Science Fiction's Thoughts on Collective Constraints

"No privacy at all around this place." - Uncle Orville

Why do we enjoy science fiction so much? Has sci-fi been popular since the turn of the century because of space lasers, or little green cartoon men in silver outfits? I’d say science fiction has held our adoration for this long because it removes constraints.

The novelist Richard Powers, in conversation with Ezra Klein, asks us to imagine a planet far, far away in another galaxy, and on that planet a parent and child stand together. Now, imagine that parent and child thinking about Earth. What would they imagine?

Go ahead, take a second, and then come back.

When I first did the exercise as part of a Literature, Culture and Society class at Penn with Doctor Clayton Colmon, I thought about how green our planet is. How absolutely lush and wet and filled with humans and animals it is. I thought a lot about nature, then about the colossal cities peeking out from specific hub spots. Is that what you thought?

Yet, when we’re asked to use our imaginations in our daily work, most of us keep our thinking within the systems we’re baked into. We consider what we’d do to the degree that we don’t ruin our access journalism. Or we confine our innovation to a web page. We don’t remove the constraints that our favorite science fiction does when it imagines twin planets that share resources, or hospitals where diabetes medication is archaic. We keep ourselves bound by external restraints and imagine small footsteps we can do inside those boundaries, without rocking boats too far. Science fiction captures our attention because anything is possible, and it always leads to progress.

Earlier this week I was at the Magic Kingdom, spending the most time in Tomorrowland, an area of the park that Walt was very passionate about, but wasn’t too thrilled about at the time of his death. Walt knew that a theme park built upon the technology of tomorrow would have to be updated frequently to live up to that potential. As it stands today, Tomorrowland is beloved not for its futurism, but its sense of nostalgia. It's a future that people in 1960 thought was possible. It feels like walking into a science fiction show, a dream of the past where there are no constraints in the future, with flying cars soaring through moon beam projections and twinkling lights overhead. And in the corner, Walt Disney’s 1964 World’s Fair exhibit, the Carousel of Progress, a four-act rotating animatronic play detailing the advancements of separate decades of American life - the best example of the promises of tech. It’s a must-do for every visit, for me.

Watch the entire magical show here:

If you haven’t ridden this masterpiece, let me lay it out for you. Starting at the turn of the century, our characters show us how wonderful life is with the advancements that have been made. We see growing ice boxes until a refrigerator makes an appearance, we learn how “flying contraptions” are about to take to the sky, and that it’s now possible to cross the country by train in just under seven days. Our carousel spins us through the 1910’s, 20’s, 40’s and to a final scene, an amorphous future (current???) date.

But by the 1940’s, there’s a shift ever so slight you might not notice it while sucking down your pepper jack Mickey pretzel. Our ever-cheerful narrative describes a new practice he’s involved in called “the rat race,” where he and other commuters drive all the way from their homes to a place of business where they spend all day, and then drive all the way back. In another room to the right, the mother character uses a rigged machine to spin paint while she creates a rumpus room to host neighborhood parties; it breaks. Daughter, a teen, has revived an old exercise machine to become fit and trim for her date. While the narrator imagines new televisions bringing Latin lessons to every living room in the country, we’re meant to giggle at the other characters turning off their educational shows and watching fluff on their small greyscale tv set. Uncle Orville still just wants his privacy.

At the 1964 fair, the show was placed in an area called Progressland, where inventions powered by electricity (specifically General Electric) were a big hit with audiences. And by this time, we’re meant to be fully onboard with the idea that all the aforementioned advancements created progress - but progress for who? Certainly not the commuters tied to their vehicles without family or friends for hours a day. And certainly not to Walt Disney, who’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT, as we know it today) was meant to be a car-free utopia; Disney famously hated traffic and built his parks based on hub-and-spoke cities that didn’t rely on them. Don’t worry, we’ll talk more about EPCOT in a later email.

By confining innovation to be part of already-built systems, we’ve trapped ourselves in domes we can only look out of, and imagine, a carousel of the same ideas again and again, just slightly enhanced whether that’s the rat race or Uber or changing the shading of a button on an article page.

In Dr. Colmon’s class we’re spending a lot of time reading Ursula Le Guin, so you’ll hear her come up for the next few weeks. In an interview with Zoe Carpenter of The Nation on alternative worlds, Le Guin draws a direct line from a lack of diversity of voices and ideas to constraints on progress, starting with her conversation with a fifteen-year-old girl about science fiction showing her “a future where I can live.” George Lucas, too, was a believer in alternative worlds that were just useful societies. But Le Guin fights against progress moving us into that future.

“The future in science fiction is just a metaphor for now… but progress… the latin word means going forward,” Le Guin says. “We assume it means progress toward something better, higher, more noble, more free… but you can progress toward evil just as easily.”

In her view, considering words delicately and backing up her thoughts with years of science fiction expertise, Le Guin challenges us to define progress.

“If we're going to get anywhere, we have to hear the voices we haven't heard before, because the “imperial voice” has gotten us to a bad place,” she says. I, too, question the moves we’ve made in the name of progress that has had poor impact on our communities. The actions constrained within access journalism systems. The product development that fears ad revenue and doesn’t look beyond the current monetization ferris wheel.

Speaking about constraints like academics won’t alleviate the systemic inequalities that bar us from progress. What would it take for us to be advocates for our readers in solidarity, rather than perform journalism from a place of exceptionalism? What would it take to value the lives of others in a way that encourages us to sacrifice our place in these iron-clad systems to build solidarity as a collective in knowledge and information equity? What are your hopes for collective missions and transformational outcomes toward human-centered progress?

A lot to chew on. Goodnight, commenters.

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