Virginia Postrel: Why Neal Stephenson, Peter Thiel Are Wrong About the Future

Former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel
has a great piece up at
Bloomberg View. She notes recent books by science fiction
writer Neal Stephenson and libertarian venture capitalist Peter
Thiel that “lament the demise of grand 20th-century dreams and the
optimistic culture they expressed.” Cue Apollo program
nostalgia.

But as Postrel shows, the idea that we were somehow more upbeat
about the future when the baby boomers were still wet behind the
ears isn’t ahistorical:

Americans in the mid-20th century were not in fact sanguine
about the future. Anxieties about the march of technology were
common. In February 1961, a statistics-filled Time magazine
feature warned that automation was wiping out jobs
and, worse, “What worries many job experts more is that automation
may prevent the economy from creating enough new jobs.” At least
nine episodes of the original “Star Trek” series were about
threatening or out-of-control computers. (Still others involved
menacing androids or ominous artificial intelligences whose exact
nature was vaguely defined.) Movies such as “Colossus: The Forbin
Project” (1970) and, of course, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)
picked up the scary-computer theme. Nor was the space program as
universally popular as we nostalgically imagine. Americans liked
the moon race, but only in July 1969—the month of the moon
landing—did a majority
deem the Apollo program “worth the cost.”

Thiel writes about the need to recapture a “definite future,”
one in which specific tasks are undertaken that can concretely
succeed or fail (his book Zero to One, which I’m reading, is
genuinely interesting). Stephenson is calling for “more interesting
Apollo-like projects” and fiction that celebrates the bounty of
possible futures. Postrel counters:

Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in
technological progress. It reflects it. Stephenson and Thiel are
making a big mistake when they propose a vision of the good future
that dismisses the everyday pleasures of ordinary people—that, in
short, leaves out consumers. This perspective is particularly odd
coming from a fiction writer and a businessman whose professional
work demonstrates a keen sense of what people will buy. People are
justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on
those who won’t directly reap their benefits. They’re even more
wary if they believe that the changes of the past have brought only
hardship and destruction. 

Postrel writes that people in the
mid-20th century believed the future would be better than the
present because they believed their present was better
than the past. They either had emerged from a pretty brutal recent
past or the memories of just how rotten things had been were kept
alive via historical consciousness and other forms of storytelling.
In many ways, we’ve lost that sensibility despite ongoing
improvements that are both large and small in our daily
lives. 

Storytelling does have the potential to rekindle an ideal of
progress. The trick is not to confuse pessimism with sophistication
or, conversely, to demand that optimism be naive. The past, like
the present and the future, was made by complicated and imperfect
people. Recapturing a sense of optimism requires stories that
accept the ambiguities of history—and of life—while recognizing
genuine improvements.

Postrel also makes a compelling case for the TV show The
Knick, which chronicles “decidedly flawed characters living in
an exciting but brutal period and improving surgery through clever,
risky and—by today’s standards—often-high-handed medical
procedures. 

The whole piece is well worth reading.