ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the diffusion of those ideas about rapid, perpetual, and inevitable technological change throughout cultural, political, and economic life. It focuses on three key examples in science fiction TV and film, World Expos, and tech start-up investing. These practices of producing futuristic media, promoting national identity, and investing in start-ups exerted unique forms of media, state, and financial power explicitly concerned with technology and the future.
First, I describe how changing computer interfaces was an insignificant aspect of representing the future in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but midway through the 2000s became a criterion for plausibly representing the future. Second, at the 2017 World Expo in Astana, Kazakhstan—themed “The Future of Energy” the international community promoted their plans to meet the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement with emerging technologies. Instead, the USA Pavilion promoted libertarian ecological economics as national identity and policy position, which argues that inevitable technological change in the future will solve climate change today. Finally, two high-profile tech start-ups—Uber and Theranos—are reliant on technologies that don’t yet exist, or never did. More than simply chasing “the next big thing,” they are investments in the idea that such technologies will rapidly, perpetually, and inevitably emerge.
