The world of tomorrow – Works in Progress

As a child, I felt lucky to be born in 1960. I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my life in the magical new century. By the time I was a teenager, however, the spell had broken. The once-enticing future morphed into a place of pollution, overcrowding, and ugliness. Limits replaced expansiveness. Glamour became horror. Progress seemed like a lie.

Much has been written about how and why culture and policy repudiated the visions of material progress that animated the first half of the twentieth-century, including a special issue of this magazine inspired by J Storrs Hall’s book Where Is My Flying Car? The subtitle of James Pethokoukis’s recent book The Conservative Futurist is ‘How to create the sci-fi world we were promised’. Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.