The Doctor
“You believe it’s the year 1999 when in fact it’s closer to 2199. I can’t tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don’t know”
Morpheus speaking to Neo in The Matrix 1999.
Are our expectations being managed? Have you ever noticed the 70s, 80s and 90s music always playing in shops, pubs, most radio stations and when you are on hold? Some people say that is because those decades were the peak of pop music, and it was downhill from there. Others say it is only the older generation who listen to the radio, and we get stuck with their favourites.
But I remember when I was a kid that we were supposed to be zooming around in flying cars by now. And who has forgotten about Doc Brown’s upgrade of the DeLorean with a “Mr Fusion” home energy generator supposedly in 2015? These were realistic expectations in the 1980s as after all, twelve men had walked on the moon by 1972.
But instead of us demanding to know why those reasonable technological objectives still have not been met, we appear to be resigned to zooming on Zoom instead of flying to the office like George Jetson. We have been browbeaten into accepting high fuel prices instead of expecting cars to come already fuelled with all the energy they would ever use.
Whereas the earlier inventions of the 20th century empowered us (especially women) to spend more time with our families and friends, to travel and be freer, to express ourselves individually and to have more leisure, most of the technological advances since World War II have been to dehumanise us: to have us spend less time with our families, to surveil us, to make us conform, to control us, to change us.
What is the difference? The former technologies extended and enhanced our humanity, but the later technologies seemed to be designed to change what it means to be human. And there is no more insidious technology than that which would change our DNA and yet that has been the objective since the discovery of DNA in the 1950s.
We have had our high expectations of technology transformed into a managed retreat approach to life. I say that is a psychological operation: a kind of fifth-generation warfare. It is a bait and switch.
One way to manage our expectations is to make us nostalgic for the past with music and movies that are recycled from the past. Another is to make us feel guilty about the present with nonsense such as climate change and Critical Race Theory. Yet another is to try to implicate those empowering technologies such as cars, aeroplanes, vacuum cleaners and air conditioning as either killing the earth or spreading deadly diseases. Meanwhile, the dehumanising technologies march on.
We haven’t really progressed. We are still in those 1950s cars on those 1950s roads using 19th-century fuels including battery-powered electric cars (invented in the 1880s).
I for one am saying no. I am restoring my childhood expectations. I refuse to give in to managed retreat. And I do not believe my expectations are unreasonable. Consider Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) and the SAFIRE project as candidates for “Mr Fusion”. Furthermore, the electrical theory of the universe (tested and proven by SAFIRE) shows that electromagnetic levitation and propulsion are not just possible but practical given a powerful energy source such as safe LENR or SAFIRE nuclear reactions.
I say no to dehumanising technology. I want to know where the empowering technology is, and I want it released now. I don’t want my expectations managed. I don’t want to live in the past. I’m looking forward to a better future. Will you join me?
