09-10-2022, 09:55 PM
(01-27-2021, 02:30 PM)sbarrera Wrote: That's a great video to watch, it was made the year I was born. It has that High Era spirit of belief in progress, and an assumption that there would always be institutional support to make it possible for the architects of modernity to realize their Big Visions. I loved the commentator insisting that the cost of utilities would force the vast majority of the population into urban hives. Instead, we've spread out. Everyone has their own vision. No one wants to live in house full of plastic furniture. But some of the tech they predict did indeed come to pass, some more advanced (computers, telecommunications) than they imagined, and others less so (robots, 3d printing).
So what went wrong? Except that we don't quite have the robots or the in-house food factory we have most of this technology -- or better. 3D printing is closer than you think, and I can see how it will be used. If we like how a cell phone works but get tired of the outward appearance we can replace the outer cover. Instead of the teletype we have more versatile printers.
Economic inequality has intensified, and that has slowed much of the technological paradise that this video suggests. Deeply in hock to landlords and to creditors, many people are working thirty-hour-a-week jobs... but two of them -- for bare survival. Such was a political decision to solve inflation by ensuring that people are obliged to participate in the production and servicing of what the economy needs, but to pay them so little that they cannot participate fully in the consumer economy. Such is exploitation in the form of neoliberalism, and it has colored the lives of a huge chunk of the American workforce. The elite dream of a workforce managed brutally and compelled to live on the brink of starvation is all too common in history.
Obviously, housing is inadequate, and those "ticky-tacky" houses from the 1960's are being cut up into apartments that will become slums in their own right if they are not such yet. But remember that the elites are having McMansions built on quarter-acre lots. and you can imagine what the cost is for servicing them with roads and utilities. Such crowds out the possibility of affordable housing. If anything the tract house can be replaced with a prefabricated unit (I have heard of people making houses out of shipping containers. Work must be done to make them livable, but if one is handy one might get something comfortable).
Something the size of the tract houses of the 1960's (they are adequate for all but large families or those addicted to conspicuous consumption) can be fully or partially manufactured. Electrical wiring can be built in along with access points for data and other signals. A broadcast antenna and a satellite receiver might be built in. Toilets and water supplies will be built on standardized foundations (although the toilets and sinks might be installed soon after the building is put in place.
A bland outer surface is perfect for painting whatever mural one wants. People will likely be under pressure to plant trees or gardens -- hey, I'm looking at the conformist 2030's, and certain forms of aesthetic austerity will not be acceptable.
Plastic furniture? I doubt it. Wood is still quite durable. So is leather, and if a giant turtle can live for over 100 years without a change of leather (I have felt the skin of a snapping turtle, and it feels just like leather -- the shell feels like wood), so can leather.
Technology fits human nature and the political milieu or it will either never establish itself or it will die.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.