The Future is Yours
5/24/19 - Futurists are not only white guys who give self-congratulatory TED talks. Everything from political appeals to Instagram ads are pitching us on a vision of the future. Rose Eveleth of Flash Forward expands our notion of what futurism can be, and how we can pry it away from arch capitalists and tech billionaires.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
Rose’s podcast Flash Forward is everywhere you listen: Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and more.
This special edition of CYG includes excerpts from these Flash Forward episodes:
TRANSCRIPT: THE FUTURE IS YOURS
[Ads]
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman! On this week's agenda Rose Eveleth takes us to the future but like a good kind of future that we might actually want.
[Theme Song]
Aminatou: Bonjour Ann Friedman!
Ann: Hola!
Aminatou: [Laughs] Ten years of friendship, still can't respond to me in my native tongue. I am hurt! I am hurt.
(1:50)
Ann: This is the recurring language troll of our friendship.
Aminatou: Oh my gosh, one day. One day. We're deep in book writing, hello from Vermont, and occasionally we're going to be handing the show over to some of our favs.
Ann: Which is something we love to do occasionally. A few times a year we invite a podcaster who we love to do a takeover of our show and let you all listen to what their show is about. And this week we have the incredible Rose Eveleth.
Aminatou: Rose's podcast is called Flash Forward. You can listen to it wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. It is great. Here she is on our show this week.
Rose: So when you picture a futurist, you're probably picturing a white guy, maybe with glasses, probably wearing like a black t-shirt and jeans, standing on a TED talk stage. How close am I? And you can't really be blamed for picturing this dude when someone says futurist because these are the dudes who constantly claim that title and get up on those stages and talk about the future as if they alone know what is coming.
But the future is not exclusively the domain of rich white guys who want to inject younger people's blood into their bodies to live forever -- which is real thing that Peter Thiel wants to do, just FYI. In fact, futurism is all around us -- you are being pitched futures all the time. Every time you see an advertisement or some sponcon on Instagram you're being pitched a future in which you own that toothbrush or bralette and your life is so much better because of it.
Every politician's platform is describing a future, one where they will make changes and shape the world into their vision of tomorrow. Lobbyist groups from Planned Parenthood to the NRA are all pitching futures, some more desirable than others. What I'm trying to say is that futures are all around us. And it's worth being able to identify them, ask questions about them, and ultimately create them. And that is where Flash Forward comes in.
(4:15)
Flash Forward is a show about futurism that goes beyond these tech dudes. What I do every episode is present scenarios, some of them likely some of them not so much, and try to find the hidden and surprising angles behind those futures. What would the warranty on a sex robot look like? What kinds of fashion items will become popular when climate change gets worse? What would neonatal care look like on a space ship? And I try to answer those questions in two ways. The show always starts with an audio drama, a little fictional scene that drops you into the world we're exploring that day and considers how this future might impact real people on the ground. Then I pull us back to the present and talk to real experts about all the curious ways that future might unravel.
So I rounded up some of my favorite examples from Flash Forward that I thought you might be interested in to show you what I mean by futurism. Take Universal Basic Income. Regular listeners may remember an episode last year where Amina talked to Annie Lowrey, the author of Give People Money about this. And most of the time, these days at least, you hear about universal basic income in the context of automation and tech companies who are like "Hey, we have to do UBI because when our amazing technology puts people out of jobs people are still gonna need money to buy iPhones and toasters the connect to your shoelaces or whatever dumb thing that we've invented that probably also spies on you."
But there are people working on basic income who are not those dudes, and they're actually doing it, right now, in communities around the world. So on Flash Forward's episode about giving people money I talked to Aisha Nyandoro, CEO of Springboard to Opportunity, who is working to lift up black women in Jackson, Mississippi via a basic income project. Here's Aisha.
(6:03)
[Clip Starts]
Aisha: I never think about automation, and robots coming. I never do. I never think about automation and the robots coming unless I'm in California. Because then it's like, "Oh my God, they're here now" And I do get that they are coming. But our keys, and what we see every day is that there is extreme poverty right now, and we need to address those inequalities right now.
Aisha: What is going to happen in this pilot program is that we are going to give $1000 a month to sixteen extremely low income African-American women, and we are going to let them do whatever the hell they want to with their money. And the crowd goes wild and we're all like, "Whooooh!" [Laughs] That is what we're going to do, and we're gonna watch what happens, and we're going to trust that these women know what it is that they need for themselves and their families. And that they are actually going to do those things that they need to actually achieve the goals that they are trying to achieve, and the dreams that they have for themselves.
[Clip Ends]
Rose: The more people who have the opportunity to make their dreams reality the better the future will be. Universal basic income is beloved by softies like me everywhere but not all futures are quite so warm and fuzzy.
Consider genetic editing. You might have heard that last year two "designer babies" were born in China. These two babies were the first humans ever born whose genes had been edited with a technique called CRISPR. CRISPR is basically just a really easy way to slice up genes and paste them where you want them -- think of doing a scrapbook collage. Except instead of making memories, you're making a person who will have memories. Gene editing has all sorts of really interesting and cool applications. On the Flash Forward episode about CRISPR I talk to someone who has a degenerative eye disease. CRISPR could cure both her and her father of this condition, and save their eyesight which is very cool! But often the conversations around this technology center around some really problematic assumptions about bodies, disease and disability. People say things like "we're going to eliminate disabled people," which actually living disabled people have some feelings about! Here's a clip from that episode:
[Clip Starts]
(8:20)
Alice: You know, in a lot of the reporting around human germline modification and about the magical powerful possibilities of CRISPR as a technique, a lot of that conversation is about the removal of suffering and pain and disease. So, whenever I hear stuff like that I'm like they're talking about people like me, people that are in my community.
Rose: This is Alice Wong, the founder and director of an organization called Disability Visibility
Alice: For the listeners out there I'm somebody who's a full time wheelchair user, I rely on personal assistance for almost every aspect of my daily activities. For those of you who are listening to the sound of my voice, I'm wearing a mask over my nose that is attached to a ventilator. So, people look at me and think "Oh my god this person is just, you know, I cannot imagine living like that." And these are the kind of pervasive attitudes that are ableist.
Rose: For Alice there's a huge difference between someone choosing to undergo a CRISPR derived therapy to stop her eye yolks from scrambling and scientists deciding what kinds of bodies are and are not desirable at the embryo stage.
Alice: For people to elect to do this to their own bodies, hey, more power to you. You know I think that's . . . that's a choice that everybody hopefully would get to make for themselves if it is available. But I do think that, you know, the kind of preemptive elimination, or alteration of certain genes are based on fear. They're based on the imagination of non-disabled people about what living with a disability is like. So I think that to me is the difference.
[Clip Ends]
(10:50)
Rose: Often people like Alice are not included in conversations about the future of genetic editing. And leaving certain bodies out of these conversations is one of the reasons we mistrust the idea of futurism in general. Take, for example, all the excitement about human space travel. If you believe certain futurists we will be living in space colonies in no time. We'll send humans to Mars and create settlements there and soon have whole generations living beyond Earth's atmosphere. But there's actually very little research on some key things like . . . can we actually have babies in space? We literally might not be able to. Some research suggests that because of the way microgravity and radiation impact the body humans could not get pregnant in space. And even if we could there is a whole lot of stuff we don't know about how fetal development and childbirth might unfold in different gravities. There's a huge amount of research on how human bodies are impacted by being in space but almost all the bodies that have studied belong to men. And there's almost no research on how reproduction, gestation and delivery might work in space. Just a warning, I'm about to talk about blood for a second.
(12:05)
Blood in space is actually a huge problem, there are whole manuals for what surgery might look like in space because you have to figure out a way to contain the blood so it doesn't float around in little droplets and get everywhere. Delivering a baby often involves blood! And all kinds of other fluids! And even if you figure that out, if you get pregnant and deliver without complications, you then have a baby in space. Here's science journalist Maggie Koerth Baker from the episode where I get even deeper into this question.
[Clip Starts]
Maggie: I think you also have a neonatal care issue too, right? Because if we're not planning well enough to have done really in-depth research, and try to understand what reproduction and pregnancy is going to be like in space, chances are we're not sending that first team to Mars with an OBGYN.
Would you even have an incubator, would you even have things that somebody might need to assist an infant that has functional bodily differences that all of the stuff that we sent their parents to space with aren't prepared for?
Rose: One thing we do know is that if we wind up having a ton of space babies there will be more girls than boys
Maggie: There's been some data that shows that astronauts are more likely to have female babies than male. Like, if you've been to space, and you come back and you have kids, the kids that you have after space are more likely to be female.
Rose: Which means our future space colonies might wind up being mostly ladies, whether we like it or not. Then again, all these conversations assume that reproduction in space is going to be setup just like it is here on Earth, which mostly involves two humans having direct, intimate physical contact. But, if we have the technology to get to Mars, we've probably figured out some other stuff, too.
[Clip Starts]
Anicca: One thing that I notice is that all of the conversations surrounding this, understandably I guess, are very heteronormative.
Rose: This is Anicca Harriot, a PhD student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine studying biochemistry and molecular biology.
(14:24)
Anicca: And so there wasn't much information or insight or even thought into IVF for example in space and things like that and what that might look like.
[Clip Ends]
Rose: Once again, surprise, surprise, ignoring women and assuming heteronormativity! I'm shocked. Other times on the show I get a little bit more meta and talk to people about what certain visions of the future say about the people who imagine them. So one really common version of the future in science fiction is one where everybody drinks like a slurry or gets their calories from pills. You know, the whole Soylent thing, or food pills. But, it's actually impossible to fit all the calories you need into a pill, or even a couple of pills. And yet this idea persists. And I wanted to know why? Why do food pills keep popping up these, Western, techy circles?
[Clip Starts]
Soleil Ho: I think a lot about efficiency with food pills too and just how in the U.S. everything is sort of wrapped up already. And you only get the nice parts of meat, for instance, or the really nice vegetables. Whereas in the rest of the world you use everything.
Rose: This is Soleil Ho. She's a food writer and the host of the podcast Racist Sandwich.
Soleil: It makes sense to me that a food pill would come from a culture where everything is already presented most efficiently and most pristinely. Like of course. You just unwrap it. We've been trained from birth, essentially, like with chicken breast, you just unwrap it and then heat it up a little bit and then you're done.
[Clip Ends]
Rose: On this episode I also interviewed an expert on eating disorders, about whether a food pill future would be good or bad for people who might have toxic relationships to food. I mean Soylent is just Slim Fast marketed to men! And in all my research on food pills I never saw anybody talking about what they might mean for the approximately thirty million Americans with eating disorders. You can tune into the farm to tablet episode for more on that.
[Ads]
Rose: Not all the futures I talk about on the show are technological and that's because the future isn't just shaped by devices and giant tech companies. It's also shaped by people and policies and culture. I've done an episode where gender is like hair color, something we kind of notice but don't really care that much about. I've got an episode about what would happen if we actually tried to ban plastic or what might lead us to decide that contact sports are no longer worth it. What happens if we make all drugs completely legal? What would it be like to know the exact date on which you were going to die? What happens if the 2020 census just fails? Here's Susan Lerner, the director of Common Cause New York, talking about that, and about why the census is critically important in particular for marginalized communities.
[Clip Starts]
Susan: The populations that historically have been undercounted are also the populations which historically are economically and socially disadvantaged. They're the populations that the government tries to assist. And if you don't have an accurate sense of people who need help then you can't have an effective program to help them. You are not putting in enough resources. You're not going to where the people who actually need the help can be found. Your efforts are misdirected and they're too short of the mark. And that happens way too frequently, and it shouldn't happen because we just haven't accurately counted who needs the help. That's the most basic thing. Where we have limited political will to help people we certainly shouldn't be misapplying what little resources we have because we don't have an accurate count.
[Clip Ends]
Rose: Speaking of people who have been systematically erased by government counts, let's talk about tribal nations! A couple of years ago when the California secessionists were making more noise than usual I started wondering about the actual logistics of their plans. And in particular I wanted to know what all the Native folks in the state thought. Tribes in the US have treaties with the national government, not with states. So if California did secede it might wind up as an independent nation dotted with other independent nations inside of it. And those internal independent nations have a treaty with the country California just broke away from. Which could get weird. It turns out none of the California secession movements had talked to the Native people who live in the state. Here's Richard Monette, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin and the director of the Great Lakes Indian Law Center.
[Clip Starts]
(22:20)
Richard: It inevitably sets up the kind of conflict where one state becomes subordinate to another for a lot of reasons: militarily . . . you know, economically a state could be strangled if I'm entirely surrounded by a state, right? We could not allow cable television to be brought there or we could stop the telephone poles so you don't have electricity. Well that's the situation now with tribes and states, and that's precisely what states do. You're not going to get your liquor or your cigarettes. You're not going to get your satellite lines .You're not going to get your T1 lines for your computer, your high-speed computer, you're not going to get that because it comes through a part of this state and so we're going to tax it. So it's possible to politically, almost even culturally, but certainly economically sort strangle that interior one.
[Clip Ends]
Rose: And it's not just political plans that impact the future either. The future is shaped and experienced by individuals with internal lives and habits. So sometimes we consider those kinds of futures like what if we couldn't lie to ourselves? What if one day we woke up and we had lost the ability to deceive our own brains? Maybe this would be good. Sometimes self-deception is a form of self-sabotage. But it would also mean we'd lose imagination. On the episode I talked to Jacquelyn Gill, an assistant professor of paleo-ecology at the University of Maine. And she told me a story about growing up and her imaginary friends who would keep her safe at night if she ever had to leave her bed and use the bathroom. As adults it's easy for us to forget that even though this kind of sounds cute and funny the monsters and ghosts and imaginary friends that kids have can feel so real.
[Clip Starts]
(24:18)
Jacquelyn: It felt incredibly real to me. I mean my heart would race you know when I knew the ghosts were in the room. And even like running to the bathroom like I was I was counting down in my head the seconds. I was like running really quickly. You know, peeing as fast as I could and kind of getting back and then it was like this palpable relief of nothing can get me. I'm safe now.
Rose: This kind of thinking, this magical way that kids can build fictional worlds to help them get through scary or strange situations, it doesn't really last. Jacquelyn can't quite remember when exactly Mr. Ghost stopped showing up for her but it probably happened slowly, like with all the rest of her imaginary friends.
Jacquelyn: I remember like feeling this sense of guilt that a long time had gone by without my thinking about them and sort of kind of promising to myself I would never forget these friends. Um . . . I don't know why I'm getting a little bit emotional. It seems really strange. But yeah, just the sense of like oh, I forgot about my friends. And then I'd feel badly about that for a bit. And then like longer and longer stretches would go by and eventually you just sort of start thinking about them altogether.
Rose: When you're a kid these can feel like real relationships. So losing them feels like a real loss. Today Jacquelyn doesn't think about Mr. Ghost all that much. Unless some nosy journalist like me shows up I guess. But she does hope that Mr. Ghost is still available, out there, somehow, if she ever needs him.
(25:52)
Jacquelyn: You know what I do think about it is if I ever have a child of my own sort of passing that on to them. Sorry I don't know why I'm crying, this is so weird. I think he's, you know, he's out there and I like to think that other little kids who might need that could also have that in their lives.
[Clip Ends]
Rose: So often conversations about the future are devoid of this kind of emotion and this kind of imagination. The point I'm trying to make with all of these clips and I guess on Flash Forward in general is that everything is futurism. Politics, science, culture, art, sponcon, it's all pushing us one way or another. And if we cede futurism to these same seven tech guys we lose. They don't have our best interests at heart. So what I'm hoping you get from this episode and from listening to Flash Forward is the power to take the future back and the tools to do so. So when you're pitched a future on Instagram, by a politician, by an advocacy organization, you'll know it when you see it. We all make the future happen, and the future should be for all of us. And when the same people are imagining the future over and over again those futures tend to kind of suck. Let's imagine better ones.
You can find Flash Forward wherever you get your podcasts, so wherever you are listening to this episode of CYG you can definitely find Flash Forward as well. You can also reach us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all those places at @flashforwardpod. We are @flashforwardpod on pretty much everything. I'm Rose Eveleth and you can find me on the Internet at roseeveleth.com or again on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, @RoseEveleth. I am the only Rose Eveleth for better or worse. Okay, I'll see you in the future.
Aminatou: You can find us so many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf where Sophie Carter-Kahn does all of our social. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: Bye boo!