 Thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it. As she mentioned, I write for a website called Gizmodo. And specifically, I write a blog called Paleo Future, which looks at past visions of the future, how we imagined the future would turn out now, whether that's flying cars, jet packs, meal pills, utopias, dystopias, and not even just technological social futures, political futures. This sort of history of tomorrow can tell us a lot about any given generation's greatest hopes and darkest fears. I think that it's often when we think about history, we're thinking about our elementary school days of memorizing facts, or memorizing people, or memorizing dates. But I think that this sort of prism gives us a look at how people actually felt at a given time. It's almost an honest barometer through which we can try and understand how people were thinking. And in turn, hopefully understand a little bit better our own time, which I think is the ultimate goal. Why does this matter? Well, when we tend to look at the past visions of the future, whether that's the 1950s, the 1920s, whatever era you want to look at, and whatever people you want to look at, a lot of it is born of optimism. There is this sense that the future will be better than the past. But today, there's also this sense that the future used to be better. You've probably seen this in the culture lately that people think the future was a much more optimistic time to be alive in the 1950s, say. And I think I used to share this feeling. When I first started the Paleo Future blog in 2007, it's had a couple of homes since then. I was most recently a Smithsonian magazine, and this past May moved over to Gizmodo. Back in 2007, I had a lot of misconceptions about what the future was and what history was, and how people interpret those sorts of exchanges throughout history. I'd like to start with one modern-day example of the future. How many of you saw Elon Musk last week make an announcement about the Hyperloop? A fair number of you? So Elon Musk, for those of you who don't know, was an entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal. He currently runs SpaceX as well as Tesla, the electric car company. Musk teased this idea for over a month. He did a number of interviews where he talked about this thing called the Hyperloop. And he explained it as a revolutionary new form of technology. A revolutionary way to get from place to place, so revolutionary that it would get you from Los Angeles, where I currently live, to San Francisco in just 30 minutes. This sort of technology was going to change the world, he said. And as a heavy user of Twitter, I started to see certain camps emerge talking about this in the lead-up, even before he really laid out the plans. This is 67-page plans that was released on Monday. These camps were the hyper-optimistic people who believed that the Hyperloop was indeed going to revolutionize society. There were the hyper-sceptical people who believed that this was never going to happen. Without even hearing what it was, people thought this was never going to happen. And then there was this sort of mix in between that I found most interesting. Here's a tweet from a man named David Roberts. America used to build big, futuristic things. Now we snark at them on Twitter. And this was a reaction that he had to the snark, which I'm sure if you've ever used Twitter is sort of a native tongue in Twitter, that there's a lot of snark, there's a lot of people that are making fun of things. And I used to share this sentiment. I used to have this romanticized notion of the past, this romanticized notion of the past of the future, if you will, that we used to decide we were going to do big things. Everyone rallied behind it, and we got things done. That was the idea. That's still the idea. And I hope to show you today a little bit behind the curtain and show that this is a romantic notion that isn't necessarily true, that every future, every bold vision takes a tremendous amount of effort, and there are always stumbling blocks, and there are always people who are going to snark, and there are always people that will, rightly or wrongly, not believe in your vision. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, this is how I have become such a reluctant optimist. I am the furthest thing from an optimist in most ways, but somewhat perversely have become an optimist in studying past visions of the future. The future was built on snark. How many of you have seen the Jetsons? You familiar with the Jetsons? In the United States, the Jetsons premiered in 1962 and only lasted one season. It was 24 episodes, and I actually spent about half a year recently looking at every single episode and analyzing it because it is such a cultural touchstone, because even when the hyperloop was announced, people called it Jetsonian. People said that this was a Jetsons vision of the future. This is a 50-year-old show. How can we still be talking about the Jetsons' future? Well, the Jetsons emerged at a time when my parents' generation, the baby boomers, were exposed to this vision of the future. One thing the baby boomers forget is often that this is a snarky vision of the future. Nothing about the Jetsons was invented in old cloth. There was nothing about the Jetsons that they spearheaded, flying cars, jetpacks, computers, meal pills, some weird 3D printer food, microwave thing. These were all things that were already out there in the culture, and they were parodying this. This was not an earnest vision of the future, but when you're a kid, say you're five years old in 1962, this is the future. This is the optimistic vision of the future that everyone's trying to see. I'm gonna go through a couple different examples to hopefully sort of bust a few myths. And one is this space-themed lunchbox, it's a great little artifact. I actually have this lunchbox. This isn't mine, this is the one that's in the Smithsonian. I don't have the thermos, which is pretty cute. But yeah, I've been a collector since I started the blog, and I have hundreds of magazines and books and weird little artifacts like this. And I think this is an important little artifact because it comes from what we call the Space Age. The Space Age started in 1957 after the launch of Sputnik. The Soviets put up the first artificial satellite into orbit, and this kicked off, for better and for worse, what we now call the Space Age. What characterizes the Space Age is this techno-utopian idea that technology would push humanity forward. You saw this morning at the keynote, certain people that advocated this idea, Eric Schmidt being one of them. It's a very techno-utopian idea that if you simply give people technology, that this will affect culture in a very positive way, and not only push us to the moon, but push us beyond. And the Space Age was supposed to touch every aspect of culture. In 1958, there were two Sunday comic strips that were started, and I think these are important artifacts as well. They were explicitly started to rally youth to become advocates of technology. One was Our New Age by Atholson Spillhouse. He was an inventor originally from South Africa who went on to be a dean at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology. The other is Arthur Radbas, closer than we think, which ran from 1958 until 1963. And I think these two artifacts are important in understanding that this was a concerted effort to get what we could out of the Space Age, if you will, that there was optimism to be had. And the Space Age was so much larger than space itself, as I said, space age markets for consumer goods. Here we have an example from Radbas, closer than we think, where we have a bubble top house. Why not have summer all year long? Put a bubble over your house. You see a rather futuristic looking car in the driveway, a futuristic lawn mower. These ideas, again, were to tell kids that this was your future. If you would only work towards it. Atholson Spillhouse, this one is from Our New Age, and which was done by Spillhouse, who again believed that he wanted to, as he put it, inject a little subliminal education into the Sunday funnies, much like the Jetsons, much like other pieces of technology, and much like a sort of propaganda campaign, if you will, to get kids interested in science and technology and therefore futurism. You have here just a small snippet of the comic strip researchers thousands of miles away make insult books in the Library of Congress or the British Museum. Now this is from the 1960s. The ARPANET hadn't even made its first connection yet in 1969, and this was rather prescient, obviously, and again, a very techno utopian idea for what the future was going to hold. The space age thinking was going to build a leisure society. I'm sure you're all familiar with a lot of these promises that we would be pushing a button to make everything happen. But getting to sort of the myths, the romanticized notions of what we think. If you had to say what percentage of Americans supported the Apollo space program, the program that got a man on the moon. If you had to guess, what percentage of Americans supported this program, thought it was worth the money? What would you say? 90%, 80%? It fluctuated between 35 and 45% support throughout the 1960s. Now, if you had asked me this question, back in 2007, I would have said 90%. I would have said, of course. We decided we were gonna go to the moon, we went to the moon. That's how these things work. That's the only way these things work. But the tricky part is that when you're a child, when you're five years old, you're reading these comic strips and you're toting your space age lunchbox to school, you have a very different perception of the world. You may not, as a five year old, be perfectly cognizant of something like the civil rights movement that was also happening at the time. You simply saw the monorails or the space program. But whatever you may think of the Cold War space race, it happened. We were thrust onto the moon and it still boggles my mind. Whatever it took to get there, I was not alive to see it, but I can't fathom what it would be like to live during that age. And I think that is part of why we romanticize this era because, A, the people in charge today were around to see it, but they were five at the time. And the people who weren't around to see it, like me, my generation, get a rather romantic notion about what it meant. This is from the 1964 World's Fair. We were still five years out from being on the moon, but another example of sort of a promise that was implicit in World's Fair techno-utopian thinking. My next example that I wanted to go through quickly is another time when we would take for granted that progress was something that everyone could agree upon. In the 1930s, there was a big campaign to fight against what was called robot music. In 1927, the first feature length synchronized sound, talky, if you will, movie came out. And a lot of people were naturally skeptical of this. One of the reasons was entrenched interests for musicians who played in theaters. Now I'm sure you're all familiar with this sort of popular notion of the silent movie era where you have an organist or a pianist. But some of the grander movie palaces of the 1920s actually would employ a hundred musicians to play along with given movies. So this had to be fought against by the American Federation of Musicians who spent, they formed what was called the Music Defense League and spent $500,000. I forget what it is adjusted for inflation, but it's a lot of money to fight against what they called robot music. These ads, they ran all over the United States and Canada and they were banking on this sort of nostalgia. How can something like a robot, how can robot music ever replace the soul needed for creating music? In 1927, only 157 American movie theaters were equipped for sound. And by 1931, there were over 13,000 theaters, two thirds of all American theaters that had sound. Again, this is another example of one of the ads they ran. The robot here represents something that is cold, mechanical, soulless, awful, terrible. But today, can we imagine what it would be like without sound movies? They didn't pursue the legal route. They were trying to appeal to the broader audience. And who knows, what if they had won? I think this is one of the things that's interesting to me most, is that we take for granted that those things that have come before us didn't require work. There were no battles. It was just the evolutionary step of society that we went from silent films to sound films to color films to 3D films. This is just the natural progression. This is how things are, which is not the case. The president of the American Federation of Musicians warned that the time is coming when the only thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical, can drama, can music, can vaudeville. Now you may agree with this. I think that I do in some respects, but at the same time, this is the kind of conflict that gets written out of history. I think that we take it so for granted that this is the way things are, this is the way things were meant to be in so many words. Here we have another one, making musical mince meat. Here we're grinding up some instruments. The robot is, again, a butcher. He was someone who was to be disdained. Another ad said 300 musicians in Hollywood supply all the music, and there were scare quotes around music offered in thousands of theaters, can such a tiny reservoir of talent nurture artistic progress. Again, a perfectly valid point in so many ways. But this is what gets often written out of history, this struggle, this time in which people actually had to fight over the future. Again, the robot is conspiracy, the only reason you would want any technological progress, if we can call it that, would be for more money. But I'd like to leave you with this strange sense of optimism. I think this is truly what, and maybe I'm totally out of left field and maybe I'm a complete weirdo for thinking this, but the more I learn, the more myths I'm able to destroy about how the future is actually manufactured, I get so optimistic. Because I truly believe that if we think our best days are behind us, it breeds a sense of utility. Why fight for anything? But if we understand that everything is a fight, and I have no problems for a fight, we can understand that we can move forward. There is this optimistic vein in society that will allow us to move into the future and make whatever world we wanna see, whether that is a world with or without talking pictures, world with or without people on the moon. I think that in the struggles of the past, we truly do find a better tomorrow. You can be inspired by this image, an image that, coming from 1959, says nothing about social change, says nothing about political change, it's just a postal worker in a jet pack. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being inspired by that. But the more we can bust and sort of contextualize all of these different images, I think we can truly move forward. Thank you for your time. Thank you.