The Overdriven Future

One Brian Eno quote that I keep coming back to is “Go to an extreme and retreat to a more useful position”. It’s important to think about the possibilities in the imagination phase, including all the silly experimental ones, because it serves to refine what is practical. But the practical solution without first exploring the extremes is (arguably) less satisfying. But going to extremes and using it as the main objective is less satisfying than using the more prosaic. Using extremes is the overestimation. The “useful position” is perhaps an “underestimation” but it gives you headroom.

An artist that comes to mind is Syd Mead, whose work is generally an overestimation (or an overdrive) of the future, yet has informed the look of the future--as did the Futurists in the 1920s and 1930s. But the look of the future changes over the centuries: The futurist depictions of air travel made in the 20s showing turboprop planes is a faded future, but the futurist visual tropes seem to have similarities having to do with speed. So the idea of flying over the Atlantic in 3 hours on the Concorde has the same "look" as going to Mars in 3 months. Art is actually a good motivation for thinking about the future, but it will always look like Futurism or Syd Mead, and people like Elon Musk are kind of in that vibe. But it’s still all cinematic, and you have to exit the theater into the real world at some point.

[8/4/2024: I saw a 1971 black Cadillac Coupe De Ville the other day, and it looked like a Mead car of the future, which is in stark contrast to the Cybertruck. The Cybertruck more accurately looks like the future–a dystopian one].