Remembering the 1950-60’s USA ‘Futurists’ - What Went Wrong?

Futurism in the United States properly began during the late ‘50s, and took off—as one might guess —in the ‘60s with the Gemini space program and its ten manned flights.

Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, along with their friend FM-2030, all predicted back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that we would have become “immortal” by now. How has that “immortality” worked out for these guys lately? At least FM went into cryo, something he long advocated, but not under the best conditions. (He went into cardiac arrest on the East Coast and his brain experienced hours of warm ischemia before getting to Alcor in Scottsdale, AZ.)

I keep having the odd experience that we live in “the future” that we can remember thinking about 30-40 years ago, only it doesn’t much resemble our visions of it. What did we used to call stories set in years like 2012? We called them “science fiction.” Yet in many ways we don’t live in particularly science-fictional times, at least compared with people’s expectations about the early 21st Century just a few decades back. Instead of seeing “accelerating progress” or whatever, the stagnationist thesis promoted by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel, Neal Stephenson and others seems to describe our current situation better.

The underlying stagnation also explains why transhumanism has nowhere to go, even if some aging transhumanists haven’t figured that out yet. In the absence of real progress, transhumanists can play their games and hold their versions of Halloween like “singularity summits,” “bil conferences” and “extreme futurist festivals” all they want, but they still age, they still have to worry about making a living in our deteriorated economy, and they can still die suddenly at relatively young ages like, for example, the extropian Robert Bradbury. Mainstream people can see the disconnection between the make-believe versus the reality, and they justifiably write off transhumanists as unserious bohemians going through something like a teenager’s goth phase.

When I saw ‘Clockwork Orange’ at the time it was released, it did seem to be a more valid scenario than the optimistic scenarios put forth then.
But though it does look bad now, for instance talk of falling off a fiscal cliff might be a scare tactic. We are in debt for an indeterminate number of trillions of dollars: some say up to 130 trillion aggregate, but it appears likely Asians, Russians, Germans, etc., will buy us out; will buy everything that is for sale in America and we lose our sovereignty. Yet losing our sovereignty is a trend, right? A ‘futurist’ might say so, at any rate. You pay a pessimist a million dollars to write a book titled “The Coming Destruction Of American Sovereignty”, and he’ll do it. Pay an optimist, a futurist, a million to write, “The Coming Golden Age Of Borderlessness”, and he’ll start pecking at his keyboard.

I’ve started to read about Modern Monetary Theory, and you can find some basic information here:

http://moslereconomics.com/mandatory-readings/

Modern Monetary Theorists counter the debt doomsday propaganda by pointing out that Americans live in a closed financial system where public debts = private assets right down to the penny, because the money can literally come from nowhere else. The equation comes from the boring facts of national accounting, not from theory or philosophy. The “balanced budgets” favored by conservatives tend to harm the economy because taxes and spending cuts deplete private assets, again according to the closed nature of the U.S. financial system. The U.S. issues its own fiat currency, and it can no more “run out of money” than a bowling alley can run out of points. The government faces inflation as a practical constraint, but given all the underused resources in the American economy, hyperinflation doesn’t seem like a realistic threat.

In that case there is cause for optimism;
and the situation in the Mideast isn’t as bad as it appears. Last night watched Sean Hannity complain about flag desecration in the region.. if anyone would waste time concerning flag desecration then Mideast threats at this time are probably blown out of proportion.

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