Hey.

You know how everything I make always says “working 2050, a speculative oral history“ on it?

Whatever happened with that?

Well, I’ve found that when I have to do more than write a bunch of words on a daily basis,

like collaborating with other people,

or working on things not wholly within my locus of control,

I get scared. And when I’m scared of something,

I love to avoid it.

That said, I’m trying to get on the last few episodes of Working 2050, and trying to push myself to understand why the hell I care about it.

As part of this, I am going to write about why it matters to imagine a hopeful future — and what that hopeful future might look like.

Self Actualization Entertainment

During the pandemic it feels like there is a cultural obsession with sensory media. When I look at the TV shows my friends + I have binged over the last year, they all involve beautiful tangible things.

They are materialist tv shows.

Not like, Marxist materialist, but like… About Material.

For example:

My girlfriend watched all of heat salt acid fat and a litany of other intensely colorful cooking shows this winter.

And every queer I know watched the Queen’s Gambit, a show my friend described as so sensory it “made chess sexy.“

With so much of our connection, work, and intimacy happening via screens, we are desperate for experiences focused on the senses. 

As we get to something resembling a vaccinated-ish future, more people are talking about the future of everything post-pandemic, particularly media.

Someone at MIT Press predicted post pandemic media would be “full of life, celebrating self actualization, and designed to be experienced collectively,”

The sensory hallucinations on TV right now seem like one way this future has already coming to pass, a way our screens have already adapted to our unmet needs. 

Another place media is already changing during the pandemic — the gaming and the fitness industries.

Virtual reality now provides relatively cheap full body experiences like a new game called The Walk, funded in part by the NIH.

The Walk tracks your steps and provides you with new clues and information about a murder mystery as you walk further, a sort of 10,000 steps Ms Marple. 

And the expansion of pop neuroscience, particularly neuroscience in the business/self-help book world, feels related to this type of sensory media shift, with even the opening of a gym called HOA in California designed to help you train your  “emotional fitness“.

So what do these pandemic media trends have in common?

I’m particularly curious about the ways media became part of addressing all sorts of personal and social problems during the pandemic. 

So I’m interested in possible futures, versions of 2050, where the arcs of these respective trends overlap to create something… good. The non Qanon nightmare futures.

In the pilot of Working 2050, 2050 interviewee Ursula Delany talks about her work building RPGs to help people find their purpose, to figure out what the hell they’re supposed to be doing in their life.

She talks about how horrible things in the 2020s and 2030s shaped the science and technology of emotional understanding.

How “emotional literacy,” became something that was everyone’s concern, not just the problem of a single individual.

The result was highly sensory, interactive, tailored stories and games designed to help people build these skills.

So, in Working 2050, “self actualization media” is ubiquitous, a combination of readily available technology that allows people to create tools, games, narratives, and possibilities more easily than we can in 2021.

There’s also increased public literacy around trauma, emotional skills, “self-care,” and how we learn. 

This fictional interview is based on real interviews I did last March at the start of the pandemic.

And the idea that these trends could converge in such a way, to create a future where these trends have positive outcomes not outweighed by their drawbacks (or.. global societal collapse).

Well, it’s hopeful.

To say the least.

One of the wonderful things about writing fiction, or as Ursula Le Guin calls it, “lying“, is you get to decide everything that happens, even if you’d like for it to be somewhat realistic.

Is this possible, to have a net positive intersection between these three technological trends?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Could you believe in this future?

What would it take to make it happen?

• H