Miley Cyrus’s outfits at the VMAs kind of make me despair for humanity – but to explain why, I first have to spoil the ending of a 31-year-old short story. Bear with me, please.
The story is Ray Bradbury’s The Toynbee Convector, and it goes like this: a time traveler appears bearing news of an improved future, where prosperous and satisfied humans live peacefully in harmony with nature. The traveler has brought back films and documents showing how it was achieved, which help the people of the present accept that the world he’s describing is true. Inspired by the advances he describes, and emboldened by the traveler’s promise that in his time they have already succeeded, they gradually begin to improve the world. One hundred years later, the man (still alive, of course; what’s a utopian future without longevity?) reveals that it was all a hoax. He had never traveled in time. He had faked his story and his evidence, all so he could trick humanity into improving the future by convincing them it was inevitable.
This would probably not work in real life for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that “humanity” rarely does anything monolithically. If most of us came together to realize a vision of our golden future, we’d surely still have several vocal (and armed) contingents opining loudly that the golden future is too PC, too communist or too controlled by Illuminati lizard people. But it’s true that we humans do better with a road map and a sense of direction and purpose. With a plan in place, we’re a bunch of infighting bunglers, but without a plan we’re mainly agents of random violent chaos.
And yet, for the most part, the stories we tell ourselves and each other about the future are grim at best. We have more interest in stories that highlight the worst elements of the present day by envisioning the dire dystopias they could slippery-slope us into. That’s got cultural value, for sure – and it’s fun to read or watch. But it leaves us without a Toynbee-style model that feels achievable and real.
It seems we’re most likely to feel like we’re “living in the future” when current events mimic our fictional conceptions. It’s rare, though not unheard of, to suddenly notice and revel in the fact that you carry a tiny, near-omniscient brain that is also a camera that is also a personal arcade in your purse at all times. More common is noticing, as I did the other day, that every one of Miley Cyrus’s VMA costume changes looked like a background character in gonzo cyberpunk comic Transmetropolitan – or, if you’re not familiar with that masterpiece, basically any 1970s science fiction movie. “Oh great,” I thought. “The future is coming to pass, and it’s just as racist and colonialist and self-obsessed and fatuous and myopic as we always imagined.”
Retrofuturist cut-outs, see-through gumdrop dresses, and stolen hairstyles are not the only resonances we notice between our dystopian imaginings and our actual world. I’ve heard and made frequent comparisons between Tinder, or its clones, and the panoptical “äppärät” in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Only a few weeks ago, many of us had the horrific realization that the Virginia shooting would not have been out of place in the dark, satiric near-future of the TV show Black Mirror. I hear the refrain over and over from my friends and on social media: is this what it’s like living in the future? I do not like this future. This is not the future I want.
But we don’t really have a vision of a different future – at least not one we believe in. Maybe it’s too much to hope that we can come up with one, that we can really embrace an imagined future where our gadgets make us more connected instead of more isolated, where the internet is a force for good instead of a platform for sociopathy, where our silly outfits are free of cultural appropriation. Maybe we’re already too cynical, and too hungry for fictions that play to that cynicism. But there’s a chance we’d have an easier time seeing our way to a functional future if we had some idea what that might look like. Bright Mirror, anyone?
