A little nostalgic for the future

One of the great things about growing up in the ’50s and early ’60s is that it seemed a pretty optimistic time — except for the part about fall-out shelters and irradiated snow from all those nuclear tests. My brother Ed had a subscription to Popular Mechanics just for the tantalizing visions of the future it always offered: We’d be living in geodesic domes. We’d have flying cars and video phones and home robots.

Now it’s 2011. We’ve got the iPhone 4 and the Roomba. Two out of four ain’t bad. You don’t see many geodesic domes except for Epcot, or at the end of certain back roads in Montana, where aging hippies constructed them out of scrounged lumber and plywood and now wonder what they were thinking. Still waiting for those flying cars, but somehow I doubt that’s going to happen. Most people can’t even drive properly; handling an aircraft is a good deal more complex. In America, nothing catches on unless it’s simple.

The future ain’t what it used to be. To illustrate, here’s a couple of videos I’m stealing borrowing from Singularity Hub. I like them for many reasons, including the dippy background music. You’ve also got to appreciate the assumption of unlimited energy and the warm aesthetic qualities of molded plastic.

That one is actually pretty prescient, foreseeing e-commerce and online banking. Then there’s the sexist bit about the poor husband paying for all his wife’s online purchases. In the early ’60s, who could have predicted that one day women would make almost as much as men?

Moving on, we visit the House of the Future, which thankfully never caught on. You have to give Monsanto credit for trying, though. If every American had demanded a house like this one, Monsanto might have grown into a shadowy multinational corporation with the power to dictate U.S. policy. Oh, wait …