Opinion | Have we forgotten to dream of a better future?

The Rotterdam artist Daan Samson makes art installations that he baptized ‘prosperity biotopes’. The common thread in those works is the fusion of unspoilt natural beauty and modern technology. For example, at an exhibition I saw a glass vivarium with scaly ants in the middle, a bit like the mysterious black monolithy, a bit like the mysterious black monolith 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or a shiny electric dream car from Mercedes-Benz on a Bolivian salt flat, between a few tough cacti. My favorite welfare biotope shows a small modular nuclear reactor from Rolls-Royce, pardoes in the rainforest of the Congo peaks: a steel caterpillar with shiny scales, half sunk in the ground, which looks a bit like sandworms Dune from Frank Herbert.

Should we choose between the beauty of wilderness and technology, does Samson seem to ask us, between tall squoias and equally tall skyscrapers? Or can we reconcile the best of both worlds?

Some art critics thought that Samson’s welfare biotopes were intended ironically. It was probably a subtle conviction of mass consumption and screaming Product Placementor an indictment against technology that tarnishes wild nature. And couldn’t there be capitalism criticism? In an answer to his subsidy application, however, the Rotterdam culture committee labeled the Welfare Biotopen as ‘Pooperal’. The committee “misses the critical reflection,” says the sour report, and would rather have seen a “socially critical exhibition on prosperity”. Anyone who wants to receive subsidies – so tax money skipped off the capitalist milk cow – must make anti -capitalist art. An artist who celebrates prosperity and progress? No subsidies for this Hansworst!

As a progress thinker, I don’t believe that a little earlier was better, because as the American journalist Franklin P. Adams once said: “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” Yet in recent years I have become increasingly convinced that something has really changed in our culture. If you grass in the art and popular culture of the past, our ancestors seemed really more positive about modernity and technology. Doem thinking is of all times, but today the belief in progress seems completely dead and buried.

Tribute to steam engines

Have you ever read poetry that sings the praise of modern technology? Today it sounds crazy, but in the past. In his epic poems, the eighteenth-century thinker Erasmus Darwin tributed to steam engines, grain mills and blast furnaces. The grandfather of the famous Charles even predicted the invention of locomotives and aircraft – and it also made you happy. Rudyard Kipling, one of the most famous poets of the nineteenth century, wrote an ode to the steamboat: he compared the mighty machines with a symphonic orchestra. Others composed hymns about the Panama Canal or powerful dams, or a tribute to De Telegraaf and its inventor, Samuel Morse. Because why wouldn’t there be a beauty in human ingenuity?

In the nineteenth century, when the industrial revolution came to cruising speed, numerous also appeared utopian novels That expressed a future of universal prosperity and brotherhood. The most popular title in that genre was Looking backward by the American writer Edward Bellamy from 1888. The main character falls into a hypnotic sleep of 113 years and wakes up in 2000, where he finds society of his dreams. Nobody has to work, everything is free, hunger has been eradicated forever. Our great -grandparents enjoyed it: Looking backward became one of the best -selling books of the century.

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That optimism lasted well into the twentieth century. In the visual arts you had movements such as Art Deco, Futurism and Popart, which were positive about technological progress and industrialization. On world exhibitions you could get acquainted with the latest gadgets in the field of technology and industry. Even in the 1930s, when dark clouds took themselves above the Western world, the tone remained hopeful. The World Exhibition in Chicago of 1933 was called A Century of Progress And had the motto: “Science discovered, the industry fits, man adjusts”. In New York in 1939, visitors left with a cheerful Blauwwitt pin: “I have seen the future.” They also pinned that on their shirt, without feeling ridiculous.

New Frontier

Was optimism ending after the Second World War? Not really. In 1955, Walt Disney opened his theme park Tomorrowland (part of Disneyland) with the winged words: “Tomorrow can be a wonderful era”, thanks to science and technology. The sixties brought the iconic TV series Rigid traitwho takes place in a hopeful and high -tech future of space travel. Earth problems such as poverty and war were forever past tense, no longer suitable as plot material. The wide universe was at our feet as an endless’New Frontier‘, ready to discover. The slogan of the Enterprise spaceship: “Going boldly where no one has never been!” In the same decade, millions of people also watched The Jetsonsa futuristic television series in which people travel around in flying cars and on floating platforms. Every family has a robot as a household help, for a delicious meal it is sufficient to button.

Compare that with our contemporary science fiction: that is a story of a thousand and one nightmares. If we are not eradicated by artificial intelligence, or by alien beings. If a nuclear war does not destroy the planet, or an ecological catastrophe. Anyone who survives all this disaster as at Mirakel will certainly end up in a Takingalal. In the popular film franchise The Hunger Games A totalitarian world government forces people to fight for death in sports areas, as a entertainment. In The Handmaid’s Tale Life future women as submissive breeding machines in a patriarchal Christian dictatorship. In The Matrix Milking super intelligent robots literally express us as living batteries.

TV series Black Mirror Is the most resourceful of all, with 27 episodes and just as many visions of the future. I have just felt it: at most one is undisputed optimistic about technology (‘San Junipero’, by far the best). The other episodes are one long horror festival, with usually technology as a culprit – from virtual reality to killerdrones, from brain chips to surveillance cameras. This series reflects our collective imagination. If a new technology pops up somewhere, such as AI, most of them can only think of what can go wrong: a tsunami of Deepfakesthe loss of human relationships, the death blow of creativity. Or of course the extermination of all humanity by predatory robots.

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And our contemporary art, as you find in museums and poetry collections? That sometimes seems like an endless litany against the horrors of modern technology, capitalism and “consumption culture” (also known as prosperity). This would lead to all kinds of ailments: isolation, alienation, commodification, mental stump, spiritual emptiness, loss of authenticity. It is not uncommon for this to lead to conflicting diagnoses: has modern man turned into a docile herd animal, or a hyper-individualistic narcissist? Do we live in an EMO cration in which feelings are above all, or a neo-liberal performance culture in which cold figures and ratio feed the upper hand?

Believe

I know, I have to be careful not to work too selectively. In the nineteenth century there were poems about the horrors of the “dark satanic mills”, such as the English poet William Blake the new factories describedjust as there were artists walking around in the post -war decades who criticized modern technology. Yet you feel your little toe that a culture committee had looked up a century ago by Daan Samson and his cheerful prosperity biotopes. As Kamagurka once said, “The future used to be better.”

What happens to a civilization that gives her belief in progress? One possibility is the curse of the self-fulfilling prophecy. If we all lose our belief in progress, stagnation will be our part. Citizens today oppose just about every new construction project, governments squeeze new technology to death with the conservative ‘precautionary principle’, and companies are always investing fewer In research and development.

A spirit of the times is difficult to cast in a graph, but if you look at hard figures over GDP growthEconomic productivity and innovationthat doesn’t make you happy. Certainly, the economy is still growing, but significantly slower, especially in the struggling Europe. We have more scientists than ever, but fewer pioneering discoveries. Like the French German Homo Universalis Albert Schweitzer ever said: “Real progress is closely related to the faith of a society that considers this progress possible.”

Is it not urgent time that we value progress and innovation again? To improve the world, we not only need scientists and inventors, but also artists such as Daan Samson, who show us the beauty and poetry of modern industrial technology. And who have the imagination to imagine even better worlds. In which paradise can we wake up in 2150, after another hypnotic sleep of a good century?

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