson no no I'm sorry no so that was actually Dwight Eisenhower it was part of his farewell address the same speech that made the warning of the military industrial complex famous I was struck by this because when we think of presidents renowned for their soaring idealistic rhetoric Eisenhower the plane spoke in Midwestern general is not necessarily the top of the list but the speech and that passage is very much part of a common thread that I was reading throughout basically all inaugural addresses of the post war period the sense that in this theme that having built a shining city on the hill and having accomplished its manifest destiny the United States is still in this process of expanding its so called empire of liberty and freedom and helping to spread its bounty and freedom overseas and whether such rhetoric is inspiring to you or makes you sort of cringe the point I'd like to make is that the United States has historically been a nation more consumed by its future than its past has been rather self-consciously a work in progress and I think that's one of the things that really has differentiated the U.S. and its political story from that of some other countries this realization that the United States was a living growing organism and not a finished product is one of our defining quirks as a historian Joseph Ellis Ellis argues in the quartet the book that takes a look at the period of time between independence and the writing of the Constitution he argues that even outright nationalists like Madison Washington and Hamilton recognize that they were arguing for a political framework that would consolidate the states into a union in which a truly national sense of allegiance would develop gradually over time the sense that we were creating something that wasn't quite done yet and slavery of course as the country's original sin was a cancer on the body politic from that very beginning something that always stood in the way of the American project rendering our initial aspirations hollow and hypocritical at least for that moment as Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently put it in his I Have a Dream speech when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence they were signing a promissory note to which all of us are its heirs again this notion of there's a promise to the future of work in progress and it's very telling that even that Constitution was amended at the very outset by the Bill of Rights not many countries are born amending themselves if we wanted to analogize to the tech space it's almost like there was an operating system that we knew was going to have to be constantly updated that we were setting up a work in project process something to be tinkered with forever more the idea of manifest destiny also somewhat arrogant carries within it this acknowledgement throughout the 19th century of this country that was marching towards its destiny again a work in progress and then there's that perfect Abraham Lincoln quote one that sums up Americanism in a pithy phrase and also wearing his futurist hat Abe Lincoln said the best way to predict the future is to create it there's some debate as to whether this was actually something that Lincoln said and I think there's also a variant of this quote that is attributed to Benjamin Franklin but I find that sometimes those contest it if he didn't say it he might as well have or he should have said it are sometimes the most revealing of those that go back to Churchill but I think that that quote of Abraham Lincoln that the best way to predict the future is to create it kind of encapsulates the essence of America and our relationship to the future I find that one of the things that is in very short supply in the U.S. compared to some other countries and I grew up in another country and when I moved here I was sort of struck by this the fact that there is there's a short supply of fatalism America is a country for better or for worse those people feel that they do have a destiny that they can define and that they can make it happen there's no stopping us the Cold War is an interesting period in our recent history because our very brand of being the nation of the future was challenged by the Soviets their country too was seen not just by themselves but by plenty of outsiders as a work in progress a country evolving from socialism into full-fledged communism its own shining city on the hill a competing one if you will a country with its own manifest destiny whereas I feel like most of the time our power is in competition and in friction with countries that are clinging to a past I think this was one of the things that was so evocative about the Cold War and in that same period after World War II as the U.S. entered the atomic age and the space age there was a sense of wonder that was alluded to in different contexts earlier in the conversation about the promise of science and technology and its potential to help us transcend even partisan divides which was something we revisited however briefly in the early days of the dot-com period and the zuberance around the internet as John Kennedy said in his inaugural address let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors together let us explore the stars conquer the deserts he threw that in because of Arizona State University Italian history eradicate disease tap the ocean depths and again soaring futures in the American context have not always been talk about science and technology again a theme that was alluded to earlier were kind of interested in the humanistic aspect too so if you consider how Lyndon Johnson sketched his vision for the so-called great society it was also a form of foreshadowing of futurism, of looking ahead he said but most of all the great society is not a safe harbor a resting place, a final objective a finished work it is a challenge constantly renewed beckoning us towards a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor I read an awful lot of speeches as you can tell in thinking about today's event and so I also went back and read President Trump's inaugural I know I felt too soon but I did it struck as you recall a very different tone and message from the conventional inaugural addresses that I've referenced from the late 20th century if the trend has been in the last few decades to rhetorically commit to extending American values and bounty to all peoples of the world Trump famously stepped back from such a vision essentially saying that had been a fool's errand which was hurting our nation and to be fair that message of his resonated with millions of Americans who in various ways have felt left behind henceforth the Trump vision posited a world that was America first it was equally striking however that dropped into this otherwise stark and realistic hard-headed speech Trump did allow himself this one flourish we stand at the birth of a new millennium he said ready to unlock the mysteries of space to free the earth from the miseries of disease and to harness the energies industries and technologies of tomorrow and it's interesting how that language echoes the passage from the Kennedy inaugural I read earlier it seems to be a rare nod by him and perhaps a speechwriter to the convention of the genre and of that moment what the inaugural called for but mostly of course his was a wake up call to make America great again now this notion of making America great again is less an exercise the way it's talked about in today's Washington of building a shining city on the hill and more an attempt to retrench into some imperfect but comfortable past and I think that is what's relevant about it to today's conversation is this idea of are we becoming less forward looking as a society and that is an impulse that is very common in plenty of other nations politics nations that are consumed less by the future and more by the past past grievances, past privileges past slights and I don't want to make this a one-sided political observation by the way the left in this country is also guilty at times of indulging in nostalgic politics much of the energy and rhetoric emanating from the labor movement for instance also can sound a lot about retrenchment about attempting to go back to some romanticized good old days and perhaps that's understandable given all of our uncertainties about the future but I think if one thing we should consider is if we are going to truly make America great again we need to make America excited about the future again if we must look to our past for inspiration it shouldn't be to recreate any one past moment any time but rather I would argue our past in patience and restlessness with the imperfections of each one of those moments to resist the temptation to become helplessly fatalistic about what the future holds and for all of us to sort of find a way to take ownership of it and that's one of the things that animates what we're trying to do a future tense and all of which is I realize easier said than done particularly at a time when it's so hard for us to find shared narratives about where we've been let alone where we're headed so as we leave here we should all be thinking about whether the future has a constituency in this town something I've been thinking a lot about and how we can nourish it how we can perhaps flourish so that we can all play a role in the writing of the history of the future thank you very much and thanks for coming today, thanks all the wonderful speakers we had and Joey for having the idea for this event it was really really great so thank you and hope to see you at the next future tense