Dream Factories: The Future
TWO SORTS OF STABS AT WHAT MIGHT BE, and both look back to an earlier era of the movies as a starting point.
History is not a straight-line thing. As Gardner Dozois once said: SF-type guys and ladies looked around in the 1910s and said, “By 1980, we will have night baseball!” They were right, just wrong about the date.
People have predicted revolutions in technology before; they were approximately right; their dates were too pessimistic AND by the time their predictions came true, so had lots of others. No straight-line thinking ever turns out just like it was planned.
To very widely paraphrase Asimov in an early essay: First-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart looks around, tinkers, invents the horseless carriage. Second-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart invents horseless carriage, he and Teddy use it to race to the sawmill faster than a horse could carry them, to rescue Pearl from Oil Can Harry. Third-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart, Pearl, and Teddy are caught in a traffic jam in his horseless carriage, on the way to a drive-in movie (where Oil Can Harry is going to rob the concession stand). (The thinking is Asimov’s; the examples are from my W/S u-plotter.)
Lots of people predicted movies in your house. TV (radio pictures) fulfilled part of that need (selling you oats when Mr. Ed wasn’t); then (and there should have been video discs before tape, but everyone was waiting for a stylus-less system; by the time they got that, tape had stolen the march) videotape in your home, two formats locked in a Texas-style barbed-wire death match; laserdiscs; DVD; etc. (I’ll buy the new stuff when they can guarantee it’s the only system I’ll ever need.) Home video recapitulates the ontogeny of recorded music: cylinders to shellac 78s to 45s to 33 ⅓rd albums to eight-track to cassette to compact disc to DAT to DVD and audio chips.
Here (he said) in the early 21st Century: All the people who predicted movies in your house ignored all the other stuff that would be grab-assing for your time and your increasingly limited attention: video games, computers and computer games, palm pilots, cell phones, walkmans, watchmen, VR glasses and gloves, paintball for gods’ sakes, rock climbing, inline skates, snowboards, fly fishing, and beds and breakfasts, the whole thing.
Now movies may or may not go digital. (The idea of film or music or anything using up brainpower when there are perfectly good mechanical means of producing exactly the same results, seems to be multiplying entities retrogradely. It uses less power, you say. I say: You’re forgetting the power that was used to make the chip in the first place, which is why Silicon Valley’s running out of water and steam.)
There’s a future for the movies (on the way to videotape and TV): What it is neither you nor I nor anyone else knows. That movies will still be made (and most get worse and worse, pretested, safe, delivering their dull shocks as regular as clockwork, by people who make them to as narrow a formula as any ever devised, including me and Sennett) is certain. That some great stuff will be made, and slip through, by plan or accident, like it always has, is probable, too.
So enjoy these stories; one pretty speculative; one rather elegiac (if I must say so, and I must).