I believe new is always better than old, that progress in every aspect is preferable to nostalgia. It’s easy to glorify the past and get stuck in patterns just because they were always there but that doesn’t mean it was better back then. This is all true except for one thing: The future. It was definitely more beautiful in the past.
In the post-war optimism (and cold-war fear of apocalypse) there were dreams of a bright future where we had hovercars and house robots.
Today, we have a digital society that in many ways is more of an utopia than all the 50s futuristic designs could predict. The social exchange and border defying communication of the 2000s is something truly humanistic.
Today’s only problem is that the images of tomorrow are rather dull. If not gloomy.
Oil crisis, climate crisis, genetically modified superhumans, nanotechnology out of control. It feels as we’re just rushing closer and closer to the Singularity as depicted in Charles Stross‘ »Accelerando«.
That’s why I was happy the other day when I read about a contemporary project that has all the qualities of hovercar dreams and »Futurama« esthetics: »vertical farming«.
The project is about building selfsustaining skyscrapers (called »farmscrapers«) that basically are huge greenhouses for urban areas. The coolest of them will integrate the farming levels among the living spaces, making it a house that produces food for its inhabitants.
This is much more fun than the electric car and while not as spectacular as hovercars, it definitely does it for me.
It’s a shame that Europe, of course, is last to jump on the train. The vertical farming projects currently underway are located in the US, China and the United Arab Emirates. My prediction: European farmers will soon join ranks with the record companies in a fight against the future.
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