Programmed By Fellas With Compassion And Vision
This future sucks.
My Brain Hotel has been vacant the last couple weeks. We took a family vacation to Colorado, which accomplished two objectives. First, I got to visit my mom, my sister, and her family. Second, it allowed all of us a brief respite from summer in Houston, the Swamp Ass Capitol of America.
And summers are only getting worse, here and everywhere else. And while 2025 has been relatively mild as Houston summers go (we didn’t hit 100 degrees until late July), that period where you can’t walk from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned car without needing to wring out your undies still lasts five months.
It’s no mystery why we’re here. While other countries and some States of the United variety have attempted to pivot from fossil fuels to renewables and use technology to address climate change, our own government is doing everything from staffing the EPA with idiot sycophants to dismantling climate research to repealing established scientific studies with the apparent (not unfounded) hope that we’ll eventually forget their findings when another trans athlete places 7th in a race.
We’re going backwards, in other words, and not just in the sense of denying established science.
We went to see The Fantastic Four: First Steps while we were on vacation, mostly because I didn’t like the (distinctly Colorado) optics of spending an entire day at a brewery with my teenage kids. And while Marvel appears to have ditched most of its “multiverse” bullshit following the latest Doctor Strange, Quantumania and Deadpool ❤️ Wolverine, or whatever, they still threw in an interesting twist by setting F4 on “Earth-828.”
For the benefit of those of you who played outside as kids, the rest of the MCU mostly takes place on Earth-616. This is how First Steps can — with a straight face — offer up a retro-futuristic setting where space travel (including faster-than-light), flying cars, and robotics all exist in that Earth’s equivalent of the 1960s. Earth-828’s Reed Richards is basically Tony Stark without the alcoholism or narcissism, though with similarly questionable facial hair.
First Steps wasn’t the first time I’d thought about the disconnect between the visions of the future we were offered and what we’ve ended up with, but it annoyed me all over again, which is exactly how you want to feel on vacation.
We’ve all seen the memes and the TikToks, or we’re just fans of a certain band. If you’ve spent any time awake since the beginning of the 21st century … well, for starters, you have my sympathies. But also, you’ve probably noticed the present day looks a lot different than the future we were promised/threatened.
One of my favorite songs as a kid was “I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World),” Donald Fagen’s ode to/takedown of the Popular Mechanics dreams of his youth. As one occasionally attracted to the more cynical jazz-rock stylings of Steely Dan, Fagen’s solo album The Nightfly struck an unexpected chord. “I.G.Y.” (and “New Frontier,” and the title track) were seemingly as far as you could get from terminally ironic songs like “Deacon Blues” or “Bad Sneakers.”
Part of the appeal was imagining the tantalizing concepts of transatlantic undersea rail and Von Braun’s “wheel in space,” concepts which Fagen himself knew were unobtainable (the lyric “By ‘76 we’ll be a-ok” was written in 1982). Even he couldn’t fake optimism, as it turns out, but 13-year old me also had trouble buying it.
Even growing up watching The Jetsons and Johnny Quest, I don’t know how realistic I thought any of it was. Hell, I also watched The Flintstones, which didn’t exactly make me long for my Neanderthal forebears. But even the meager advances I’d hoped we’d have achieved by now have either been abandoned or actively rolled back by politicians parochial, greedy, or both.
Take Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The movie’s gloomy depiction of “future” Los Angeles isn’t exactly promising, unless you’re worried about SoCal droughts, and inhabitants of that world still had to deal with artificial intelligence (“Replicants”) taking their jobs. On the other hand: there are flying cars, off-world travel, and noodle shops a-plenty.
Released — like “I.G.Y.” — in 1982, Blade Runner takes place in the far-flung future of 2019. Scott could be forgiven for thinking 37 years would be long enough to see space colonies, though it might be illuminating to hear his thoughts today. Maybe instead of bugging him about Alien: Earth, some intrepid entertainment journalist could ask him about the Space Force.
We covered this earlier, but I never put much stock in those optimistic visions of the 21st century. Whatever future younger me envisioned generally included radioactive fallout and societal collapse. Even ignoring that, perhaps the least surprising realization following a lifetime ingesting science fiction is the stuff they *did* get right: the surveillance state (Enemy of the State, The Conversation), targeted advertising (Minority Report, Max Headroom), and reality TV (Network, The Truman Show). Who needs polar ice caps and a functioning democracy when Love Island is on five nights a week?
Taxpayer-funded space travel has always had its critics, not without merit. The arguments in favor tout the advantages to “all mankind,” but any potential benefits we may have learned from ants sorting tiny screws have since been abandoned in favor of letting a few billionaires engage in their latest dick-measuring contest.
Sometimes literally.
Now, sending a few celebrities into the mesosphere is hardly indicative of a regime change in space exploration. And yet Elon Musk talks about a million people living on Mars by 2050, apparently with a straight face. And Jeff Bezos waxes rhapsodic about O’Neill colonies to pimp his space station plans. But the fact remains we’ve only managed to land a half dozen remote landers on the Red Planet over the last 28 years, while SpaceX’s Starship heavy rocket hasn’t had a successful launch this year. Musk and Bezos may speak airily about traveling to distant planets, but it ain’t happening. Not in their (or our) lifetimes, anyway.
That’s billionaires for you. Lofty proposals about abandoning the one planet we have that came pre-terraformed for interstellar colonies (solely supplied and supported by either SpaceX or Blue Origin, of course) aren’t just unrealistic, they’re ignorant. Because these so-called futurists would rather run from Earth’s problems than do the actual work required to fix them. It’s why Musk envisions using his own semen and nukes to colonize Mars. It’s why Bezos would rather sink a billion dollars a year into his phallic space fantasies than stick a crowbar in his wallet and pay his workers a fair wage.
As for artificial intelligence, or robots, or your plastic pal who’s fun to be with, the news is similarly glum. Fellow billionaires Sam Altman and Bill Gates more or less handwave the environmentally catastrophic energy needs of AI by claiming it will soon achieve intelligence enough to solve all our terrestrial problems, freeing humanity up for a life of leisure.
Which is all a diplomatic way of telling us to get our unemployment applications squared away. Then again, if you’ve heard about Musk’s “X” chatbot Grok referring to itself as “MechaHitler” you might be understandably concerned that the “solution” to those mundane terrestrial problems might be of the “final” variety. About the only hope at this point is that ChatGPT and the like will be too consumed with digesting a few decades worth of 4chan shitposting to go full Skynet.
Forget jetpacks. At this point, I’d take being able to find a movie to watch without spending 20 minutes scrolling through a dozen streaming apps.
Years ago Lynn Ashby the editor of the Houston Post described Houston as that place on the stinking alluvial plains. That description has been stuck in my head along with a description of the seasons there as tropical and dormant