The Short Life and Early Death of Tech Optimism
For decades, science fiction writers touted technology as the solution for human suffering while sowing the seeds of their own disappointment
Life isn’t Star Trek.
This is too bad for a number of reasons, such as not having convenient transporters, gorgeous starships, and lots of alien species who look suspiciously like us. Naturally, the most fun reasons are the unlikeliest ones — that’s the appeal of sci-fi stories.
But the real reason life isn’t like Star Trek is a downer: the show’s techno-optimism posited a happy and healthy humanity living in a better world because of human ingenuity and technology, a future that seems increasingly fragile for many and out of reach for most.
Star Trek grew out of early and Golden Age science fiction, tales of rocket ships and derring do, computers and manifest destiny among the stars. It’s long been accepted conventional wisdom that scientists who love science fiction are partial to Star Trek over Star Wars, an intellectual property that is filed under sci-fi but is actually fantasy.
I know, conventional wisdom does not equal truth, but we’re about to delve into a lot of vibes here.
There’s a reason our old flip phones derived from Capt. Kirk’s communicator and our smartphones channel the Next Generation’s data PADDs, while light sabers are still toys. Fun toys, but just toys. Star Trek created a feedback loop of fans who became scientists and engineers who took inspiration from the show, the writers of which in turn took inspiration from the work of scientists and engineers.
That’s the root of tech optimism that drove so much science fiction in its earlier forms. And that root is near death today.
I started down this thought path when I picked up this Flashback’s subject: the March 1982 edition of Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact, one of the SF mags that carried the biggest torch for that feedback loop between science and speculation. I chose this issue because the cover seemed a perfect encapsulation of tech optimism from the early space and computer revolution: famed writer Arthur C. Clarke on “Future Communications and the Third World.” (Which, to be fair, is headlined inside the magazine as “New Communications Technologies and the Developing World,” which is less problematic from today’s perspective.)
This was a subject close to Clarke’s heart. As a “futurist” writer he did predict many of the things we take for granted today — GPS, small portable computers, near instantaneous communication anywhere on the earth, and more. One of his beliefs, that he delves into here, is that communications technologies would be the liberation of people from politics, that free and open exchange of information across imagined national boundaries would be the primary goal of future generations.
To oversimplify at bit, I consider Clarke to be one of the prime examples of science fiction writers as tech-optimist preacher. Yes, he created the iconic killer computer HAL 9000, along with Stanley Kubrick, for the book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Clarke tended to view humanity and its worse impulses as the problem — HAL only went bad because politicized bureaucrats gave it contradictory orders — and technology as the potential solution, whether it comes from humanity or outside the solar system.
In this essay, which he adapted from a presentation he made to a UNESCO gathering as a representative of his adopted home country of Sri Lanka, he argues this explicitly: that the expansion of communications tech from telephone to telex to television for bringing growth to developing nations would require the establishment of a network of communications satellites. He was particularly keen on bringing television worldwide: “Every TV program has some educational content: the cathode ray tube is a window on the world — indeed, on many worlds. Often it’s a very murky window, but I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that, on balance, even bad TV is preferable to no TV at all.”
I’ll skip the Mr. Beast and Real Housewives joke here and move to Clarke’s idea that follows: that the easy recording and broadcast of events would lead to a more free and open society. He specifically looks ahead to a world where cameramen and journalists no longer need cumbersome cassettes but can simply beam the video out to the world.
“The implications of this are enormous,” Clarke writes. “Just one example: how many soldiers would shoot a cameraman, if they knew that millions of people were watching?”
In 2026, we know the answer to this question: far more of them than you would ever have imagined.
The naiveté of sci-fi tech optimists such as Clark is both charming and sad in retrospect. They really wanted a better world and believed we were developing the tools that would deliver it. Clarke gestured at the idea that those tools could be used by both good and evil people, but in his estimation the good of the many would emerge victorious over the politics that had held them back.
Looking back as an adult on the writers and works that I drew inspiration from as a kid, I see that they were simply too optimistic about the power of technology when placed directly in the hands of the people. Blinding themselves to the pessimistic potentials of these technologies is their biggest failing and, I believe, one of the reasons so many evil people today — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others of my generation who claim to draw their inspiration from classic science fiction — have developed technologies designed to suppress and oppress.
As a young fan and writer, I bought into this idea that connection and computing power would bring people together across national and ethnic lines and held onto that belief for most of my life. But ultimately, we’ve used those tools to sharpen those lines, retreat into more rigid ethnic divides, allow ourselves to be bamboozled by charlatans who sell us surveillance disguised as safety, and watch as social media tears apart the foundations of civil society.
No technology is going to fix us. AI will not solve our problems, Palantir will not protect our nation, Ring will not respect our civil rights when the police state comes calling. Technology will only feed back to us what we feed into it, so any solution can only come from ourselves.
Speaking of evil assholes, hardcore right-winger Jerry Pournelle — a.k.a. “this asshole again” — once more rears his warmongering head, reminding us that while a lot of science fiction writers skewed utopian, there was a large contingent insistent that the idea of utopian peace was for commies and pansies. In his op-ed, “The Defense of the Realm,” Pournelle once again flaunts his militaristic and belligerent attitude toward science and society.
For Pournelle, science (and his science fiction) is about projecting force. Here he’s railing against a lack of government interest in dominating and militarizing space, right about the time when he was part of the ersatz group of writers and thinkers pushing Reagan’s space defense system (i.e. “Star Wars,” the proposed tool of death, not the movie). At one point he proposes a system of “space lances,” a series of satellites armed with hard metal rods that could be fired at ground targets at high speed with massively destructive results. You get the feeling that Pournelle experienced a hard rod when thinking of this crap.
Because I believe that Pournelle — both a writer and a defense contractor — was a pernicious influence on society in his militarism and proximity to the Pentagon, I want to highlight something he complains about here that has always been a hobbyhorse of the right, all the way to the present day: university professors and college students. Pournelle presents without any example or evidence the claim that students of the time were being taught that technology was evil:
“One reason for our technology deficit was our war against technology during the whole of the ‘70s. For a decade our students were taught that technology was evil; that everything is crap and there’s no help for it; that civilization as we know it is wasteful, and even with the most stringent conservation programs, even with the most drastic cutbacks in consumption and standard of living, things will never get better.”
This is bullshit. Pournelle confuses two pessimistic movements in the 70s with “anti-technology” activism.
First, there was the anti-nuclear movement. There was a reason for this movement: we were all living in a Cold War under a constant background threat of nuclear annihilation. Pournelle and his ilk all got boners from the idea of nuclear weapons and mutual assured destruction, while those of us who were kids were taught how to hide under our desks from atomic blasts. Relatedly, there was the fear of nuclear power, which given the technology of the time proved well-founded in 1979 with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster, just seven years before Chernobyl. This was a movement about a specific type of technology, not technology writ large.
Second, there was a lot of Malthusian nonsense in the air during the 60s and 70s, most popularly rendered in the classic sci-fi overpopulation movie Soylent Green (1973), which was based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel, Make Room! Make Room! To again oversimplify a bit, Malthusian theory says that increases in agricultural production leads to unfettered population growth that will ultimately spark social disorder and societal collapse.
The thing is, that turned out not to be true. What actually happened in the U.S. (and other wealthy, highly developed countries) is that living standards rose, birth control became widely available, and the population never exploded because the majority of women didn’t want to or need to give birth to four, five, six, or more babies.
Again, Malthusian theory is not an argument that technology is evil in the way that Pournelle is trying to claim. And the theory was controversial, as well as pretty racist, given how focused its proponents were on the so-called “third world” countries that Clarke was advocating technological solutions for. Pournelle is just a perpetually aggrieved right-wing warhawk who hates university professors because they teach ideas he personally hates.
Hilariously, he said this in 1982 during the first age of personal computing, at the dawn of 80s tech glam. We were sending Voyager probes on journeys to deep space, where they continue transmitting data to this day. The nation was agog with pride for the successful new Space Shuttle. I may not consider Star Wars to be “real” science fiction but I’ll be damned if it didn’t play a crucial role in re-popularizing sci-fi for the masses, along with films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hell, E.T. the Extraterristrial came out three months after Pournelle published his claptrap. Pournelle holds a willfully blinkered view that belies his sclerotic, anti-liberal, and anti-humanities thought.
But what Pournelle is ultimately arguing for is the privatization of space: “that NASA and the government cannot and should not continue to dominate the space environment, and the sooner they get out of the way, the sooner we will have a real space program.”
You’ve probably noticed that this is the reality with live in today, with the refocusing of the government’s efforts on the militarizing Space Force and leaving space access and future exploration to Musk’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and others. Sadly, it hasn’t gotten us much beyond exploding rockets, Katy Perry in space, and multi-billionaire megalomaniacs. And it has to be noted that these privatized programs have yet to surpass what NASA, even with its flaws, accomplished during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Instead, they’ve made wild promises and subordinated science and research to crony capitalism.
We’ve lost so much to the neo-Gilded-Age billionaires currently running the country’s technological explorations and Pournelle helped pave the way. While I maintain some level of optimism for our future — and the futures we imagine and hope for via science fiction — we’re living through dystopian times driven in part by the dark side of sci-fi writers who were sowing the seeds for that collapse for decades.
One last moment of crankdom from this issue: editor Stanley Schmidt’s lead op-ed is a classic, “I just got back from vacation and have a deadline, so here’s a notebook dump,” in which he muses about 1) the perception of overpopulation driving bad public policy (good point), 2) why private cars should be prioritized for transportation policy (bad point), and 3) how some people are hypocrites about the environment because they don’t realize that some natural formations in the western desert closely resemble strip-mined lands back in the east (truly bonkers point).
Finally, he complains about the “idiot lights” on car dashboards and his perception of a society reverting from the pinnacle of written language to the crass pictograms used for road signage and other areas where language barriers may pose actual dangers. I’m curious how he’s adapted to a world of emoticons and The Office GIFs.
Out of all the sci-fi mags of the time, Analog was certainly the crankiest.
And the Rest…
The short stories in this issue made no impact on me at the time or on this revisit, with one notable exception: Greg Bear’s “Schrödinger’s Plague,” which was my introduction to the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, quantum mechanics, and the uncertainty principle. It’s too much for me to attempt to explain so if you’re unfamiliar I’d recommend the wiki. Suffice to say that there is a cat in a box with a bottle of poison that may or may not be released by the the quantum-level decay of a radioactive atom, which means that the cat is both alive and dead until someone opens the box and observes it.
In Bear’s box the cat is replaced by a deadly rhinovirus and the story plays as if the beginning of Stephen King’s The Stand was an academic comedy of manners. One rather prickly professor has decided to prove or disprove Schrödinger’s paradox and now the fate of the world potentially depends on whether the other professors unwillingly pulled into the experiment can believe that the rhinovirus was dead when the box was opened.
Easy enough. Unless you’re a hypochondriac.
This was also my introduction to Bear, who would become one of my favorite science fiction authors in the 90s. I would highly recommend checking out his work, from his nano-tech thrillers Queen of Angels and Slant, to his space operas The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. He’s a versatile writer with a broad range, certainly on display here in Analog.
Elsewhere in the issue, book critic Tom Easton argues that in order for art to be Art it must be widely read, universal, and controversial. I’ll just say I think that’s hogwash and leave it at that. The letters to the editor section exists for aggrieved men to complain that their competence isn’t acknowledged. Seriously, the letters capture the vibe that infected GenXers who are ruining us today through their solipsistic megalomania in Silicon Valley.
And that’s a wrap on the March 1982 Analog. For the next Flashback, we’re going to jump back further in time to 1968 for a book and movie combo that debuted when I was still an infant: Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The two worked closely together but the film and novel have some significant differences that are interesting both in their predictive nature and in their creative process. I know the movie holds up, but does the book? We’ll find out next time.
