The future: no jetpacks but George Osborne’s head in a jar
My childhood visions of the future were elaborate and optimistic. The scenes were a cut and paste job of robots and megacities, space colonies and jet packs. I gobbled up comics, books and films to feed my future dreaming. Grown up (of sorts), the future feels as if it will be like today but worse somehow.
In the Alka Seltzer fizz of the nineties, when the long hangover of nuclear confrontation seemed to be clearing, it was so much easier to dream of a shiny science fiction future. It was the big dumb future of the Lost In Space reboot – Daz white spacesuits, men with chiseled Joey Tribiani jaws and terrorists foolish enough to rely on Gary Oldman to get the job done.
If you were lucky enough to live in a peaceful part of the placid west, the nineties were a kind of nothing decade. The ugly realities of the noughties future were squirming around just under the surface but they were easy to ignore, drunk on cheap credit and reheated pop culture pastiches.
My nineties was a slow slide from toddler to bullied school boy to tolerated sixth former. At one point, choosing between Blur or Oasis seemed pivotal and whether or not your owned Kappa popper trousers was the difference between success and social Siberia.
I was 17 when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 took place. They were at once horrifying and distant. They were something that had happened on TV and virtually everything about them was filtered to me through a speaker, from the Today programme or the 10 O’Clock News. Norfolk was not abuzz with talk of terrorists.
While the planes were striking the towers, I was in a history class on the causes of the First World War. I heard the news from a disinterested bus driver who muttered something about Bin Laden. The radio burbled away with theories and static but I didn’t see that footage, the dust and carnage, until my bike ride home from my grandparents. I stopped outside an electrical shop and stared at the bug eye of big screens in the window.
It didn’t hit me then – my 17-year-old brain was stuffed with thoughts of girls who didn’t know my name and books I wanted to buy – but that atrocity exhibition in the Radio Rentals window demolished the beautiful future dream. The sense that the universe can vaporise you as quickly as a sadistic kid slaughtering ants with a kettle became very real.
The new century began in September 2001. While the history books we’d been clutching in that class on the afternoon of 11 September made sure to draw lines between war and postwar, there hadn’t been a day in the 20th century when an armed conflict hadn’t been clattering on the periphery.
The 21st century has just made taking sides and placing bets even tougher. The Soviet Union was the big bad end-of-level boss. In the new century, the enemies were nimbler and harder to catch. Osama Bin Laden was practically mythical by the time the Navy Seals gunned down the flesh and blood vessel in Abbotabad ten years later.
As the chatter about Iran gets louder, I can hear Things Can Only Get Better being piped into my brain stem, the deja vu flooding my system. We really don’t want a war, say the ministers, while their back-benchers mutter and splutter about how it might just be goddamn unavoidable and how a good scrap is golden for the polls. At the same time we eye Argentina like Jack Palance staring down the goat herder in that Bill Hicks routine: “Pick up the gun…”
The Arab Spring sprang to life in 2011 but, by the end of the year, while Ghadaffi was dead in Libya, the army was back lording it up in Egypt. Ask the Burmese how easy it is to shift military rulers who’ve spent decades drunk on the idea of power. Depose one man with too much gold braid and a penchant for summary executions and often as not another one just hops up into his place. Democracy should come with a gift receipt.
The future could be stem cell miracles and lab-grown future food for all but I fear it’ll be war for water, blood for oil and the poor pushed out of the cities. The coalition government in the UK is already aching to make the poor, the disabled and anyone else it deems as undesirable get out of London. China picked off the destitute from Beijing’s streets in time for its Olympics, Boris and Dave are just dreaming of the same.
The hover boards won’t be here for 2015 and space travel is long going to be a jolly for the super-rich with bank accounts so full there’s nothing earthly to spend it on. In Britain, an ageing population and a dwindling birthrate means politics will be as stuffed with the old faces as rock’n’roll has been for decades.
If you think you’re bored with still seeing Mick Jagger creak across the stage, imagine countless years of George Osborne and Harriet Harman until their heads are presenting policy documents from pickling jars.
The Italians talk about the “caste” that control everything. Everyone in power is old and the young can’t get their feet on the first rung of the ladder. That’s only going to get worse. The rich get richer, the poor get bitter. The riots last summer will start to look like hijinks as the real unrest gets started.
To my generation, nurtured in the bosom of a boom, the future can seem incredibly bleak. Distracted by reality TV, Twitter and Facebook, you can ignore the hard parts for a while. Then thirty looms up ahead of you and forty is just over the crest of the hill. You don’t own a house. You don’t have a child. You’re nominally free but as trapped as anyone else.
In Ireland, the Celtic tiger cubs are still clutching their parents credit cards and making an escape to Australia and New Zealand. They realise that the birthright they were promised – cheap property, easy credit and jobs there for the picking – has evaporated in the heavy fog of politicians’ promises.
The science fiction future of my childhood dreaming is trapped in Star Trek box sets and the idle wittering of techno-utopians. The iPads will get thinner. The computers will get smaller and faster.
The big problems still stretch out ahead of us. Little wins are followed by huge stumbles. On our TV screens, in parliaments, in trading rooms and on the battlefields, it’s the eighties reoccurring. Fukuyama knows he was wrong. History didn’t end, it just looped around on itself and picked up cooler props.
