I love to read, lately I've been rereading my way through some of the classic dystopian future books predicting how things would be in our time. It's fun to see what predictions were way off, and which ones we are currently living with. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) actually nailed air pods. The author Ray Bradbury described tiny "seashell" speakers that fit hidden in the ear. The protagonist starts talking to his wife, but she is oblivious because she has tiny speakers hidden in her ears.
The wife in the book is also addicted to a screen that constantly shows a senseless barrage of images and short clips that are mostly incoherent. The protagonist watches it for a few seconds and a scene appears with two people in the middle of an argument. No context is given, but the actors are in a disagreement. Montag, the protagonist suggests they turn it off, but his wife says, "no I want to see who wins the argument." Montag says, "but you don't even know what they're arguing about?!"
Bradbury envisioned the constant nonsense screen would take up a whole wall of the house, so clearly he was way off on the dimensions.
The book I'm currently reading is Aldous Huxley's brave new world (1932). In this vision of the future, all humans are test tube babies and they are engineered and conditioned into different castes. On the one hand, Aldous really thought we were all going to be zipping around in personal helicopters. So a swing and a miss, but I want to give him credit for even thinking helicopters would be a thing at all in 1932. The helicopter was invented in 1939.
I was reading the other bike blog today was stunned to realize another prediction from brave new world was happening right in front of me.
In the book, the test tube babies receive huge amounts of conditioning when they are young. This is done through speakers repeating stuff to you while you sleep also shock therapy, drugs ect. So everyone acts the way the system wants them to. A bureaucrat/geneticist explains that they used to allow the lower classes to enjoy nature because that didn't really cost anything for the upper classes. Then they realized the mistake they were making. If the lower class just enjoys the simplicity of nature they aren't consuming anything.
"Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect, they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. The problem was to find a more economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found. We condition the masses to love all country sports. At the same time we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured goods as well as transport. Hence those electric shocks."
Electro-magnetic obstacle golf and escalator squash are two of the sports mentioned in the book, but that's because Aldous couldn't imagine that there would ever be a $15,000 bicycle.
Think about this, Aldous Huxley was into some far out stuff. He did lots of hallucinogenic drugs, he wrote numerous books and was considered a visionary in his time. And when he tried to conceive of expensive sports that required elaborate apparatus, he settled on versions of golf and squash. Bicycling was around in 1932. In fact it was pretty big, they had velodromes and the Tour de France and Olympic cycling. But he was like, come on, the bike is basically perfect, how could a simple machine like this ever be perverted into a massively expensive consumer good?
RIP Aldous Huxley 1894-1963
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