2. Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit 78. Similarly, in 1949 Orwell had placed his futuristic dystopia, 1984, only thirty-five years in the future. 79. In fact, video telephones had first been debuted in the 1930s by the German post office under the Nazis. 80. From Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 36–37. The original essay was published in 1984.
81. The original book, in German, came out as Der Spätkapitalismus in 1972. The first English edition was Late Capitalism (London: Humanities Press, 1975).
82. Probably the classic statement of this position is Space and the American Imagination, by Howard McCurdy (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1997), but other versions of this sort of rhetoric include: Stephen J. Pyne, “A Third Great Age of
discovery,” in Carl Sagan and Stephen J. Pyne, The Scientific and Historical Rationales for Solar System Exploration, SPI 88-1 (Washington, D.C.: Space policy institute, George Washington University, 1988), or Linda Billings, “Ideology, Advocacy, and Spaceflight: Evolution of a Cultural Narrative” in The Societal Impact of Spaceflight, Stephen J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, eds. (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2009).
83. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 84. In this case, too, there’s a Soviet equivalent: the Tupolev TU-144, which was actually the first supersonic passenger plane, and which first flew a few months before the Concorde in 1968, but was abandoned for commercial purposes in 1983.
85. Source: www.foundersfund.com/uploads/ff_manifesto.pdf. 86. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). 87. Toffler’s own politics are slightly more ambiguous, but not much. Before the success of Future Shock, he had been known mainly as a business journalist, whose greatest claim to fame was probably that he had interviewed Ayn Rand for Playboy.
Like most conservatives, he pays lip service to women’s equality as an abstract principle, but never mentions actual feminists or feminist issues except to criticize them: for a typical example, see his Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be
Created and How It Will Change Our Lives, Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler (New York: Doubleday, 2006), pp. 132–33. It is certainly curious that both Toffler and Gilder are so obsessed with the threat to motherhood: it’s as if both are basing their
politics on an opposition to the ideas of Shulamith Firestone, long before Firestone herself had actually appeared on the scene.
88. Eccentric though they were, it’s hard to overestimate the influence of such figures on the Right, because they were
considered its creative visionaries. Gilder’s supply-side economic theories, for instance, are widely cited as one of the main inspiration for Reaganomics, and his “technology report” was so widely read that market observers spoke of a “Gilder
effect,” where the share values of any company he mentioned approvingly would almost invariably rise in value immediately thereafter.
89. Win McCormick, for instance, informs me that by the late sixties he was involved in a think tank founded by a former
president of the University of Chicago, one of whose main concerns was trying to figure out how to head off the upheavals they assumed would ensue within a generation or so, when machines had completely replaced manual labor.
90. I have no time to describe in detail some of the actual political conflicts of the early seventies described in the unpublished Zero Work volume that set the stage for the later emergence of the Midnight Notes Collective, but they reveal quite clearly that in many assembly-line industries, wildcat strikes during that period did focus on demands for replacing drudgery with
mechanization, and for employers, abandoning factories in the unionized “Rust Belt” became a conscious strategy for sidestepping such demands (e.g., Peter Linebaugh and Bruno Ramirez, “Crisis in the Auto Sector,” originally from Zero Work, published in Midnight Notes, 1992).
91. The United States sometimes likes to maintain the fantasy that it does not engage in industrial planning, but as critics have long since pointed out, it does. Much of the direct planning, and hence R&D, is carried out through the military.