Where is my rocket pack.

Let’s look at some known generational gaps. I’ve written a very brief overview of the Industrial Rev late 1780s to 1815. My father could do the same for his life’s 1st 25 years (expanding electrical & telephone networks; “talkies” aeroplanes, wireless WW I etc). I can do it for 1944-69 (computers, space rockets, atomic power, polio & TB Vaccines, anti-biotics, transplant surgery; and after. You can do it for the gene therapy, communications revs etc for 1984-2009. These are trends are typical of periods of rapid change that the 2020 book should have projected.

Scenario: 1789-Second Fleet: A young country lad, having walked to London and fallen on hard times, picks a pocket or two – and earns himself 25 years in NSW. England is still “green & pleasant” full of “pleasant pastures”. Sure, a steam engine or two had slipped into England’s first cotton mills, Frenchman Jouffroy had made a working paddle steamer (1783) and was experimenting with torpedoes; England’s first steam boats & tugs were working (1788- Symington). Enclosure was putting pressure on crofters & yeoman farmers; but, steam pumps & crushers in Cornwall’s mines apart, that was about it. A fortnight after the French storm the Bastille (14 July 1789), our lad is on a ship ready to leave from Botany Bay. In 1805, so great were the political changes is Europe, British Prime Minister William Pitt said, “Roll up the map of Europe; it will not be needed for the next ten years.” Actually, that map would never be used again!

Our Lad’s sentence is up 1814, but what with waiting for a ship and the voyage home, Wellington has won the Battle of Waterloo before he reaches London – 11 years after William Blake has penned:

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills ?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills ?

The late 1780s’ couple of steam-driven boats and mills, multiplied many times by the Napoleonic Wars, are so pervasive they’ve led to the unsuccessful Luddite Riots (1811-12). Steam engines have spread to foundries & minters (Matthew Boulton has invented the prototype assembly-line system to produce the famous “cartwheel pennies & 2d” coins) at his Soho Foundry. In 1800, Napoleon commissioned Robert Fulton to build the Nautilus the first submarine; in 1803, his steamboat ran on the Seine, by 1807 his first commercial steamboats were running. Treverthick’s high-pressure steam engine was powering a road locomotive “The Puffing Devil” (1801) and railway locomotive (1803.) Watt & Boulton’s worker, Walter Murdoch gas-lit Soho Foundry (1802) and another Soho employee Samuel Clegg set up Gas Lighting and Coke Company – the first commercial company. From Jan 28 1807, London streets (Pall Mall) began to install gas lighting. By 1812, Boulton’s engines powered The London Times’s printing presses.

Within a single generation, during the Napoleonic War, steam power had become pervasive and gas lighting was becoming so … and that’s only innovations in steam & gas!

Notice that, before the French Revolution began, all the features of the Industrial Revolution were in place: improved metal, esp iron & steel production; new spinning and weaving machines; Watt and Boulton’s new steam engines. The same is true of 1944 (V2 rocket; Colossus computer)-1969(Men on the moon) and so on – and before 1944, the features were in place. 12 years ago, an IT geek explained to me very accurately where computer-based communication “conversion” was going “By 2010″.

So what happened to those who can clearly extrapolate 2009′s trends to 2020?

What, better than implementing a personal carbon trading scheme or instituting content regulations on Australian-based web video to “preserve Australian culture”? Ok, here’s my idea: not doing those blatantly stupid things.

But one should always offer positive alternatives. So I propose the following grab-bag of off-the-top-of-my-head ideas: (1) abolish payroll tax and replace it with increases to both the GST and the top personal income tax brackets, (2) amend the Constitution so that it provides for truly independent HoR Speakers and Senate Presidents drawn from the ranks of retired Federal Court justices, (3) take immediate steps to ensure the maintenance of quality journalism by setting up a series of very well funded completely-independent-of-government trusts to produce daily news, current affairs and investigative reporting material without advertising (a really difficult one to get up, with all sorts of issues to work through, but worth a shot I think).

I call this quick list “The Future by Me”.

BBB

Chloe Adams sounds like a proper fascist.

BBB

I’m an adherent of DeeCee’s type of futurism, more or less, which gets a lot of fascinated attention (the movies and the news media love academic extremists who talk about mind uploading and 1000-year lifespans) but not a lot of serious backing (if only people cared as much about Friendly AI and reversing the ageing process, as they do about climate change… then again, if society at large were that gung-ho about something like develoing nanotechnology, we might all be dead already). My concept of 2020 is that the world will be, at the very least, beginning to experience a technological upheaval which can only end in extinction, transhumanity, or a global luddite dictatorship. So from my perspective “The Future by Us” certainly seems like short-term stuff. (Ironically, the chapter which does have the longest perspective, namely Anna Rose’s, is, for that very reason, the one whose image of the future is most challenged by such considerations.) But someone has to plan for the possibility that the techno-apocalypse doesn’t happen.

They aren’t. (This isn’t an attack on Anna, by the way. I think she’s done a pretty good job. It’s just the plain truth.)

Off the top of my head I can think of plenty of young people involved (actually more involved) in the enviro/ climate movement (“grassroots” or not) who have a better handle on the kind of economic, political, legal and technological changes needed to avoid runaway climate change. None of them have Anna’s free run with the establishment, however.

And that’s the problem here – the whole 2020 fandangle is only a symptom of the same problem: the exclusion of most genuine voices from the higher levels of political discourse in place of “representatives”, “leaders”, and other forms of pin-ups, all of whom are either already part of the machine, or are very quickly sucked into it.

Some might have noticed that GetUp emails started being sent from “simonsheikh@getup.org” or somesuch, rather than getup@getup.org?

And from experience, he’s not particularly competent either. A prime candidate for NSW parliament?