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T A B L E _ T A L K Will portals be going the way of "Push" or is this current fad destined to become a permanent fixture? Discuss portal mania in Table Talk's Digital Culture area R E C E N T L Y Let's Get This Straight The paperless book Do loose lips sink chips? Paul is live World war 3.0 - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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the F U T U R E is now - - and then - - - > Professional "futurists" see a golden tomorrow -- but they don't love computers. BY ETELKA LEHOCZKY | In the future, there will be cars that drive themselves and "mag-lev" trains connecting major U.S. cities. There will also be video phones that connect over the Internet, and even "digital assistants" that store all sorts of handy information in a box the size of your hand. I came upon this crazy quilt of prophecies -- some pie-in-the-sky and some already outdated -- at "FutureQuest: Strategies for the New Millennium," this year's gathering of the World Future Society. Hanging out with the WFS at Chicago's Hilton and Towers a couple of weeks ago, I felt like I was inhabiting William Gibson's old story "The Gernsback Continuum." There may not have been streamlined cities popping up in the corner of my eye or flying wings gliding overhead, but I was surrounded by the conceptual detritus of an equally grandiose, though somewhat more recent, vision of society's destiny. Founded during the mid-'60s wave of technological idolatry that spun off from the space race, the WFS preserves the high-efficiency, clean-and-green spirit of that era with a hermetic disregard for the all-too-messy march of time. The June-July 1998 issue of the WFS publication the Futurist, whose inside front cover depicts a chrome-and-glass domain straight out of "Logan's Run," spotlights such notions as the use of moss to clean indoor air, a movement to grant nationhood to whales and the poolside Solar Shower. Its list of "65 Forecasts About Your Future Life" includes "intelligent refrigerators" that tell you when you're running out of orange juice and "fully automated bedrooms ... allowing us to control lights, phones, drapes ... with the touch of a button." Of course, the smart refrigerator is dubious at best, and we already have a device similar to the last one -- it's called the Clapper. But no matter. As was all too apparent at the convention, this mix of predictions -- some unlikely ever to happen, others that have arrived without exactly transforming society -- is perfectly in keeping with the futurist ethos. Throughout the weekend, the atmosphere in the Hilton and Towers' shabby-luxe ballrooms faded from grandiose dreaming to barely concealed anxiety and back again. With a median age of around 50 and a median income that couldn't be much higher than $50,000, the futurist movement is a middle-aged, middle-class phenomenon, with all of that demographic's wishes and worries. The plenary session could have been a convention of Midwestern middle managers, with perhaps a few systems analysts thrown in. Men wore navy blazers, tan pants and inexpensive ties; women tended toward wrinkled linen jackets, floral skirts and little white flats. Panelists and audience members alike scribbled notes on hotel stationery and carried their convention packets in thin, well-worn leather satchels. No cell phones or pagers were in evidence, and only one or two laptops. The reasons for this dearth of real, live high-tech gadgetry soon became clear. "No other society on this planet is so besotted with computers," warned Buffalo, N.Y., futurist Deborah C. Sawyer in the workshop "The Information Age and its Repercussions." The author of "Sawyer's Survival Guide for Information Brokers" and the forthcoming "Getting It Right: Decision-Making in the 21st Century," she explained that even though she'd worked with computerized databases since the age of punch cards, she nonetheless regarded the computer revolution as (to quote her presentation's title) "The Second Coming of the Pied Piper." And the whole world is in danger of being seduced. N E X T _ P A G E .|. Why computers are "catalysts of chaos" |
