…how TV news will survive in a postmodern world; implying that American journalism as we know it has been embedded in an old-style “modern” zeitgeist.

DARN IT, it’s a half decade into the twenty-first century and I still don’t have my Futuro house yet.

…via an MIT online journal, offers a list of “Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die.” I agree with almost everything on his list.

• Nuclear weapons; land mines: Only a GOP-machine politico could like those.
• Coal mines; internal combustion engines: Powerful and nostalgic, but wasteful as all heck and often fatal to their operators.
• Cosmetic implants: Usually dorky-looking.
• Lie detectors: Overrated and way fallible.
• Prisons (not really a “technology” but a social institution): A costly waste of human energy, particularly in the war-on-some-drugs US.
• Manned spaceflight: Now Sterling gets into potentially pissin’ offi some of his own sci-fi fandom. But is there really anything those dozen dead shuttle crewpeople did that a radio-controlled robotic space explorer can’t do?
• DVDs: The miracle movie medium doesn’t impress Sterling one whit. He hates their frailty and their copy-protection schemes. He seems to prefer unprotected digital downloads, but fails to answer how downloaders will conveniently store their acquired data. I happen to feel the discs are still way useful, if that dumb CSS and Macrovision can be gotten rid of.
• Incandescent light bulbs: As long as fluorescents are as irritating as they are, the warmth of the classic Edison bulb will, I say in opposition to Sterling, remain most welcome.

…offering an exhibition of old sci-fi magazine illos, entitled The Future We Were Promised. The most telling thing about it’s the fact that the museum proudly announces its location as being in “the historic Old City District.”

A future without the major record labels!

…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:

• Boeing fires Phil Condit; cuts costs by closing the fancy new Chicago HQ, establishing a less top-heavy corporate structure, and installing a smaller main office back in Seattle.
• The new Seattle Seahawks football stadium is named after the largest consistently-profitable company still based here. At Costco Park, all soft drinks come only in 24-packs.
• Two National Hockey League teams in U.S. small markets go broke. One moves to Winnipeg, the other to the Tacoma Dome.
• Baseball commissioner Bud Selig gets “contracted.”
• New York Mayor Bloomberg is forced to resign amid worldwide public outcry over his plan to tear down Yankee Stadium.
• Inventor Dean Kamen shows off a working, affordable, two-seater solar car. Every Republican state governor in America vows to never allow the thing on the streets.
• The major record labels lobby for emergency “survival” legislation allowing them to retroactively cancel all artist royalties whilst setting up government subsidies for executives’ mansions and cocaine budgets.
• Clever rust-belt entrepreneurs form a joint company to buy up underused and/or abandoned factories and mills. Their clothes, shoes, DVD players, garden tools, and other products all carry the same patriotic-themed brand name (perhaps “AmeriMade”). Their ads’ message: If you’re not willing to pay more for an AmeriMade product, you’re a bin Laden sympathizer.
• Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives, despite endless rants emanating from Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, the Wall St. Journal, The McLaughlin Group, etc. that anyone who doesn’t vote a straight Republican ticket is a bin Laden sympathizer. The new Congressional leadership begins to openly ask whether permitting further broadcast-media consolidations would be unwise.
• The New Republic runs a lead editorial admitting it is no longer a “liberal” magazine, and hasn’t been since 1983.
• Amazon.com becomes “profitable” by spinning off all its slower-selling product lines (hardware, appliances, sporting goods, etc.) to co-branded joint ventures with traditional retailers. The hardware operation, f’rinstance, becomes “Jack’sHometownHardwareAndBaitShop.com, Powered by Amazon.”
• Osama bin Laden is found in November on a remote island just like a soap-opera villain, having had plastic surgery to look like a whole other person.
• A cheap, simple-to-manufacture AIDS treatment drug is announced. Unfortunately for Muslim African leaders, it turns out to be made from reprocessed pork semen.
• High definition (or at least medium-high definition) TVs finally become popular, chiefly for viewing DVDs.
• Politicians in slumping tourist states propose Nevada-style regulated brothels, sparking a rift between the corporate and moralistic branches of U.S. conservatism.
• Gangsta rap completes its disappearance from the music scene when its last major audience (white mall kids) collectively decides it would rather pretend to be Mexican.
• An NFL head coach admits reports that he’s gay.
• Somebody figures out how to turn a profit from a “content-based” website. But the formula’s still too labor-intensive, and the potential return too low, to interest any but the smallest mom-and-pop sites.
• A major retail chain is reorganized as a co-op of local store operators.

BARRING ANY UNFORESEEN year-2001 computer bugs, this will be the first MISCmedia entry for the year of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

So what might you, my loyal (in your own fashion) readers, expect here over the coming months?

• Some more fiction experiments like the one serialized last week.
• Even more fun at MISCmedia Radio, our 24/7 streaming Net-music service. Perhaps even a second channel, devoted to the eclectic and exotic from all over.
• Attempts to play around with the online column’s currently standardized format (a single topic a day, running about the same length). Maybe I’ll return to my former threat to turn the daily site into something closer to a “weblog” or something close to the multi-topic format of the old Stranger column.
• Pieces of the new MISCmedia book (a photo-essay look at the city I have a lifelong lover’s quarrel with) as they emerge.
• Either more or fewer attempts to turn a financial profit from the site. It’s pretty clear the site’s current business model (or poor excuse for one) isn’t gonna work; but no new schemes (which might involve ads, subscriptions, special merchandise offers, etc.) have gelled in my viscous head.

  Many folk these days are claiming pure “content” websites, as business propositions, are molding corpses from 1998. I believe, now that the stupid money has largely abandoned the field, we can all get back to the work of figuring out just what might work in this crazy, still-new medium. Remember that broadcast radio was around almost a decade before the first national commercial networks started; and TV’s developers spent the whole of the 1940s working out the medium’s operational shticks.

• Possible new directions for the MISCmedia print mag. Scrapping the free distribution has put the print mag more or less in the black, but without real growth opportunities as it’s currently constructed.

  To make it more than a “personal zine,” albeit a professionally written and designed one, will require a move up to a thicker, slicker, and possibly more infrequent format. Perhaps something along the lines of the great old humor magazines (Punch, the original New Yorker); though for that I’d need some outside investment and a lot more content contributors.

• More of that “fun” factor, so easy to spot yet so elusive to define. Looking back at the past year’s entries, I see too many that, in retrospect, feel as if they were filler items, laboriously ground out to fit a self-imposed quota of work. There’ll be far less of that this year, I promise.
• More stuff by other people, adding the ever-valuable variety of points-O-view. Send your stuff in today. (Yes, we’re still picky and won’t run everything.)
• More chocolatey goodness.

TOMORROW: Two books, two different “radical” interpretations of the WTO protests.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Gore cared more about chads than about blacks….”
• That unsung savior of western civilization, beer! (found by Fark)….

THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 15th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.

As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of HAL 9000; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some dot-com stocks to sell you.

(P.S.: Most every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)

NO COLUMN MONDAY, BUT ON TUESDAY: What you might see on this site in the year of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

ELSEWHERE:

• “If the music industry had its way, there’d be no such thing as a cassette player….”

AFTER THE LAST ISSUE of our MISCmedia print magazine discussed various variations on the theme of “Utopias,” it seemed only proper to follow with a “Dystopias” theme.

Only thing is, I couldn’t find folks who wanted to write about nightmare worlds–other than ones they’d personally lived through.

Perhaps I just didn’t ask the right people.

Perhaps all the dystopia fans were heartbroken when Y2K failed to instantly end Civilization As We Know It.

Perhaps economic times really are good enough (or enough people believe they’re good enough) that they couldn’t imagine things ever getting really scary.

Perhaps everybody’s just so taken in by the talk about global corporate power representing the “End of History” (i.e., the world’s final and permanent socioeconomic configuration) that even those who protest against it can’t imagine any other system (let alone any other dysfunctional system).

Indeed, the cheap and easy way to construct a fictional nightmare future has been to predict the future will be exactly like the present, only more so.

In the past three or four decades, there have been fictional evil futures constructed wholly around single dominant trends of all types: air pollution, oil shortages, overpopulation, fundamentalist religion, nuclear war, the dehumanizing effects associated with big old mainframe computers, radical feminists, radical anti-feminists, humorless liberals, repressive conservatives, Communists, Fascists, Thatcherists, and (just about every dystopian writer’s all-purpose bad guy, in either a lead or supporting role) television.

Just maybe, all these authors’ different wrongnesses add up to one big accuracy–that any future elaborated from a single aspect of the present would be a dystopia.

History seldom flows in a single, linear progression or regression. There are multiple, competing influences in the course of events everywhere. There are trends, backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes. There are intercene fights, palace struggles, wars, and rumors of wars. There are serendipities, happy accidents, and unplanned disasters.

Life is oscillation and vibration. Death is stasis. A static culture, no matter what it was, would be a living death.

MONDAY: Would “open media” do for (or to) journalists what Napster might do for (or to) musicians?

IN OTHER NEWS: Shopping malls are losing sales fast. Some analysts say half the nation’s current suburban shopping centers may be gone within 10 years. How does a crafty mall operator survive? Make the place look more like a ‘real’ downtown!…

ELSEWHERE:

• Sage advice for the inexperienced lover: “Don’t take etiquette advice from porno films….”
• Are CNBC’s choice of stock-pickers and their recommendations “rigged against the retail investor?”…

FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last Thursday night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).

YESTERDAY, we discussed the nostalgia-for-six-months-ago WTO protest art show at the Center on Contemporary Art. We compared it with the Woodstock-nostalgia photo show at the Behnam Studio Gallery, which reiterated the Time-Life Music party line remembering “The Sixties” mainly for the rise of corporate-rock gods and the wild-oat sowing of white college kids.

It’s too darned easy to imagine WTO protestors slowly succumbing to the same seductive lure of selective memory.

Imagine, sometime in November 2029, a 30th-anniversary gathering of former (and a few still) anarchists and anti-corporatists.

It might be held to mark the grand opening of a retro-’90s theme restaurant–complete with slacker-dude and goth-gal character waiters, a cute nose-ringed plush doll mascot, and authentic period dishes (fish tacos, pho soup, Mountain Dew) reformulated for contemporary family tastes.

Some of the newly middle-aged attendees at the gathering will grumble at the re-creation scenes of the protests being enacted as full-color holograms; Hi-8 video was, and will always be, good enough for them.

Folks who’ve become attorneys, politicians, advertising executives, and dimensional-transport engineers will reminisce about the good old days when sex still seemed dangerous (and hence exciting), when you had to get your hair dyed instead of simply taking a pill to change its color.

The old-timers will moan about Those Kids Today who mindlessly frolic in next-to-nothing and who casually sleep around with their genetically disease-resistant bodies.

In contrast, the old-timers will assure one another that Their Generation was the last apex of human society, as proven in that big, fun, life-changing spectacular that was the WTO protests.

They’ll remember everything about what they wore, how the tear gas smelled, the friends they met, and the music they played.

They’ll be a little foggier about just what it was they were protesting against.

Such a sorry scenario might be inevitable, but then again it might not be. It depends on the extent to which the loose post-WTO coalition keeps working on the real and important issues behind the protests.

TOMORROW: What our readers like to read.

ELSEWHERE:

• To us old-timers, “I Spy” signifies neither a DJ club nor a kids’ game, but a TV adventure show in which local kid Robert Culp was star-billed ahead of Bill Cosby….

OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.

WITH Y2KOOKINESS long past by now, we might be able to resume talking about “The Future” without sounding too much like hype-followers.

We might even get to resume talking about ideal futures, a.k.a. Utopias.

Utopias may never exist here in the realm of the real (indeed, the name literally means “Nowhere”). But they express the kind of society certain people want to create. Thus, they can hold bold and sometimes dangerous dreams–especially if those dreams involve the destruction or subjugation of everyone outside the dreamer’s own group.

Last month’s Atlantic Monthly carried a roundup of “five and a half” currently popular Utopian dreams:

• The Free-Market Utopia (essentially a purer version of the financier-ruled world we have now, as fantasized by Cyber-Libertarians and the WTO);
• The Best-and-Brightest Utopia (the academic left’s and the think-tank right’s dreams of a Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia);
• The Religious Utopia (Democratic Party fundraising letters’ nightmare scenario of Pat Robertson as czar);
• The Green Utopia (the bucolic, post-industrial future dreamed by hippie communes, Eugene anarchists, the Unabomber, and Pol Pot);
• The Technological Utopia (the old Mondo 2000 dream of sex robots, or conversely the AOL/Time Warner dream of an entire planet downloading the same encrypted Madonna video); and
• The Civilized Egalitarian Capitalist Utopia (the “and a half” scenario, being the author’s own hope for a just-slightly-less capitalistic world than we’ve got, based on his belief in civil society, representative government, private charity, and progressive taxation).

One could go on and on into ever more bifurcated Utopian fantasies; many of which would be someone else’s Reign of Terror.

There’s the one where all males would be held in bondage (if allowed to live at all). There’s the one where all meat eating would be unlawful. There’s the one where the total ideological rule of midtown Manhattan and southern California would be replaced by the total ideological rule of downtown Manhattan and northern California. There’s the one where the poor would be sent off to boot camps, to learn to become good submissive house boys. There’s the one where all drinkers would get stoned and all stoners would get shot.

What all these have in common is the dream of engendering a simpler, more predictable world by developing (by force if need be) a simpler, more predictable human race. None of these dream futures seems to have a place for anybody like me who believes society’s too simple and predictable already.

Corporate-libertarian writer Virginia Postrel sees a common flaw in both Utopian and anti-Utopian future-fantasies: “A uniform society, a flattened, unnuanced world designed by a few smart men.” She seems to find that a heresy against her own belief in capitalist hero figures continually emerging to seize the day.

I’d go even further, diversity-wise, than Postrel. My kind of Utopia’s one where entreprenurial crusaders wouldn’t get to run everything, because commerce wouldn’t be considered the totality or even the centrality of all human endeavor.

More about that some other time.

TOMORROW: The problems with proclaiming real-life Utopias.

ELSEWHERE:

• From the great local political zine Eat the State!, some strategies for keeping the anti-WTO coalition more or less intact….
• “Green Eggs and Hamlet….”
• Are club DJs and orchestra conductors merely overhyped middlemen? (found by Arts and Letters Daily)….

NEW-MILLENNIUM HYPE’S DIED DOWN ENOUGH by now, I trust (this is being written a couple days in advance), that you won’t mind if I start in again bashing those futurists who can’t imagine a future without their own sort running things.

Just as Xerox staff futurists imagined future offices all centered around copiers, the NY and Calif. cultural trend-diviners keep presuming all pop-cult product in years to come will be funnelled thru the likes of Viacom, Time Warner, Hearst, Fox, and Silicon Valley’s most prominent dot-coms.

DIgital video? To the likes of Newsweek, it’s just a new toy for Hollywood.

MP3s? The NY Times has officially dismissed its utility as anything but a promo mechanism for established major-label acts.

At some press junket three or four years ago, a PR agent from LA confided in me what she believed to be the eternal procedure of pop-cult trends (whether they be in the fields of music, fashion, food, games, or graphics):

1. Something catches on somewhere. It could be anything, it could be from anywhere. But it will die unless–

2. The NY/LA/SF nexus takes it over and turns it into something mass-marketable; then–

3. The masses everywhere eat it up, get tired of it, and patiently await the next trend foisted upon them.

I told her that was going to cease to be the inevitable course of everything one of these years. She refused to believe me.

Even today, with the Net and DIY-culture spreading visions and ideas from every-which-place to every-which-place (including many visions and ideas I heartily oppose) without the Northeast/Southwest gatekeepers, I still read from folks who cling to the belief that America inevitably follows wherever Calif. and/or NY lead.

It’s never been true that everything from underwear to ethnic-group proportions follows slavishly from the NE/SW axis. Country music, while eventually taken over by the media giants (even the Nashville Network’s now owned by CBS), developed far from the nation’s top-right and lower-left corners. So did R&B, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime, jazz, etc. etc.

American literature has its occasional Updike or Fitzgerald, but also plenty of Weltys, Faulkners, Cathers, Poes, Hemingways, and others from all over.

What could these creators, and others in the performing and design and visual arts, have done without centralized publishers, galleries, agents, and other middlemen controlling (or preventing) audience access? Quite a bit more than they did, I reckon.

And as online distribution and publicity, DIY publishing and filmmaking, specialty film-festival circuits, and other ascendent means of cultural production mature, the artistically-minded of the 21st Century won’t have to even bother dumbing down their work to what some guy in Hollywood thinks Americans will get.

I’ve talked about this a lot, I know; but I’ve failed to give one particularly clear example: The live theater.

New Yorkers still like to imagine “the national theater” as consisting only of those stages situated on a certain 12-mile-long island off the Atlantic coast, and inferior “regional theater” as anything staged on the North American mainland.

T’aint the case no more.

These days, the real drama action takes place in the likes of Minneapolis, Louisville, and Ashland (and, yes, Seattle). What Broadway’s stuck with these days is touristy musical product, often conceived in London (or, for a few years this past decade, in Toronto) to play long enough to spawn touring versions in all the “restored” downtown ex-movie palaces of the U.S. and Canada. Off-Broadway these days gets its material from the other regions at least as often as it feeds material to them.

Another example: I’m writing this while listening to a giveaway CD from Riffage.com, one of the many commercial websites now putting up music by indie and unsigned bands from all over, in vast quantities. (Others include EMusic, Giant Radio, and MP3.com.)

This particular CD uses MP3 compression to cram in 150 tracks, all by bands I’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with a future where more musicians might be able to practice their art their own way and make a half-decent material living at it; as opposed to a recent past where thousands gave up in frustration as all the money and attention went to a few promoted superstars (whose lives often wound up in VH1 Behind the Music-style tragedies).

Sure, there’s mucho mediocrity on the Riffage CD. But that’s OK too.

I’d rather have a wide regional and stylistic range of mediocrity than some LA promoter’s homogenized, narrow selection of mediocrity.

TOMORROW: This same geographic-centricism as applied to topics of race and politics.

IN OTHER NEWS: Some of you might have seen a parody Nike ad disseminated by countless e-mail attachments during the WTO fiasco. It depicted a nonviolent protester attempting to flee from Darth Vader-esque riot cops. The tag line: “Just Do It. Run Like Hell.” Well, during the college football bowl games (ending tonight), there’s a real Nike commercial depicting an everyday jogger dutifully executing his morning run in spite of numerous Y2K-fantasy disasters and destructions all around–including street riots.

ELSEWHERE:

• Bored by TV shows? Then go straight to the commercials!…
• First there was that movie, The Gift. Now, you can gift-wrap yourself in the modern Net-shopping/UPS-delivery way, with see-thru bubblewrap vests, skirts, and bikinis from Bubblebodywear! (found by Slave)….

ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.

In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.

The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).

Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.

But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.

It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.

We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.

We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.

As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)

In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.

The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.

We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.

TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.

ELSEWHERE:

• Who sez death can’t be creative?…
• Twin Peaks still holds up after 10 years, to me and to my ol’ pal Jim Emerson….
• The changing American workplace means new types of repetitive-stress injuries…

AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.

In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.

The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).

Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:

• Our species is still referred to as “Man,” and its chief players as “Men.” The big future benefits for women: One-stop shopping (in government-run warehouse-order stores); government-run restaurants called “public kitchens” (eliminating the need to cook); and housework-reducing technology.
• Racism apparently doesn’t exist, but the narrator apparently meets no nonwhite people in his future journeys and doesn’t seem to think that’s worth noting.
• The other big-industrial nations have adopted the same economic-governmental system; and “an international council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members of the union, and their joint policy toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions.”
• Instead of cash, everybody carries a punch card (called by the then-novel name of a “credit card”), nontransferrable.
• Music is fed into every room of the home via telephone wires from central studios, where live musicians play edifying classical selections 24 hours a day.
• Consumer goods are distributed by hyper-efficient pneumatic tubes, which connect all the buildings in the major cities (and, the doctor promises to the narrator, will soon be built out to farm communities).
• Efficient calculating and industrial forecasting are a vital functions of the Industrial Army, but no computational devices are mentioned.
• With no poverty or homelessness, there’s almost no crime. The apparently only major taboo is “laziness” (refusal to perform one’s assigned job). Those convicted of this are detained and fed bread and water until they repent.
• Despite total government control of the means-O-production, ideas and arts are not censored. Rather, visual-art projects are voted by citizens (in what sounds alarmingly like today’s “public art” bureaucracy). Book and periodical publishers must raise their own startup costs (the closest thing to “capitalism” permitted in the system), ensuring artistic freedom while discouraging “mere scribblers.”
• And most importantly, just like in most utopias, Bellamy’s “Age of Concert” doesn’t just demand personal uniformity, it claims that’d be the inevitable result of everybody getting together and figuring out that a hyper-rational, planned-economy society’s the only way to go.

One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.

Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.

Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.

TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.

ELSEWHERE:

• A round, yellow icon celebrates 20 years of conspicuous consumption; but this story (found by MacSurfer’s Headline News) doesn’t mention the secret behind Pac-Man’s status as the first video game many women liked to play. As punk-rock cartoonist John Holmstrom once noted, “Some women couldn’t identify with games about shooting and other obvious male metaphors. But Pac-Man engulfs its opponents–the female sexual function….”/UL>
  

SINCE IT’S THE LAST ‘TRIPLE-DOUBLE’ DAY of the century (11/22/99–get it?), I’ve got just as good an excuse as any of the current barrage of century-in-review pundits to go off and pontificate.

But instead of reviewing all the supposedly most important movies, CDs, public speeches, world leaders, or stadium-organ songs of the past 100 years, let’s skip the present century altogether and instead look at the 21st century as somebody imagined it in the 19th.

Edward Bellamy (1850-96) wrote Looking Backward in 1888. Many critics consider it the first major utopian novel written in the U.S.

Like most of the perfect-future tales that have followed, Bellamy’s is less of a story than a tract. The plot, such as it is, is pretty much over by page 50–a wealthy, “refined” young man of 1887 Boston, who’s come to loathe most of railroad-age industrial society, awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000.

From then on, just about all that happens is that our 19th-century sleepyhead looks around the future Beantown, while the kindly doctor who’d awakened him (and the doc’s smashingly-beautiful daughter) simply tell him everything about how wonderful everything has become. (The doctor has a wife, but we see or hear almost nothing of her.)

There are no conflict points in the story, but that’s part of the point.

Bellamy’s ideal future is one of those in which most anything that could result in trauma, let alone drama, has been systematically removed from the social condition.

Indeed, in one chapter the awakened narrator reads from a late-20th-century novel (you millennium-sticklers out there will be relieved to hear Bellamy refers to 2000 as part of the 20th century). Without detailing this other story’s plot or characters, the narrator tells us how weird it was for him to read…

“…a romance from which shall be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer… a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfettered by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart.”

As you might’ve guessed, Bellamy’s is one of those utopias where nobody goes hungry but nobody’s obscenely wealthy. That’s ’cause everybody works for one employer (a strict-yet-benevolent government “Industrial Army”) for the same wage. (Physical labor and other unpopular jobs are made to be as attractive as cushy office posts, by offering shorter hours or unspecified prestige perks)

It was a popular fantasy at the time it was written. Many of Bellamy’s readers had become baffled by the rapidly-changing industrial scene and its massive social consequences–which by 1888 had already included urbanization, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, monopolies and cartels running key industries, the mass immigration of low-paid laborers from such places as Germany and China, the lonely-guy culture of single-male immigrant workers (hookers, saloons, gambling), tenement housing, coal-smoke pollution, nationally advertised brand-name products, and the first large-scale labor strikes.

To those dismayed by the 1880s present, an end-O-history future, a stable and prosaic future with no conflicts or worries, would seem mighty desirable.

TOMORROW: More on why Bellamy’s scheme wouldn’t work, why he and his readers thought it might, and lessons for muddling through the real century-switch.

ELSEWHERE:

• It comes from France. It’s Clark, the band!…
• It’s no hallucination, but Tony Millionaire’s Maakies in Shockwave semi-animation!…
• Ahh, the glorious almost-miniature plastic industrial-design masterpieces. The dials that go spaciously from 5(7) to 8, but skrunch 10 to 16 in a tiny-tiny space at the far end. Yes, it’s the golden age of transistor radios!