Where are the Neo-Futurists?

I usually can't stand P.J. O'Rourke's brand of smug National Review-style "humourism", but this article on Disney's House of the Future II is awesome.

Back when Walt was alive Tomorrowland has an honest and optimistic attempt to envision a Utopian and decidedly American future. If anything, the problem with Tomorrowland was that it couldn't quite keep up with all the washing machines, automatic transmissions, plastics, and transistor radios that were actually being produced. Still, from the retro-futurist designs to the rapid-transit systems there wasn't anything about Walt's prototype city of tomorrow that wasn't inspiring.

Apparently HoF II is the latest in a long line of FAILURES on the part of DisneyCorp to repurpose Walt's visions. These include the steam punk-lite redo of Tomorrowland (O'Rourke calls it Jules Vernacular), the entire breathtakingly lame history of Epcot, and the hilarious demolition of the original HoF.

He writes:

Denigration of the future has become an intellectual prop over the past 40 years. Looking forward went out of fashion about the time that Buckminster Fuller’s audacious geodesic domes, meant to cover entire cities, wound up as hippie-height, wobbling, tent-sized structures on Mendocino County pot communes.

Bruce Handy, writing in Time about Disney’s reopening of a deliberately out-of-date Tomorrowland in 1998, began his essay with the sentence, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” He went on, “It’s not a novel observation to point out that our culture has become increasingly backward looking.”

Well, given the future envisioned in Disney’s House of the Future, who can blame us for looking the other way?

Disney’s Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative. This isn’t the fault of the “Disney culture”; it is the fault of our culture. We seem to have entered a deeply unimaginative era.

And we're back to the culture wars, and I remember why I dislike O'Rourke so much.

Otherwise, I agree. We as a society need to be more imaginative about the future. No more kitsch. No more nostalgia. No more prequels. No more reimaginings. (I'm looking at you J.J. Abram's Star Trek). Instead of Bailouts for old technologies and retro businesses (cough, GM, cough), how about a few billion for undersea farmers, jet pack-ateers, high-speed magnetic trains, and jetson style houses in the sky?

See also, Paleo-Future's Disney blog posts.

Public Transit of the Future

If you ask me, and no one ever will, the best thing to do with gas prices right now is to jack up the tax to $10 per gallon and use the surplus to start rebuilding our entire infrastructure. From neighborhoods, to local roads, to freeways, to interstates, the whole concept of how we move goods and people around this country needs to be redrawn from scratch. What we need now is not gas-tax holidays or more offshore drilling, but people with the ability to think big, absurd, techno utopian dreams. Namely, I want to go to work in a people mover. Somebody ought to make it happen.