Lost Futures and Imagined Pasts

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, journal entry dated 1843 (Papirer IV A 164)

The Future is a Choice

Strategy requires a north star, a vision, a future condition that we seek to achieve. It isn’t a prediction. It’s a choice.

While visions are subjective, predictions are intended to be objective. But choices sneak in. Every forecast is built on assumptions about how past patterns will (or won’t) repeat. After two decades helping public sector transportation agencies build visions, forecasts, and scenarios, I can confirm predicting the future of sociotechnical systems is hard. The more complex and interconnected the system, the longer the timeline, the harder it gets. Run all the Montecarlo analysis you want then a global pandemic upends everything.

The Persistence of the Jetsons Future

If you’ve ever been through one of these visioning exercises you know that someone, probably an engineer, will invariably ask for a “jetsons-like” rendering. Show us the flying cars. Meanwhile, it can take us three years to go through the public review process to paint a bus lane.

Why does a one-season cartoon from 1962 still haunt our imagined future? In the Jetsons, sky-cars lift you above traffic, robots bow to your whims, and at a push of a button a roast chicken or tomato soup will appear for dinner. Progress lifts us up to the heavens in limitless growth. That kind of techno-optimism seems like kitsch to many of us today, and yet we’re still hungry for it. Nostalgia isn’t only a longing for an imagined past; it’s also a longing for lost futures.

We Were Promised Flying Cars

We see this nostalgia for a lost future in Peter Thiel’s famous lament, “we were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” This 2011 manifesto (it’s been updated online) blames regulation, short‑term investment time horizons, and cultural malaise for half a century of technological stagnation. Whether you buy the diagnosis or not, Thiel names the wound: digital life sprints ahead while the physical world slumps behind.

Some of this perceived lack of progress in “real world” technologies, may be traced to dematerialization. Today each dollar of GDP requires fewer raw resources and less energy to produce. Email replaces mail, streaming replaces CDs and DVDs, remote work replaces commutes, and so on. Material progress has become less material.

When I watch an “old” movie from the 1990s or 2000s with my kids they giggle at the size of the monitors in the offices, mock the landlines or flip phones, and cringe at the sexist lines. One of my favorite movies of all time is “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.” I watch it every Thanksgiving with my family. In that 1987 film, the most dated visual cues are pay phones, the smoking section on the plane, and the reliance on paper tickets and cash. Otherwise the planes, trains, and automobiles are all quite familiar.

Imagined Futures

Former Transportation Secretary Buttigieg likes to say filmmakers use mobility technology as the first visual cue that we are in the future. Indeed, sci fi films have mirrored our societal dreams for decades. In the ’60s we get the cheery sky‑cars of The Jetsons (1962) and the egalitarian starships of Star Trek (1966). By the ’80s it’s Blade Runner (1982) and Robocop —neon smog and predatory police drones and robots. The dot‑com high gives us Minority Report (2002): mag‑lev pods scaling glass towers, maybe our last mainstream tech utopia outside of a Disney cartoon like Zootopia (2016). Then comes minimalism: Her (2013), where transit is whisper‑quiet and gadgets dissolve into beige walls, followed by the welded weaponized caravans of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The curve bends from buoyant pluralism, to silent detachment, to outright collapse.

There are a few counter-examples. Black Panther (2018) offered an Afrofuturist technotopia in Wakanda, and Barbie (2023) delivered a candy-colored pluralist utopia in Barbie Land. Both films critique the mainstream arc rather than extend it.

Fascist Futurist Aesthetics

Consider the cyber truck. The name screams retro-future, a 1980s polygon come to life in a dystopian present. Wrapped in faux armor, it promises “apocalypse-ready” performance. It offers a fetishized masculine revolt against the perceived constraints of the regulated, domesticated, urbanized world. It’s a simulacrum, a sci fi move prop brought to life. The aesthetic is so over the top it tips into camp, but this is precisely what Elon Musk is selling, a cosplay of a lost future.

In recent years many of the tech titans responsible for translating imagined futures into real technologies have tilted hard right. Peter Thiel is the godfather of Silicon Valley’s fascist‑libertarian flirtation, but Musk has become its carnival barker, promising to drag sci‑fi fantasies and right wing memes into the real world.

Umberto Eco, in his essay Ur-Fascism warned that fascism is “fundamentally theatrical”. It rejects nuanced critical thought and offers the humiliated everyman a shortcut to heroism through domination and danger. This is the addled fantasy of the cyber truck driver.

Rational, All Too Rational

So if the right has claimed the sci‑fi spotlight, what’s the left‑of‑center counter‑vision? “Progressive” usually cues social advance: a pluralist Barbieland where everyone gets a dreamhouse. But what does progressive technology look like?

The Biden Administration big play was electric cars. It fits U.S. car culture, keeps the auto industry humming, and cuts tail‑pipe emissions. But in a way electric cars are just diet coke, more of the same with fewer calories and less flavor. They perpetuate a car culture that drives congestion, sprawl, and obesity.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in their new book Abundance, open with a more comprehensive progressive vision for the future. They describe a world with plentiful housing, cheap clean energy, and robust transit all produced sustainably and ethically. Like Thiel, Thompson and Klein argue that America’s sclerotic institutions and regulations are critical barriers to real world technical progress. Unlike Thiel however they argue that we need to build the capacity of institutions to support technological progress rather than burn them down to the ground.

It’s a welcome discussion, and it’s spurred a much needed conversation on the left, but it’s a little plain. Listening to Klein describe his vision for lab-grown meat leading to an abundance of ethically sourced protein, I couldn’t help but think that it was maybe a little too rational. It was Star Trek the Next Generation in an age of Mad Max. Where’s the spice? Where’s the spectacle?

Finding My Jetsons

Then I remembered Portlandia’s opening.

Do you remember the '90s?

You know, people were talking about getting piercing's and getting tribal tattoos.

And people were singing about saving the planet and forming bands.

There's a place where that idea still exists...

And I've been there.

Where?

Portland.

Oregon?

Yeah.

_____

It's like Portland's almost an alternative universe. It's like Gore won. The Bush Administration never happened.

Exactly.

In Portland, it's almost like cars don't exist, right?

Yes!

You ride bikes or double-Decker bikes.

They ride unicycles.

They ride the tram.

They ride skateboards.

Yes!

Dream of the '90s is alive in Portland

Oh, Portland! May your spirit live on in DIY frankenbikes, guerrilla bus lanes, rainbow crosswalks, café tables squatting on former parking spots. These small acts of joyful revolt are the seeds of progressive transportation future – one that doesn’t require bullet-proof glass. Where humans can be together joyfully, absurdly, and peacefully in streets emancipated from two tons of steel loneliness.

I had found my Jetsons.