The Soviet politburo member stands on a high pedestal above the vast crowd. ‘In the future’ he says ’there will be no hunger. In the future you will be able to eat as much as you wish’; adding ‘Vast state farms will provide for your needs, and science will bring us new foods’. He waved at the sea of flags.
In Post-War USSR there were continuing food shortages, mostly due to the abolition of ‘politically threatening’ collective farms, in favour of larger state mega-farms. Those new state farms were catastrophically unproductive. ‘Artificial food’ factories stayed experimental.
I heard similar messianic speeches when I worked in an unreformed Belarus in the 1990s for President Lukashenka and Piotr Kapitula. They had a strangely familiar ring… Why tackle the nitty-gritty problems of the agriculture sector when you can paint a picture of a coming nirvana and plenty, subduing the ‘impatient’ masses.
A decade before, I was working as a corporate adviser, including the IT sector; zipping between Palo Alto, Cupertino, Santa Clara and Mountain View. In these places I had become used to messianic change the world speeches that started ‘In the future you will be able to …’
This brought scepticism about IT over-claiming. Every month there was something that would ‘change the way we live’. Some famous folk actually called themselves ‘Futurologists’.
There were of course major advances we enjoy today, but not due to futurology.
IBM, SCP, and other developers didn’t think there was much of a future in personal computers. Microsoft took the unwanted Disk Operating System (a forerunner of Windows). Apple ended up with the Xerox Corps’ WYSIWYG screen system. Much of the messianic stuff flopped; Apple Newton, Juicero, Google Glass, ‘internet of things’, TI99, Segway, Quicktake, and Pippin. In the UK we had our own Sinclair C5 car and the One Per Desk. They were all going to transform our lives. When ‘you will be able to…’ meets public demand, the latter wins.
Now we have self-driving taxis and look forward to climate change, crime, illness and poverty all being solved by Britcard, AI and chip implants. Never mind today’s problems. Let’s forget all of that by soaring over the top with a future Nirvana, messianic Soviet style.
This might be popular with the former authors of ‘Socialist Alternatives’, but maybe not the rest of us.
* Paul Reynolds works with multilateral organisations as an independent adviser on international relations, economics, and senior governance.
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8 Comments
Not sure where Paul Reynolds is going with this article.
What I do know is that so called internet banking has severely disadvantaged the elderly and those on lower incomes in the rural parts of the uk – in particular those who can’t afford or find difficult modern internet banking and find even quite large bank branches in reasonably sized market towns closing down.
Time the Lib Dem’s came up with solutions to what is a growing problem.
“Much of the messianic stuff flopped; Apple Newton, Juicero, Google Glass, ‘internet of things’, TI99, Segway, Quicktake, and Pippin. In the UK we had our own Sinclair C5 car and the One Per Desk.”
But the Apple Newton (hand held tablet), C5 (electric cars) and One per Desk (desktop PC where you access all your information and communciations) all kind of exist now in differently named forms so did kind of happen.
(As an aside – my Dad worked for ICL and we had an OPD at home and I can see why they never caught on….. 🙂
‘Be sceptical about futurology’ might be a good slogan, whether it’s the brave new world of a future socialist paradise, a Britain with no foreigners, AI solving all our problems without human intervention, Britcard stopping ‘illegal people’ from doing anything (what could possibly go wrong?) , or a CO2-free planet (ie no more fizzy drinks or human breathing).
Two lovely LDV readers emailed me with answers to the (implicit) quiz. Yes one of the authors of the allegedly Trotsykite ‘The Socialist Alternatives’ publication (advocating ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in a future socialist paradise).
The Socialist Alternatives, was supported by the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency and other such radical anti-democratic groups.
Yes …Kier Starmer
As our future seems to depend on constant growth and most of the dosh going to the very few; I don’t hold out much improvement for the “masses” .
I’m afraid, before that; we will run out of “Earth” the way we are going.
@Clive “ As our future seems to depend on constant growth”
I disagree, I think many believe constant growth is required and thus desirable, and for some it is so important that it should either sideline or ride roughshod over all other considerations. In the context of Paul’s piece, IT, ie. Our ability to process large amounts of information quickly, has been at the heart of much of the transformation in our economy, the problem is that people believe the economy is IT, not what IT facilitates.ie. The growing of crops, the production of goods etc.
What matters is making the correct decisions now. The future is unknown and mostly a figment of our imagination. This is best done by being as aware as possible of our present circumstances and having access to that unique intelligence that make us human.