MISCmedia for 11/23/99
Tomorrow's Still Not What
It Used To Be

AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I'd finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy's (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.

In it, a "refined" young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who'd revived him (and the doc's comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.

The chief feature of Bellamy's future is a singular, government-run "Industrial Army" that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).

Some other aspects of Bellamy's ideal state:

• Our species is still referred to as "Man," and its chief players as "Men." The big future benefits for women: One-stop shopping (in government-run warehouse-order stores); government-run restaurants called "public kitchens" (eliminating the need to cook); and housework-reducing technology.

• Racism apparently doesn't exist, but the narrator apparently meets no nonwhite people in his future journeys and doesn't seem to think that's worth noting.

• The other big-industrial nations have adopted the same economic-governmental system; and "an international council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members of the union, and their joint policy toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions."

• Instead of cash, everybody carries a punch card (called by the then-novel name of a "credit card"), nontransferrable.

• Music is fed into every room of the home via telephone wires from central studios, where live musicians play edifying classical selections 24 hours a day.

• Consumer goods are distributed by hyper-efficient pneumatic tubes, which connect all the buildings in the major cities (and, the doctor promises to the narrator, will soon be built out to farm communities).

• Efficient calculating and industrial forecasting are a vital functions of the Industrial Army, but no computational devices are mentioned.

• With no poverty or homelessness, there's almost no crime. The apparently only major taboo is "laziness" (refusal to perform one's assigned job). Those convicted of this are detained and fed bread and water until they repent.

• Despite total government control of the means-O-production, ideas and arts are not censored. Rather, visual-art projects are voted by citizens (in what sounds alarmingly like today's "public art" bureaucracy). Book and periodical publishers must raise their own startup costs (the closest thing to "capitalism" permitted in the system), ensuring artistic freedom while discouraging "mere scribblers."

• And most importantly, just like in most utopias, Bellamy's "Age of Concert" doesn't just demand personal uniformity, it claims that'd be the inevitable result of everybody getting together and figuring out that a hyper-rational, planned-economy society's the only way to go.

One person's utopia, someone I can't remember once wrote, is another person's reign of terror. You don't have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks' dystopian nightmares within Bellamy's utopian dreams.

Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the "human face" experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems--uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.

Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would've liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that's reality for you.

TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.

ELSEWHERE:

• A round, yellow icon celebrates 20 years of conspicuous consumption; but this story (found by MacSurfer's Headline News) doesn't mention the secret behind Pac-Man's status as the first video game many women liked to play. As punk-rock cartoonist John Holmstrom once noted, "Some women couldn't identify with games about shooting and other obvious male metaphors. But Pac-Man engulfs its opponents--the female sexual function...."

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Imagining a newspaper for the Net age.
• Some of today's more perverse, ephemeral "art forms."
• I still kvetch about arrogant San Francisco; but is Seattle now no better?
• Wacky emails received here lately, plus other fun short stuff.
• Can you tell me how to get to Coronation Street?
• Guys who fight aren't necessarily copying Fight Club.
• The history of trying to get away from it all.
• Does postmodern fiction trash old hierarchies or just build new ones; can't we just get past PoMo yet; and can we imagine a more proactive future?
• Ron Harris's journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.
• A hipper-than-thou magazine complains when corporations don't love it; while the zine Ben Is Dead dies.
• Election '99 pitted both prog-leftys and rabble-rightys against the corporate center.
• Not-so-guilty musical pleasures.
• Could Blair Witch be considered a Dogme 95 film?
• The joys of oral surgery.
• The origins of manga/anime storytelling.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, monfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• The origin and future of MISCmedia