From The Baffler, January 2:
In David Fincher’s most mainstream film, The Social Network, an aggrieved ex of Mark Zuckerberg tells him that “the internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.” Disappearing ink perhaps, given how difficult it has become to search for useful or accurate information, let alone its source, amid the hallucinatory derangements of artificial intelligence. Media literacy has never been more important. Society has never been lazier.
For the past few months, I’ve been researching how science fiction has been used as a guide for predicting the future. This has included reading interviews and speeches, the testimony of would-be prophets. Naturally, certain quotes pop up like weeds—but, in the case of the more platitudinal selections, no one can seem to agree on who actually said them. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” was either coined by Danish physicist Niels Bohr or mythic Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. It’s entirely possible both men did, in fact, say some variation of the quote, though it’s more likely that Bohr, who was forty years older, said it first. But then again, he may not have said it at all.
The origin of the less elegant but more popular “We can predict everything, except the future” is similarly elusive. In 2012, user1202136 on the Stack Exchange forum for English etymology asked about the quote’s source, a question that’s been viewed four thousand times. The highest-rated answer, provided by a user going by Sven Yargs—who, according to his profile, has answered 3,444 other questions—is exhaustive in its detail: “The earliest instance of that approximate wording that I could find in a Google Books search is from David Redburn, ‘The ‘Graying’ of the World’s Population,’ in Social Gerontology (1998): ‘An oft-stated demographer’s joke comments, ‘it is easy to predict everything except the future’ and while this is demographic humor, or lack of it, it does relate the trepidation with which population specialists approach projections.’”
This is the first in a string of around ten related usages or permutations of the quotation that Yargas offers, two of which include testimony from people who purport, for instance, that Bohr and Berra often used it, along with a former New Zealand prime minister, a former manager of the Yankees, and a historian of Protestantism. Many of the examples utilize that nifty linguistic distancing from fact that accompanies family legends: “As so-and-so always said . . .” Yargas sagely concludes that the problem isn’t who said it but who didn’t. User1202136’s question, accidentally philosophical in its simple quest for attribution, yielded an equally philosophical answer. In the process, another idiom seems to emerge: We can repeat anything, but we can’t source it.
There’s been endless discussion over what the political turmoil of recent years might mean for the future of the country, for art: Has the future finally arrived? Have we regressed into the past? Is the arrow of time also the arrow of progress? In tandem, there’s been renewed interest in written works, specifically science fiction novels, from previous centuries that were seemingly accurate in their predictions. Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) was an early predictor of the submarine, while Albert Robida’s Electric Life (1890) foresaw the television, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth (1975) imagined the search engine.
But, really, there’s no point debating the accuracy of these prophecies. Authoritarian governments, divided nations, media-addled citizens, dazzling technological conveniences—limited ingredients, different dishes. In 2022, a critic for the Guardian wrote that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale “arose out of an acute sense of the then-present; she was responding to nuggets of misogynistic authoritarianism cropping up in the news.” Hannah Sage Kay writes in The Los Angeles Review of Books about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “It’s consequently easy to marvel at Star Trek for its prescience . . . though what DS9 foretold was not a far-off future of technological advancement but instead a grim allegory of the present and immediate future.”
It’s not accuracy of circumstance that matters so much as an accuracy of feeling; audiences crave allegories. At odds with the outspoken desire for that which is novel and original in art, audiences also have a hunger for the familiar or at least the spectacularly plausible. If the future can’t be predicted, then maybe it can be gamed out, run through a series of thought experiments. This doesn’t mean that the task of prediction goes away. Nor that science fiction is merely a remix of elements. Rather, in lieu of concrete knowledge about what may come, something like comfort is achieved when the absurdity of the real begins to look like the far-fetched What If of the imaginary.
Maybe there’s some perverse pleasure in saying: “There are no surprises.” Literary critic Mark McGurl writes in his book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon that, according to the company, “all fiction is genre fiction in that it caters to a generic desire.” That desire is one of endless repetition, a “demand to be read a favorite story again and again.” It’s not hard to believe that readers harbor dreams of apocalypse and ruin prophesied like a trial run for reality, authored and sanctioned as a possible version to contend with, a balm against the unknown.....
....MUCH MORE
We'll have more on this topic over the next few weeks. Events are beginning to seem untethered enough that, just as the #1 market letter in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 was Arch Crawford's, which see: "Investing: "Throwing Out the Rule Book" (The best Performing Investment Letter is by an Astrologer)", so it might be worthwhile to, if not think outside the box at least expand the box's dimensions.
And it's not just me. The U.S. Army has been asking SciFi writers to develop scenarios for them for a while now.
From the blog of the U.S. Army's Mad Scientist Laboratory:
April 2022 - 395. Going Boldly: Military Thinking with Science Fiction
December 2021 - 369. Alternate Futures 2050: A Collection of Fictional Wartime Vignettes
June 2019 - 154. Takeaways from the Mad Scientist Science Fiction Writing Contest 2019
June 2019 - 153. Critical Projection: Insights from China’s Science Fiction
March 2019 - 132. Science Fiction’s Hidden Codes
February 2019 - 124. Mad Scientist Science Fiction Writing Contest 2019
November 2025 - 553. A Canticle for Krizhevsky (Part 2)
And many more.
No word on whether they've consulted Arch.
