Comment by mandevil
9 days ago
I feel like a big problem in the modern world is the small scale of our dreams. Dreams drive us, they change the world. In 1865, French author Jules Verne decided to write a book to inspire people to dream big, impossible dreams. He decided to write a novel proving that humans could do anything- by describing how, if enough people worked together, they could journey all the way to the moon. This became one of the first hit books in a new genre, science fiction. Sure, plenty of people had written about travelling to the moon before- e.g. the Roman poet Lucian wrote of being sucked up into a giant waterspout and deposited on the moon- but Verne was the first to write at a level of detail that made is seem realistic, something that humans could do- e.g. he spends several pages discussing- with math- how, if you are in America and want to go into space, the coast of Florida is the right spot (he picked a spot two hundred km from Cape Canaveral). These stories are important. The fathers of rocketry in at least two different countries (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia and Hermann Oberth of Germany) were inspired by Verne (Goddard of the US was more inspired by H.G. Wells than Verne). They independently realized that you couldn't build a cannon (like Verne depicted) that could let humans survive and get to the moon, so they went into rocketry. Verne and H.G. Wells told stories that were the first step to changing the world.
And modern science fiction seems stuck in a dystopian rut. Most of the good sci-fi (and I enjoy things like the Murderbot Diaries) are largely dystopic. Hell, Star Trek- long the most utopian of sci-fi- is doing movies about Section 31 and whole seasons about android slave uprisings. No one is inspired to build a better future by "Don't create the Torment Nexus", they just get inspired to build the Torment Nexus.
Basically, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Thank you for reading my TED talk.
Star Trek has been hijacked by people who have no understanding whatsoever of the franchise's spirit. Perhaps this is a symptom of something deeper: not only are they unable to conceive of optimistic stories, they can't even imagine a dystopic original show. Instead, they resort to co-opting an existing franchise and disfiguring it.
Maybe this is an oversimplification, but optimism is gone from media because people are no longer optimistic about the future. For a long time, the next generation always just kind of assumed they'd have it better than the previous ones. Apart from a couple of terrible historic blips like world wars, of course. Everyone has kind of believed they'd live better lives than their parents. The Baby Boomers were the last generation that really felt that way, and it was by and large true for them. From there on, Gen-X knows already that they'll never live as good as their parents. Milleneals are finding out very quickly the same, the next generation is going to have it worse, and so on. So it's no big surprise that all of our media is doomer and pessimistic.
Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
> Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
It seems to me that it's the opposite. Stories are how we form our views of the world and our dreams for the future. Therefore if we want to have people who build towards things worthy of optimism, we should start by telling stories that inspire them to be optimistic.
Look at Star Trek - Roddenberry didn't go "well the world is hella racist so I guess the show should be too". He made the show reflect his vision for how we could live a better life, and people responded to that over time. I think we badly need the same thing today.
It's kind of a chicken and the egg, but I feel like 1966 with Vietnam, race riots across the US, the Cuban Missile Crisis only four years past, and everything else was hardly a time that people would have been optimistic.
But you had a guy who had been a bomber pilot in World War Two and flown combat missions against the Japanese, who desperately wanted to put a (gay) Japanese-American who had spent the war in an internment camp into his show, and a black woman (and have her kiss his white male lead star!), and later on, when people seemed to not be getting what he was trying to say, even added a good Russian character (played by an actual Russian-American). Because the point was to show, just like Verne a century earlier, that if truly all of humanity worked together, we could accomplish anything, for example travelling the stars. And so many people were inspired by his vision, and wanted to build his vision, to make his dreams real.
And nowadays the dreams that I see, both in stories and made manifest, seem drab and small and more than a little evil by comparison. And I do think that story-tellers (of whatever medium- very much including start-up founders) need to be aware of the power of their stories, that their myths become real, and have a responsibility to use that power for good and not for evil.
That “long time” is a blip on the historical timeline. Most of history is people expecting things to basically stay the same or to get worse.
We’re talking a few decades at a time in a few places scattered over a couple hundred years, maybe, if we mean the median person in that time and place.
The 20th century got a big optimism and productivity boost from finally all but ending cyclical famines, antibiotics, and vaccines, and most of the stuff since has been of far smaller consequence. We’re coming down off the brief high of Haber-Bosch and penicillin, and haven’t found another fix yet. Computers and the Internet ain’t it, so far.