Nostalgia is not only popular in culture and politics – also in areas in which reference to the past is least appropriate: utopias and visions. Reminiscing about a better future is called retrofuturism. And the aesthetics of a retrofuturism from the 60s to 80s can be observed everywhere.
The future of the past – that is, our present – is not what many apparently hoped. This is not unusual either, because visions of the future are also characterized by the fact that most of them never come true. Every era tends to exaggerate the current technical developments and to extrapolate them in a linear way, thus coming to wrong conclusions.
Friederike Kalz (kalz-fotografie.de) )
Stephan Dörner is the former online editor-in-chief of t3n and is now managing director and communications consultant at communications consultancy fph.
Why Bill Gates was right
Shortly after the breakthrough of the steam engine, contemporaries imagined a future in which everyday life would be driven by steam. The steam engine was without a doubt a turning point – this was correctly recognized shortly after its breakthrough. However, everyday life dominated by ubiquitous steam engines did not follow. Because there were other, better technologies that shape the industrialized world to this day. Even the “space age” expected in the 1960s, in which space travel was to become as commonplace as a trip to Italy, never materialized.
The digital revolution is different from steam engines and space travel. The implications of technology in most 80’s and 90’s future visions are not exaggerated. Computers and the Internet have profoundly changed not only the economy, but also our everyday lives.
In this case, with a certain technical expertise, it wasn’t so wrong to continue the development and derive a future from it – social and societal consequences excluded. Chips got faster, cheaper, smaller; Internet bandwidth has become larger, increasingly mobile, available almost everywhere and accessible to more and more people.
Based on this technical development, in the first wave of the Internet in the 1990s, something like real estate portals could be forecast – as Bill Gates did, for example, in his book published in 1995 “The Road Ahead” did – was logical. The great art at that time was just to bet on the right horse: will Amazon win the race or one of the numerous other online book platforms at the time? Will Google prevail against heavyweights like Altavista and Yahoo with its technically new approach? Will Microsoft be able to save its desktop monopoly in the mobile world, or will another player like Apple and Google win the race, who rely entirely on mobile apps without any ballast?
“You promised me Mars colonies, instead I got Facebook”
Contrary to what many Internet optimists predicted in the 1990s, many believe that a decentralized, more democratic and better world has not emerged from this. Released in 1999 Cluetrain Manifesto promised an Internet-driven world in which Hyperlinks undermine hierarchies and prophesied human communities with discourses “made out of human conversations about human concerns”. A look at Facebook or Twitter today is enough to come to the conclusion: That was at least optimistic, maybe even naive.
Instead, there followed an unprecedented concentration of power among a few large platforms and a deep polarization of the public. Civilian manners are the exception in the discourse on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. A well-known cover of the US edition of MIT Technology Review, featuring the face of US astronaut Buzz Aldrin, states: “You promised me mars colonies. Instead I got Facebook” (“You promised me Mars colonies, instead I got Facebook”).
