I understand most of the how, but I do not understand the why of reactionary/regressive sentimentality among so many self-described "futurologists," not just on :reddit-logo: but people I've met in real life while attending conferences of such enthusiasts, back when I was :LIB: and naive enough to believe that it was going to be a lot of talking about how to make Star Trek come true for everyone, not a trade expo where Department of Defense contractors show off their latest ways to control and murder people and creepy cultists find new billionaire gods to fill the void in themselves.
For all the talk of "singularities" and of unimaginable wonders that would change everything, there was this quaint and grotesque aesthetic sense that such an unknowable future would surely, totally, have all of the inherent capital contradictions of today (rich white men in charge) and nothing would fundamentally change in the culture except the billionaires living forever and the mass destruction of the environment to make more phones would spread into space. :biden-harbinger:
How could the speculative future, supposedly so wildly advanced and strange that life itself would be redefined and all old limitations would disappear, also be so stagnant, so stale, so conservative and so boring to imagine? :grillman:
See also :my-hero: 's tweets showing his futuristic dreams of... multi-lane highways for cars on Mars. :grillman:
I know the so-called "extropians" have been a publicly known thing since the 90s, but they didn't quite take over such conferences until their billionaire masters literally bought the venues in the early 2000s.
My best guess is the prevalent ideology itself was just early 1900s Italian Futurism all along with a new coat of paint that fooled me for years, particularly Italian Futurism's featured hatred and desire to enslave women, contempt for the humanities and the desire to burn down libraries and erase history itself in a grandiose display of arrogance and hubris.
How much of this, written roughly a century ago, sounds like it could have come out of an Epic G*mer rant in a CSGO chatbox?
We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/