This is a still shot of the opening slate of the Blade Runner (1982) movie trailer. I didn't notice this slate until the second time I watched the trailer.
I woke up one morning early, before dawn, about the middle of October, in 2019. I woke up in a parking lot with a big idea in my head. No, I hadn't been on a three week binder, or had some crazy adventure like in a bachelor party movie. I'm homeless, and I just slept in a small parking lot every night. Why am I homeless? I'm not sure, I think the reason is classified, they won't even tell me.
But all that aside, I have a geeky side that reads big, weird, books about the economy, future trends, and stuff like that. I've been watching the financial markets for over 30 years, though I've never owned a share of stock, and only bought a bit of precious metals and a few futures options, in that time. I've been interested in the future, and trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future, since I was a kid. Over the last 35 years, I've come across three theories that I think can help me, and others, understand our crazy world today, and why so many things seem so chaotic on an unprecedented level. I've mentioned those theories in the last couple of posts. They are Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Third Wave concept, P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles, and Richard Florida's Creative Class concept.
I've found those three big ideas, in particular, explain different aspects of our society, our world, over the last 30 years. I've also run across other cycles, like the fact that nearly every 30-60-90 year mark we tend to have a recession, if not a depression or great depression, going back to colonial days. My geeky, brainiac side was watching these long term, and ultra-long term cycles play out, watching the ups and downs of financial markets, real estate cycles, and other stuff like that. I find the dynamics of all these different trends interacting fascinating. Yes, that's weird, like I said, I'm a geek, and not a typical geek, but an economics futurist geek, which makes me a geek among geeks.
Meanwhile, I was struggling as a taxi driver in the early and mid-2000's, as that industry got hit by new technology. First, computer dispatching replaced the old CB radios, which allowed the taxi companies to put far more taxis on the road, killing the business for seasoned drivers. Later, as we all know, Uber and Lyft wiped out most of what was left of the taxi, town car, limo, and airport ride industries.
I became homeless while driving my taxi, living in it for years, and eventually wound up on the streets, unable to find a "real " job. My family offered to fly me to North Carolina to stay for "a while," and I wound up stuck there for ten years, still unable to find a "real" job. I finally started selling my unique Sharpie artwork online to make a little bit of money. While I was in NC, I started blogging like crazy, mostly about my BMX freestyle days, and worked to learn the basics of online and social media marketing. That helped me sell about 90 original pieces of art, and some prints, over the last 5 years.
Eventually, an old friend from my BMX bike riding days paid my bus fare back to California, to help promote an online business he was starting. That didn't work out as planned, and I went back to the streets, and kept blogging and working on new ideas to get back to making a living. I know most of you don't give a damn about all of that, but that's the short version of how I was the guy waking up with a big idea, in a parking lot in the San Fernando Valley, in October 2019.
At that time, I had been blogging about the economy, a major recession (likely depression) I saw coming in the near future, and other Big Picture issues around the continual trend of new technology replacing human jobs, and our transition from the Industrial Age into the Information Age. That, as you probably know by now, is what I call The Big Freakin' Transition, the title of this blog. It was just "The Big Transition," for 2-3 years, but I needed a better title to start the blog, so I added "freakin'." That's not the most creative title, but it works.
I had all of these different ideas and theories I had learned of, studied, and pondered, combined with my own observations of markets and trends, and what I'd learned from a couple hundred other books, in my head. It was all this big mish mash of disjointed ideas, all pointing towards a lot more change, and some pretty chaotic times in the future. I had not tried to organize all these ideas at that point, in late 2019.
That October morning, the big idea was for me to go back and watch the top 30 or 40 dystopian movie trailers, and TV show intros, from the 1960's through the 1990's. Doing that, I would see how all those different writers and directors viewed "the future" from their time, and from their personal perspective. I realized that in 2019, at 53 years old, I was living in "the future" of my childhood and high school self, the time when I was most affected by futuristic movies. I decided I would begin by watching the trailers, then comparing the future each of them predicted with what 2019 was really like. How close were they? What did they get right and get wrong? Did they miss key elements of today's world? What did they come up with that's not real yet? From there, I would look at the future my lifetime of interest and study saw in the coming years, the 2020's, in particular.
So I took this old laptop (which I'm still using, now about 5-6 years old), and began that work at a McDonald's and at the local library. I also got a notebook just for this idea, and began writing my thoughts. It was early November, 2019, when I watched this Blade Runner (1982) trailer, and saw the silent slate at the beginning. That stopped me cold. Blade Runner, now 39 years ago, was set in Los Angeles in November of 2019. But some weird trick of fate, I began really getting going on this big series of ideas about the future, in Los Angeles County, in November of 2019. I was literally living in the real future that the original Blade Runner movie tried to predict. That's pretty crazy. I grew up in Ohio, and lived in Boise, Idaho when that movie came out, both of which seemed a million miles from L.A. and Hollywood. Yet somehow I ended up in L.A county, I was bouncing between The Valley and Hollywood, as I wrote out the rough ideas of this big, personal project. I could take bus or train around, and compare the real Los Angeles 2019 with the Blade Runner version, day after day. Obviously, there's a huge difference.
As the ideas came together, and I realized I had something big to write, I thought about how to publish it. With so much of other people's work involved in what I was talking about, a free blog, in the form of a book, seemed the way to go. I built the basic blog with 20 chapters, so it could be read top to bottom, like a book, not backwards, as normal blogs work. I figured I would have 9 or 10, maybe 11 chapters. From late December 2019, to about April 2020, I wrote this 20 chapter book/blog thing, and called it Welcome to Dystopia, The Future is Now, Book 1. Yeah, I not only filled up the 20 chapters, I thought a "book 2" might come along. So far, no book 2. To date, this is the most complete version of my thinking about the future, the theories that help me look forward, and at times predict major inflection points, and why I dubbed this decade The Tumultuous 2020's right before the decade even started.
This blog is here for me to go deep into the more minute and detailed aspects of all the various parts of this Big Picture, The Big Freakin' Transition. As you all know, a lot has happened in our world, and everyday life, since late 2019. I DID expect a major economic downturn to happen, and I believe it will at least feel like a Great Depression, to most people, by the time we get to about 2027. Technically, we are in an economic Depression (3 year contraction OR a 10% or more GDP drop- we had a 33% drop in GDP in Q2 2020), by one of the two traditional definitions.
I DID NOT see a major global pandemic coming along to amplify the economic and social change. But it did, and we are still dealing with Covid-19. But that is just part of what's going on in this decade. Even without Covid, this would have been one of the most chaotic decades ever, in my belief.
So with that incredibly long intro, here are the links to my late 2019-early 2020 book/blog thing about The Future:
Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1
Chapter 2: The Future the Media Shows You is Not the Future You Get
Chapter 3: Where the Hell is My Flying Car?
Chapter 4: Did the Futuristic Movies and TV Shows of My Generation X Childhood Get Anything Right?
Chapter 5: Was There Anyone in the 20th Century Who Did Get "The Future" Right?
Chapter 6: Why Care About the Future?
Chapter 7: The Power of Creative Scenes (What I did instead of college)
Chapter 8: How I Became and Amateur Futurist
Chapter 9: The "Blade Runner Future" and the Future We Actually Got
Chapter 10: The Tofflers' Third Wave
Chapter 11: Surf's Up Brah... The Long Term Waves of the U.S. Economy
Chapter 12: P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle
Chapter 13: The Big Transition- The Unplanned Revolution of Everything
Chapter 14: Disruption: Apocaplyse Past, Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Soon
Chapter 15: Richard Florida and The Rise of the Creative Class
Chapter 17: The Phoenix Great Depression
Chapter 18: The Economic Collapse is Here... Now What?
Chapter 19: Rebuilding America- Dream On... Time to Make Your Dreams Come True
Chapter 20: Our Dystopia is CHANGE- It's Time to Mold a New Reality
That's Dystopia as I refer to it, the best collection of my thinking on the future, the 2020's in particular, and the things I saw ahead, back in 2020.
Personally, I think the 2020's will be so crazy, that any person or business with a 5 year or 10 year plan, will simply have to throw it out the window. There are so many fundamental things in our world that will change in this decade, many of which have layers more change built upon them, that I don't think anyone can accurately plan beyond this decade.
I don't think the major changes will stop on January 1st 2030, I just think most of the fundamental changes will happen between now and then. Afterwards will be more of fine tuning what has already happened, providing we, as a species, are still here.
The dark side of all of this is that we are in a period where things can go totally off course, and it's possible we destroy our species before 2030 gets here. We're sitting on thousands of nukes, unstable political climates, bio-weapons, and a lot of just plain ignorant fools in positions of power. This is a decade that many things could go completely wrong. Game over. I DO NOT think that's how things will ultimately play out, but it's a remote possibility in times this turbulent. Fortunately, humans have a way of coming together in the worst crises, and working for a common good in times of great change.
Another thing that many people may notice is that I barely even touch on global warming, and today's other trendy environmental issues. My reason for that is because this economic and social turmoil could take us all out long before environmental issues really get bad. If humans aren't around in 2030, global warming isn't an issue. I think we need to make it through these economic, social, work, business, and political issues before environmental issues become the main focus. If environmental issues are your primary focus, great. But we have a lot of other stuff, as a society, to get through first, the way I see it.
Since there will be great change in business and social models, there's no reason not to design new things to work in a much more environmentally friendly way, with healthier production and manufacturing, and use. But human "civilization," by it's nature, is destructive to the environment, that was the point of chapter 1 of Dystopia.
So for anyone who has stumbled across this blog, and wants to know where my weird ideas come from, this post, and the thinking and writing in Dystopia, is the best place to find out. Thanks for reading. Lots more to come...
Steve Emig 10/13/2021
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