Reality check: We live in the 21st century. I can go to a shop and a robot will sell me a device that reads shiny disks and produces moving images. Right now, there are people in space. My handbag is home to about a grand’s worth of tech, including two or three relatively small devices which will let me communicate with anyone in the world as long as they too have one of those or a similar device. Over the last 50 years, while world population has doubled, world GDP per capita has risen from just under $500 to over $8000. For fuck’s sake, humanity has even managed to get its act together sufficiently to stop the ozone hole from expanding further and to hopefully start closing it soon! We as a species can be incredibly clever at times, so why are we so incredibly backward most of the time?
Imagine what we could do with the science, technology and resources at our disposal! We could feed the world. We could work out how to live sustainably on this planet. We might even be able to live in peace. Forget the jet packs – we might be able to learn to respect other human beings and our environment in general.
So why is it that a decade into the 21st century, on every single front we are having to fight people who want to drag us back into the 17th, or 18th or 19th century?
Case in point… intellectual property and copyright: Our current system of intellectual property and copyright dates back to the 17th century. It was, at the time, designed to encourage creativity – to ensure that creators get compensated for their work while others can still build on that work. Because let’s face it, no one in the history of humanity has ever sat in a dark room by themselves and invented anything from scratch. If Newton was standing on the shoulders of giants, where exactly do you think are we? Yet over the last few decades, the balance of copyright law has tipped further and further in one direction, to the point where we now can not only not build on our own culture, but the culture of the generation before us and the one before that is out of bounds. A select few people and corporations (very few of them actually directly involved in creating things) have done extremely well out of this arrangement. And now that technology has finally put an end to their monopoly – where previously distribution media were limiting and content could be made scarce we now have a situation of zero marginal cost and abundance – they are fighting kicking and screaming to restrict what the rest of us can do, to limit the technology and to reverse progress. Back to the 17th century it is.
Case in point… women in society: Hey, maybe I should be grateful that these days I’m recognised as a human being! And in all fairness, we as a society have made a lot of progress on the status of women. Women have the vote, and can work outside the home, trying to carve out some sort of financial independence for themselves, to contribute to society by more than just giving birth, trying to live autonomous, fulfilling lives. But women still get paid less than man for the same job, women are still attacked violently just because they are women, their contributions constantly dismissed and invalidated, their desire for self-determination constantly endangered. Last week an MP implied that children were responsible for preventing and ending abuse, and an MEP flat out said that women were to blame if they were raped. This week we hear that the sexual health and education of our children is going to be shaped by an organisation with a medieval view on sex. The best we can hope for from this government is to only regress back as far as the 1950s. “Honey, I’m home” and all that.
Why are these people so utterly terrified of the future? I don’t know what the future holds, but I can make some educated guesses on what we’re capable of and that gives me reason to hope. I don’t want to go back to the past: for a start it smelled. Why are these people keeping my jet pack from me?