One obvious place to start looking at counter-constraints is progress dogma - the belief that technological development will simply lead to a better future. This is a tricky subject and as such warrants a deeper investigation before we approach countering it. Questioning progress is obviously not new, rather we are in a dichotic system of rampant belief on one side and numerous doubters and critics on the other.
Let’s start with the world’s fairs. Norman Bel Geddes’s
Futurama exhibit for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair is perhaps the
ur-example of a glossy model of the future - a 35,738 square foot (3320 m2) model depicting the development of motorways and vast suburbs across the United States. The key technology at the core of Bel Geddes’s proposal was the internal combustion engine, his client’s core product – he foresaw the need for big, straight, fast roads to connect big cities; revolutionary run-offs allowing the cars to join and leave the motorways without slowing down; and the sprawl of a perfect picket-fenced suburbia. For visitors with mindsets tainted by the Great Depression this future was compelling. It was a place clearly better than the present, and they bought into the dream. As a result, many aspects of Futurama became a reality.
Twenty-five years after Futurama, at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, spectacular exhibits such as the Eero Saarinen-designed IBM pavilion, with content by Charles and Ray Eames, revealed how the backdrop of sublime technological development, Cold War fears, and the spectacular challenge of the space programme were impacting on popular culture. The social theorist Richard Barbrook points out in
Imaginary Futures (2007) how iconography and fetishisation were, for the first time, used to deny the principal use value of these new technologies, neatly disguising them as profound benefactors to humanity. At the heart of the IBM pavilion was the Eames’ multimedia, multi-sensory presentation, describing in highly aestheticised terms the benefits of the emerging technology. As Barbrook sums it up: ‘In the IBM pavilion, the new technology of computing was displayed as the fulfilment of a science fiction fantasy: the imaginary future of artificial intelligence.’ Building on the positive 1950s image of the robot, IBM presented the utopian public face of Cold War developments in cybernetics.
These future-utopia tropes persist because they communicate clear, marketable values. They have their foundations in genuine technical concepts, but the complexity and intangibility of an emerging technology means that there is limited potential to communicate its commercial, functional, or political value. By extrapolating the essential function of the technology to create spectacular demonstrations of future products or systems, a more tangible value can be presented. Through this
productification, an emerging technology is effectively transformed into a form of currency; in the eyes of the consumer or potential benefactor, hypothetical products communicate value far more succinctly than complex scientific or technical purity. The nature of this relationship means that the message is always positive: those with a vested interest in a specific technology or concept have an innate tendency to ignore or deny anything remotely critical or negative.
Progress fatigue
Resistance to progress dogma has a long and storied history. Since the Industrial Revolution there have been several major phases to this resistance coming (for example) from the arts: starting with Romantics like William Blake portraying industrial ‘progress’ and the environmental and social degradation it involved as heralding a hell on earth, to William Morris providing a counter-constraint to Victorian progress dogma through the Arts and Crafts movement, to the avant-garde provocations (e.g. dada) of the early twentieth century - not least in response to the First World War, which many people (including some artists, like the Italian Futurists) had seen as a great bloodletting in the name of progress.
The world’s fairs also offer their insights into this dichotic system. For example, Futurama’s hidden agendas are strikingly revealed in E. L. Doctorow’s novel
World’s Fair (1985). As a family leaves the exhibit, the father says: ‘“When the time comes General Motors isn’t going to build the highways, the federal government is. With money from us taxpayers.” He smiled. “So General Motors is telling us what they expect from us: we must build them the highways so they can sell us the cars.”’
Bel Geddes’s vision of super-highways largely came true, but so did various dystopian imaginaries that were generated out of the Futurama vision. In ‘Futurama, Autogeddon’, Helen Burgess describes the way in which ‘a messy, always-under-construction, polluted highway system, beaming cheerfully forward into the future, is reflected back to us in the second half of the century as a degraded landscape in J. G. Ballard’s
Crash and
The Atrocity Exhibition. In these tales,’ Burgess writes,
Bel Geddes’ optimistic narrative of the Interstate has collapsed … because the Interstate system is unsustainable - both narratively and ecologically. The ghosts of the highway call back to us from these future narratives, reminding us that death is just around the next bend.
The profound effects of Bel Geddes’s vision include not only large-scale societal problems, from endemic obesity to
Blade Runner-level air pollution in cities like Beijing, but also the mundane daily effects - traffic jams, road rage, and status anxiety.
Progress dogma as an eternally recurring phenomenon
The progress boosterism in the West of the 19th century was followed by two highly regressive world wars. Yet the postwar period saw an almost immediate return to … optimism! Progress dogma was reborn! America, isolated from the worst ravages of the two World Wars, kept blowing the trumpet for progress, and the other western countries followed. The lessons of history continued, and continue, to fall on deaf ears.
Designing counter-constraints
We realise now that we’ve not set ourselves an easy task. These are massive, complex systems that are more easily identified and critiqued than challenged with alternatives. But inaction is no solution. So we’ll go on, inspired by historical examples of how critical approaches have impacted on specific research directions and undermined progress dogma. The public inquiry into genetically modified food development in Europe and the consequent demonising of an entire scientific area (‘Frankenstein foods’) led by certain newspapers is one example of technology being steered away from its intended trajectory. In that case, however, the approach was problematic because the debate was simplified as a contest between good and evil, dystopia vs. utopia, rather than being an open and constructive dialogue. As this article suggests, the reality is often more nuanced and complex than a simple binary opposition can express.
So how do we move toward a more constructive approach to counter-constraints?
Here, as a discussion starter, are some
first steps:
Stop assuming that, through technology, the future will be better than the present.
Be wary of too-positive presentations of technological future solutions.
Don’t assume that any of society’s problems will be solved by technology alone.
Do assume that for every benefit a new technology brings there will be unforeseen implications.
Remember to ask: ‘Progress for whom?’
And: ‘What in this
specific case does progress actually mean?’
Remember that progress is easily confused with automation. Or efficiency.
Find ways of encouraging a critical perspective in others, without being a
dystopian dick about it.
Actively start building the future you want, with or without technology.
One approach where we have first-hand experience and that begins to address point 10 is
speculative design, which aims to facilitate a more critical and considered approach to future-formation. By countering the constraints that limit normative design to slavishly serving the market, speculative design is free to present futures that are neither explicitly utopian or dystopian. Using this approach we can explore possible scenarios when specific emerging technologies collide with everyday life. Or we can see what happens when we apply alternative configurations of contemporary technologies or systems to generate fresh perspectives on particular problems (a counter-constraint to constraint no. 2: legacies of the past, which we’ll return to in a future post). Speculation is time well spent.
We’ll give further thought to counter-constraints over a game of ping-pong on our rough-hewn
autoprogettazione table, followed by coffee and toast. More, much more, to come.
Images - General Motors,
Futurama, 1939; Paul Klee,
Angelus Novus, 1920 [CC BY-SA 3.0].
