Quote:
Originally Posted by jmecklenborg
I read somewhere awhile back that American architecture, interior design, industrial design, etc., was much more experimental and aggressive when the culture, overall, was thought to be much more conservative. Now we live in a world where many social norms have been relaxed, but building design, city planning, landscaping, and industrial design are much more conservative.
There is little that is "futuristic" about any new car or really anything. The Tesla cybertruk seems like a 1970s/early 80s "Tron" idea of the future. New popular music seems, overwhelmingly, to sound like the worst stuff from the 1980s.
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I think that's mostly true and there's a couple of reasons that I can think of for it. Perhaps the biggest one is simply that a lot of the engineering and manufacturing technologies that we use today we're introduced - or at least popularized - in the early to mid 20th century. Things like steel framed high-rises and skyscrapers, window walls, and curved car/train metal body panels, etc. Once new technologies are introduced there's a flurry of experimentation over the following decades to see all the different ways that can be used. Then things settle down a bit once most of the possibilities have been explored. The design of the typical passenger car today would have been a wild and radical design concept 50 years ago with the swooping aerodynamic body lines, elongated headlights, etc. But they're not radical now because they're so ubiquitous. Kind of like with biological evolution which is driven by genetic mutations. When a particular mutation occurs it's very bizarre but when it becomes successful it's then very common place and no longer unusual. In the case of industrial and architectural design, we experimented for decades including with many radical ideas and some of those ideas stuck and became the norm.
The other issue is that futurism is often a fundamentally conservative pursuit. It often involves a society extrapolating its current thought process into the future as if they're right about everything, they know everything important, and they just need to keep doing what they're doing but more of it. The most popular futurism tends to reject fundamental changes in philosophy. Basically people see their present-day society as being the foundation from which something larger is built without considering the possibility that the future will need a whole new, fundamentally different foundation. So for instance, a society that is in love with cars after their fairly recent widespread adoption will envision society as being based around cars but just more so. Flying cars with adapted 60s styling, cities with multi-level expressways running through them, everything being accessible to drive through etc. And even futuristic public transit is based on an auto-oriented format with a high quality suburban commuter system meant to shuttle affluent suburbanites long distances between a CBD and their leafy suburban dwellings. They haven't yet experienced the major drawbacks of an automobile based philosophy so there's no reason to believe anything will fundamentally change.
And that's really the ethos of Modernism itself which was basically society dominated by enlightenment before the prevalence of Postmodernism. Modernism included the belief that rationality and science were these incredibly powerful god-like tools that would set humanity apart from nature and allow us to be dominant and separate from it. It was the idea that as humans advance and progress, we will be further and further from a state of nature and increasingly in a separate elevated existence that isn't to beholden to the limitations of nature. Almost like a reversal of the "born again" process of Christianity. Instead of accepting a faith-based deity as our "lord and savior" unlocking an enlightened utopian future, it was accepting rationality as our lord and saviour which unlocked an enlightened utopian future. Modernism basically just took the same mindset and made it secular by substituting God for science and technology. So the Modernism basically retained the overall framework and just substituted something irrational and faith-based like belief in a higher power with something rational and systematic like a scientific pursuit of knowledge. You can see this in the architecture and planning ideas of people like La Corbusier.
But then as time went on we gained more maturity as a species and realize that true advancement means being in balance with nature rather than at odds with it. And also that the "end of history" mindset which suggests that we know all the important basics and just have to continue on our clear and obvious trajectory was also tossed out once we realized that evolution - both biological and technological - is not teleological. There is no predetermined endpoint, there's no guarantee of continual advancement, and advancement itself does not necessarily look one particular way. Something can be advanced by being very complex technology or it can be advanced by using simple, age-old processes that are more sustainable. We started to notice how that previous view of technology as substitute for religion was flawed as these are both based on irrational faith. The whole premise of anything - religious or scientific - leading to some type of magical utopian fantasyland was unrealistic. As a result, a lot of what looks the most aggressive and experimental is actually the most conservative in that while it features new, flashy content, it actually favours an old framework such as one favouring more technological complexity. You can get a sense of that progression by comparing steampunk to cyberpunk and solarpunk. All of these punk genres are forms of futurism that take a dissenting view of prevailing societal frameworks only for them to be increasingly integrated into the mainstream.
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