The Future is Broke
A few years ago, I ran across a piece by a venture capitalist on the topic of climate technology. The piece’s cover image (above) showed a woman outside her single-family home, her electric SUV being charged under a photovoltaic canopy while wind turbines provided additional power. The woman stands triumphantly in front of her home, phone in hand, watching a package being delivered by a drone. This slick, sanitized, cartoonish vision of the future is probably what Marc Andreesen had in mind when he wrote the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” In this techno-optimist future, everything is new and shiny, people have everything they need, and everything is better, faster, and more sustainable than everything is now. Mining for the petroleum, cobalt, lithium, copper, silicon, and the other natural resources needed to make this future possible are presumably handled by nanobots. Waste streams from manufacturing and product disposal -old and discarded PV panels, wind turbines, data servers, smartphones, etc. -are also managed by nanobots. In fact, all of the future world’s hardest, currently-unsolved problems will be solved by nanobots, because there are no limits on what uninvented, fantasy technology can do. Needless to say, a nanobot-less future doesn’t fit with the techno-optimist’s vision. Without nanobots, the future will likely continue relying on the slave labor, overflowing landfills, and lethal levels of emissions that built today’s industrial-technological hellscape. It’s tough to be optimistic about these things.
The only people who could possibly buy this VC’s vision of the future are those who are blind to, or are shielded from the vast harm already inflicted by technology. They don’t see Chinese and Indian factory workers making subsistence wages, living and toiling in abysmal conditions manufacturing the tech. They don’t see the harms technology has exacted on the collective interpersonal and cognitive capabilities of humankind. They don’t see that everything humans manufacture gets old, breaks, is discarded, and must go somewhere -be it in a landfill, an ocean, or vaporized in the air. They can’t or won’t see these things because to do so would undermine their delusional visions of the future and, by extension, the value of their current work intended to create this future.
In November 2009, I was featured on the cover of the New York Times’ real estate section. The piece, entitled “ The Decline and Fall of the Bachelor Pad,’’ was about bachelors living in unorthodox housing arrangements as a response to the 2008 financial crisis. I was living in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse in which everything was in various states of disrepair and decay. Rather than apologize for my dilapidated home, I attempted to find meaning in it. From the Times’:
For Mr. Friedlander, his surroundings are an exercise in mastering a sort of Zen, “and not identifying with my apartment,” he explained, “being able to find peaceful existence no matter what kind of living situation.”
In contrast to popular notions about the nature of success, I was trying to promote a version of success that stood independent from acquiring a big house, fast car, lots of gadgets, etc. I had the sense that as the earth’s climate destabilizes and natural resources become more scarce and supply chains break down and economic and political structures collapse, basing success on the acquisition of new and shiny stuff would be increasingly difficult and futile. Much like the Japanese art of kintsugi, I wanted to promote an appreciation and aesthetic for the state of brokenness.
A couple years after the Times’ piece, I started working at the micro-apartment startup LifeEdited. In my role, the future of housing (and living) became my official area of focus. We designed and developed several prototype apartments, including my home, meant to demonstrate how design and technology could add a ton of function to relatively small spaces. LifeEdited’s millionaire CEO was a techno-booster, and unlike my busted Brooklyn apartment from the Times’, the LifeEdited prototype apartments were slick, new, and gadget filled. Our first apartment, dubbed LE1, was a complicated, white jewel box design that was near impossible to keep clean and rightly lambasted in another Times’ piece entitled “ Selling the Pared Down Life.’
I left LifeEdited in 2016 after realizing our fussy little apartments would never be a scalable housing solution. I started my own consultancy with a focus on the future of housing, mainly helping startups and developers with innovative housing solutions get their products and projects to market. I also worked with a couple of the world’s largest corporations in helping them grasp the future and how to be ready for it. In late 2018, one of these corporations hired me to write a white paper on the future of housing. But my research did not point to a future that looked anything like the VC’s idealized version. My research portended a future dominated by scorching temperatures, elevated seas, drenched coasts, droughted deserts, and tanked economies. In this broken, dirty, hot, wet, sick, and uncomfortable future, billions of migrants wander the world scrounging for leftover food, water, and materials. This is a future where survival, not convenience or technological optimization, will be the highest priority. In other words, the future of human civilization is a broken mess that resembles Mad Max far more than The Jetsons.
Originally published at https://deepfriedlander.substack.com.
