I have two reasons why I believe the idea of “the future”
ended in 2003.
Firstly, Concorde was withdrawn from operation by British
Airways and Air France. Supersonic passenger air travel has been a thing of the
past for almost twenty years.
Secondly, the BBC cancelled “Tomorrow’s World,” a science
and technology series that went out in prime-time, for a mass audience, demonstrating
innovations from computers and the CD player, to the breathalyser and
bulletproof vests.
You may argue that neither of these stayed viable – a
downturn in air traffic following the 2001 terrorist attack on New York, and a
change in demands of “luxury” air travel the Concorde could not be modified to
meet; or a downturn in the ratings of “Tomorrow’s World,” along with new
technology being incorporated into the BBC News show “Click,” formerly named
“Click Online”.
Both have joined the museum of what was considered “the
future” – an example of Concorde can be found at the Intrepid Sea, Air &
Space Museum, alongside the Space Shuttle Enterprise; and “Tomorrow’s World”
lives on as an archive used to mark where progress has previously been made.
Postmodernism does not aspire to the same earnest drive for
progress that characterises modernism. Postmodernism is more concerned with how
we see the world, and while its characteristics of fragmentation, collage and
nostalgia do not require new material, anything that does come along will
simply be added into the mix. Innovations may come, or refinements can be made,
but there is nothing to suggest that the world of 2050 will be as radically
different to that of 2021. “The Jetsons” was set a hundred years from when it
was made, but as I sit in 2021, I don’t see flying cars and cities in the sky
becoming commonplace in the remaining forty-one years left, although the robot
maid could be a close-run thing.
However, I do not believe the de-emphasis of progress can be
blamed on postmodernism. A kind of contentedness arrived in the Western world
after postmodernism became part of the cultural background. Francis Fukuyama’s
1992 book “The End of History and the Last Man” hypothesised that the end of
the Cold War in the previous year meant that liberal democracy had effectively
won, and while events still occur, the progressive procession of “history” has
ended. Meanwhile, “capitalist realism,” as popularised by Mark Fisher in his
2009 book of that name, takes a German term originally describing
commodity-based art, redefining it as the notion that corporate capitalism and
neoliberalism are now so dominant, there is no visible alternative to them.
While it might not have been the kind of future we envisaged, it may well be
the one we were destined to have.
This tends to be characterised by overt recycling in popular
culture. For example, the music instrument manufacturer Roland sells a drum
machine, the TR-8S, that for all the advanced programming and sampling features
included, exists mainly as a new version of their original 1980s drum machines
like the TR-808 and TR-909, working in similar ways to achieve the same effect,
because music from the 1980s and 90s remain popular. I cannot honestly say what
popular music will sound like ten years from now, because it endlessly refers
to itself, perhaps from the moment Jackie Wilson’s “Reet Petite” became the UK
Christmas number 1 single in 1986.
This may be the sort of conclusion that would still be made before
the year 2020 began, as the emergency caused by Covid-19 accelerated the advent
of human behaviour we still thought would be more commonplace in the future:
working from home, communicating by video calls, the hastened end of
brick-and-mortar retail. New medical innovations in vaccinations and personal
protective equipment may be one thing, but these are innovations we needed and
expected to occur. Envisaging a future of flying cars and unlimited leisure
involves an element of force to enact the change, closing the gap between
reality and the imagination.
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