If most of society isn’t noticeably richer than their parents were, there are going to be limits to how much exposure to novel technologies most of society has, regardless of how much technology gets invented. However, the top-track(s) of incomes will still experience a sense of futurity.

So, it’s not that the future has been lost — the top 1%, or top 10%, still have it. Sort-of. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future is still here — it’s just not evenly distributed.

However, most of the people who invent the future — science fiction writers, scientists, engineers, etc. — come from the top 90% of incomes. So, that loop I talked about before is interrupted: even when new technologies get invented, they can’t really reach most people, and so can’t inspire them. Therefore, the only thing left to inspire most science fiction writers is pre-existing science fiction, rather than real and lived exposure to new technologies.

It’s not at all surprising that science fiction has largely lost the ability to portray something that feels genuinely futuristic — they’re not being exposed to much that is genuinely futuristic.

Obviously, there’s a feedback effect from this: without new imaginings of the future, it becomes harder to imagine — and thus harder to create — new technologies. Further, even for those engineers who do come from high-income backgrounds (and thus who might have been exposed to futuristic technologies in their daily lives) there is a problem: while the might have experience with a tiny pocket of the future, they don’t live in a mass future.

By ‘a mass future’, I mean not just little bits and pieces of the future scattered about a home, but instead the experience of living in an entire civilization grappling with the effects of new technologies. To quote Isaac Asimov, in Social Science Fiction from the collection ‘Modern Science Fiction’:

Writer X spends most of his time describing how the machine would run, explaining the workings of an internal-combustion engine, painting a word-picture of the struggles of the inventor, who after numerous failures, comes up with a successful model. The climax of the yarn is the drama of the machine, chugging its way along at the gigantic speed of twenty miles an hour, possibly beating a horse and carriage which have been challenged to a race. This is gadget science fiction. (Asimov, “Social Science Fiction”) Writer Y invents the automobile in a hurry, but now there is a gang of ruthless crooks intent on stealing this valuable invention. First they steal the inventor’s beautiful daughter, whom they threaten with every dire eventuality but rape (in these adventure stories, girls exist to be rescued and have no other uses). The inventor’s young assistant goes to the rescue. He can accomplish his purpose only by the use of the newly perfected automobile. He dashes into the desert at an unheard-of speed of twenty miles an hour to pick up the girl who otherwise would have died of thirst if he had relied on a horse, however rapid and sustained the horse’s gallop. This is adventure science fiction. (ibid.) Writer Z has the automobile already perfected. A society exists in which it is already a problem. Because of the automobile, a gigantic oil industry has grown up, highways have been paved across the nation, America has become a land of travelers, cities have spread into the suburbs — and what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done? What is the solution? This is social science fiction. (ibid.)

Gadget, adventure, and social science fictions must be understood as more than different genres of science fiction — they should be seen as different levels of the imagination, different levels of the fullness of a technology. Technology-as-physical-machine versus technology-as-enabler-of-personal-capabilities versus technological-system-as-social-relation.

A mass future is what social science fiction looks like when it’s actually and really happening, and it catalyzes the imagination of further social relations. What the rich have now is something more like the real-world manifestation of gadget science fiction — and so it catalyzes only the imagining of further pointless machines, decontextualized from anything larger. The future arrives as the absence of headphone jacks, when what everyone really wanted was longer battery lives.

Who could possibly predict the traffic jam from examining the first car? Without seeing people’s social relationships to technological systems, the imagination is still limited — and so the products of the imaginations of even the rich are lopsided and stunted.

The strangling of democratized access to the future — in the form of income inequality — is what has been killing our collective, civilizational-level ability to create futures.