The Subtle Future

Everyone knows about the Monofuture, even if they do not know it by that name. It is The Future (tm)! Flying cars! Monorails! Shiny glass and steel towers! Spaceships and spandex, all in the wondrous future of the year 2000AD!

And everyone knows that it's not the future we got by the year 2000AD. This has made a few people very disappointed, and many people flustered, because it was the only somewhat-positive vision of the future they have been given. It's Star Trek or Mad Max, and if you look around you you will not see Star Trek, therefore we must be in the Mad Max timeline.

But look around more. Just, look around you. Have you worked out what we're looking for? In 50 years of progress, what has fundamentally changed?

The cars look a bit different, yes, but they are still cars. Even if autonomous and electric they will still be cars. The railways that carry much of the worlds freight would be instantly recognisable to Brunel. Airlines hit their top speed and took their basic shape decades ago. All the improvements that have been made have not been radical overhauls, but incremental improvements to efficiency.

Domestically, the last major new device to be added to households was probably the PC, which has disappeared from many (most?) homes with the growth of laptops. This came in over two decades ago -- it was a 2nd millennium development. Before that, TVs, washing machines, refrigerators... the house of the early 21st century is very much like the house of the mid/late 20th. In 50 years not much has changed (though it is possible that the kitchen's days are numbered).

What about the internet? Surely that counts as a major change, with the accompanying social disruption? Yes. Now billions of people throughout the world have access to enough computing power in their pocket to run a midcentury space program. But, this change has been *subtle*. It is not the sort of change that fits the cover of a pulp magazine from the 50s. Unless someone takes one out and presses the Emma button, you will not be able to tell that society is any different from how it was at the turn of the millennium. Even the infrastructure, using as it does microwaves and satellites and buried fibre optic cables, is invisible to those who do not deliberately seek it out. There has been a lot of meaningful change roiling this society, but little that can be shown visually. So such progress goes unnoticed.

This leads to a major failure of imagination. What if, instead of the future being gleaming towers and sparkling solar farms and hovercars -- a yoghurt ad future -- it is a lot more subtle? Bucky Fuller, one of the great futurist architects of last century, coined the term ephemerilization to refer to "doing more and more with less and less". I'd like to use it, or coin a related term (backgrounding?) to refer to the infrastructure we use becoming less and less intrusive, blending seamlessly into the space we inhabit. Radiators replaced by underfloor heating. TVs by projectors. The things we use fading into the background of our lives ever more. What if the future doesn't just look like the present, but to a cursory glance, like the past?

TV Tropes calls this the Crystal Spires And Togas stage of civilisation. They're advanced, way more than you and your starships, and live like they're in Ancient Greece. Some even like hunter-gatherers. Their (very advanced) technology is hidden. They do not feel the need to flaunt it so that everyone knows they are an Advanced and Technocratic Society.

If we move away from the stranglehold of the Monofuture on our collective imagination, we can start to sketch out what the world to be might actually look like, and what we would like it to look like. When everyone is focused on flashy projects, they neglect the important mundane stuff that is vital to keep everyone alive and healthy. The Monofuture leads to bionic duckweed. The Subtle Future isn't so flashy. It can't be sold in a glossy brochure filled with artistic depictions, it looks like today only less so. It doesn't dominate the rest of nature, it blends into it.

It is the future I want.