Elf Sternberg

In 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation released a document called “Scenarios for the Future.” It outlined four possible futures, using a classic two-axis political compass as its guideline. As always, there is one future I wish would happen, but I believe that one of the others is much more likely.

The two axes of the compass are Political Coherency and Culture Adaptability. The best future is one of strong political coherency and strong cultural adaptability: this is the future in which government is reliable but not repressive, letting the culture evolve along with both the new technological promises and the coming environmental challenges. This future was named “Clever Together.”

Yeah, not likely.

The other ones were:

• Strong political coherency, weak cultural adaptability. This is the setting in which authoritarianism grows, as the culture demands that government “do something” to prevent, or at least obscure, the challenges to come, often with short-term addressing of the symptoms but no cure. This was called “Lock step.”


• Weak political coherency, strong cultural adaptability. “Smart Scramble” is the future in which corporate interests vie with each other, in the absence of democratic oversight, to control the world. In this scenario, technology gets away from us while our common lives together are ignored.


• Weak political coherency, weak cultural adaptability. “Hack Attack” envisioned a future in which, without either arm of the compass trying to achieve its goals, the world is ripe for non-state, non-corporate actors to wreck institutions.

“Lock Step” is the future we’re currently living in. Each future in the document includes a “narrative,” a tale of what might happen from the perspective of a futurologist in 2010, and this one starts with a pandemic in 2012. The outcome described is so eerily accurate that I think it might have been written by time travelers. The document describes:

• Behavior recognition scanners deployed in public places to detect abnormal or antisocial activities.


• Changes to packaging and transport to better handle the challenges of the pandemic.


• Portable diagnostic equipment to detect both the current pandemic and to provide early warning for new ones.


• The adoption of widespread telepresence technologies.


• The fracturing of the World Wide Web into regional or national “mini-Internets,” with border routers filtering out views that our national leaders don’t want us to have access to.

Interestingly, I think “Hack Attack” is a good description of what’s going on inside the Republican Party. Internally, it has very poor political coherency, and it is utterly incapable of cultural adaptability. In the face of a hostile world, it has become an easy target for vecortized memetics like Trump, Q-Anon, and similar interests promising a powerful, vibrant future with absolutely no vision of what that future will look like… except maybe “more of the same, only MORE of the more of the same.” Bigger trucks. Bigger guns. That sort of thing.

The thing is, for every one of the scenarios in the book, we’re seeing all of them happen. There’s emphasis on energy efficiency is “Smart Scramble,” and biohacking in “Hack Attack.”

And “Clever Together” is not without its problems. The cost and maintenance of embedded sensors is dropping quickly, which means that it’s possible for authoritarians to track everyone everywhere all the time. But it’s still certainly a better story than the others.

Does anyone else grok that the Hyperloop is really Elon Musk's clever way of exploiting America's weird transportation politics for his own uses?

The Hyperloop is being sold to politicians and tech bros as a sweet, quick way to get from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the time it takes to get from the Financial District to Japantown by the San Francisco MTBA, when in fact it's a way to test out the viability of the Gigafactory's power supplies united with linear induction motors to power a Clarke Mass Driver.

Elon Musk never does anything without getting multiple bits of data out of it. Self driving cars are a way to test various machine learning techniques against geography until the best one presents itself. The barge landings involve a hard restart in re-entry conditions of a thin, violently fast atmosphere, the kind encountered when landing on Mars. Hyperloop is a way of testing the viability of linear induction motors for insane acceleration rates with heavy payloads.

Hyperloop is how Elon Musk has tricked investors into giving him the money to experiment with yet another way to lower the weight and cost of his first-stage rockets. They may, with some probability, get the trains their Atlas Shrugged-addled minds want. Musk will, with all probability, figure out if LIMs are a way to boost a launch vessel to a significant fraction of escape velocity without having to have the fuel on board the launch vehicle.