[extropy-chat] Futures Past

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Greg Burch <gregburch at gregburch.net> wrote:

> Since I was old enough to read, I've been engaged by projections
> about the future.  My favorite parts of the set of children's
> encyclopedias we had in the early 1960s were those that provided
> projections about the future. They showed me such wonderful visions:
> Atomic-powered cars! Cities under the sea!  Vacations on the Moon!
> All this would come to be by the time I would be the age my parents
> were then.  Well now I am that age and we know what happened to all
> of those glossy futures.
> 
> But somehow, I never seem to learn.  Seven years ago, we had a
> discussion here on the List about what we called "near-term
> projections" for the future to c. 2015.  I gathered together some of
> the ideas in that discussion and put them in what I called a
> "futurist time capsule."  Here it is:
> 
>        http://www.gregburch.net/writing/NearTerm.htm
> 
> It makes for interesting and, in many instances, painful reading. 
> Bear in mind that this was the vision some of us had in the Spring of
> 1998.  We were surfing at the zenith of the 1990s Bubble.  The
> Collapse of the Bubble, 911, Enron, Columbia – all were in the
> future.
> 
> What do you take away from looking back on looking forward?

Learn to keep your predictions to yourself, cause you never know what
government nudge is going to see your predictions as both accurate and
a threat to their status quo power. Neal Stephenson, for example, got a
little to loud and widely heard on his predictions of the demise of the
dollar and the Federal Reserve with the rise of widespread cryptography
and ubiquitous door to door fiber optic. They tried to stop crypto, but
wound up stopping the ubiquitous fiber throught to Communications
Reform Act. Given the amount of capital sunk into global backbones in
expectation of ubiquitous fiber to the last mile, it was inevitable
that Greenspans complaints of "irrational exhuberance" would tip the
economy on its side. This is one reason why I refuse to stop lecturing
extropians to not ignore politics: you may not be interested in it, but
it is interested in you. Enron and the bubble collapse were the same
event.

An extropian future is not inevitable, it can be legislated out of
existence or even possibility. Refuse to politick at your own peril,
and learn to keep your secrets.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation:
http://constitutionpark.blogspot.com
Personal/political blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


	
		
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