One afternoon you’re in the Cooper-Hewitt museum in New York. You’re browsing through an exhibit of work by a long-dead designer, and suddenly you see . . . your phone. It’s the Trimline touch-tone, with the buttons in the handset, designed by Henry Dreyfuss in 1965.
On a nearby wall, you notice another familiar item: a round Honeywell thermostat, just like the one at home. It’s a 1953 design.
Then you look down at the watch on your wrist. It has a big hand and a little hand, or perhaps a late-’70sstyle LCD display with a blinking colon. You pull out your wallet and finger the worn paper money inside.
Wait a minute. It’s almost the year 2000. What happened to the levitating cars, the two-way wrist TVs, the robots, the three-hour supersonic flights from New York to L.A., the Pan Am shuttles into space? What happened to the future we were promised in the not-so-distant past?
Yesterday’s visionaries offered us a good-news, bad-news picture of the future — that is, today. The bad news was that we would probably be wiped out by thermonuclear war, overpopulation, environmental catastrophe, or alien invaders. The good news was that if we somehow managed to avoid that fate, we would be rewarded with astonishing gadgetry, extraterrestrial travel destinations, and a host of other wonders.
Our Millennial Dividend seems to have been lost in the mail. Although our social world would have been hard to imagine a few decades ago, our material world has scarcely budged. It certainly isn’t anywhere near as far along as one would have expected back then. As things have turned out, “retro” isn’t just an ironic pose — it’s reality.
True, we denizens of the late 1990s love to talk about how technology is moving forward at warp speed. But next to the recent ages that saw the spread of electric lighting, telephones, cars, television, and suburbia, our own warp factor pales in comparison. We see the equivalent of model-year changes in car chassis and pronounce them quantum advances. Our embrace of the hype is understandable; we’re just trying to console ourselves over what we’ve been denied.
Consider this: The one car that really looks and moves the way a car should these days, the Lamborghini Countach, first rolled out of the factory back in 1974. Now they aren’t even made anymore.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the 1960s, Detroit tantalized the public with a stream of mock-ups of audacious “cars of tomorrow.” They’d be gas-turbine powered, perhaps, with see-through domes instead of roofs, and they’d drive themselves on automated highways. That was the promise.
But as it happened, the actual “cars of tomorrow” are hardly any different from the ones on the street back then. There have been incremental improvements, like airbags that hit kids in the head harder than Steven Seagal. But basically, cars have stayed the same: steering wheel, rubber tires, internal combustion engine under the hood. (The innovation behind Chrysler’s hottest car, the Prowler, is that it looks like a 1950s hot rod. The subtly stated selling point for Jaguars these days is that they look the way Jaguars used to look before someone in the British government messed them up.)
It’s the same almost everywhere. The latest advance in human living quarters is “neo-traditional” neighborhoods, with houses built close together on small lots — mimicking neighborhoods of the 1940s. The casual uniform of the modern American male is that avant-garde combination, khaki trousers and a buttondown shirt. And the next wonder drug, it’s said, is going to be . . . thalidomide.
Welcome to Tomorrowland.
You cast a proud eye on your desktop PC with its Pentium II inside. But that spreadsheet you’re running has more in common with VisiCalc (1979) than with HAL 9000. And it’s sitting on top of an operating system that looks and works a lot like the Xerox Star (1981) and the Apple Lisa (1983).
A chess-playing computer beat a world chess champion in 1997. So? That was supposed to happen by 1967 — according to artificial intelligence researchers Herbert Simon and Allen Newell writing in 1957. And notice that Deep Blue doesn’t even have a bionic arm for moving the pieces.
The movies? There, too, you’ll find changes on the surface; T. Rexes in computers now follow where a stop-motion King Kong used to tread. But we’re still watching basically the same medium we did three decades ago — only on smaller screens.
And about that trip into space: The new Pan Am can’t even fly you over the Atlantic Ocean — let alone get you to the space station in time for your connecting flight to the moon.
The recent film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery underlines how pathetically we have become stuck in time. Its plot has villain and hero frozen in the 1960s and then revived today. The gag is supposed to be that they awaken to find the world bafflingly different. But the film’s unintended lesson is just the opposite: The filmmakers have to strain hard to find anything that’s really changed. (A million dollars isn’t what it used to be. Ha ha.)
The truth is that if you were actually to unfreeze ’60s Man, you could just tune his radio to a classic-rock station, tell him to use condoms, and send him on his way.
Once in a while, we do come within reach of seeing science fiction become reality, but then it doesn’t happen. When Scottish scientists created a clone of a sheep earlier this year, we were told that the same technology could be used to clone people. About time! So the federal government, of course, immediately ruled it out.
Yet one thing has, in fact, gone according to visionary plan: the World Wide Web. Computer guru Ted Nelson proposed a version of it and preached about it in the 1960s. A team at CERN, the European research center, wrote the first Web browsers in 1990. And today, Web pages for everyone from General Motors to your next-door neighbor to suicidal cults — though not for Pan Am — are just a click away.
We like the Web because it’s useful. But we love it, we cling to it, because it’s futuristic. It is the solitary, blessed development that lets us feel kinship with the Jetsons. That’s why you can’t turn around without reading breathless pronouncements about the Web. It’s why newsstands are filled with Web-fanatic magazines. And it’s why the typical price/net earnings ratio of Internet stocks is not 20, not 50, but infinity.
So we nod in self-deluding agreement as the MCI Internet ad proclaims, “Is this a great time, or what?”
Actually, it’s just an okay time. We had been hoping for better.
David A. Price is a national issues reporter in the Washington bureau of Investor’s Business Daily.
