{"id":8914,"date":"2018-01-01T17:22:13","date_gmt":"2018-01-02T00:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=8914"},"modified":"2018-01-02T17:25:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-03T00:25:59","slug":"1968-predictions-on-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2018\/01\/01\/1968-predictions-on-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"1968 Predictions on 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The 1968 Book That Tried to Predict the World of 2018<\/h1>\n

By Paul Collins<\/a><\/p>\n

For every amusingly wrong prediction in \u201cToward the Year 2018,\u201d a speculative book from 1968, there\u2019s one unnervingly close to the mark. \/ Illustration by Robert Beatty<\/em><\/p>\n

If you wanted to hear the future in late May, 1968, you might have gone to Abbey Road to hear the Beatles record a new song of John Lennon\u2019s\u2014something called \u201cRevolution.\u201d Or you could have gone to the decidedly less fab midtown Hilton in Manhattan, where a thousand \u201cleaders and future leaders,\u201d ranging from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith to the peace activist Arthur Waskow, were invited to a conference by the Foreign Policy Association. For its fiftieth anniversary, the F.P.A. scheduled a three-day gathering of experts, asking them to gaze fifty years ahead. An accompanying book shared the conference\u2019s far-off title: \u201cToward the Year 2018<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The timing was not auspicious. In America, cities were still cleaning up from riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.,\u2019s assassination, in April, and protests were brewing for that summer\u2019s Democratic National Convention. But perhaps the future was the only place left to escape from the present: more than eight hundred attendees arrived at the Hilton. \u201cThey met in the grand ballroom,\u201d the reporter Edwin Yoder wrote at the time, \u201cwhich is not so much futuristic as like a dimly remembered version of the 1920s small-town grand movie house.\u201d<\/p>\n

Invitees were carefully split by the F.P.A. between over-thirty-fives and under-thirty-fives\u2014but, less carefully, they didn\u2019t pick any principal speakers from the under-thirty-fives. As their elders mused on a future of plastics and plasma jets, without mention of Vietnam and violence in the streets, there was muttering among the younger attendees. Representatives from Students for a Democratic Society demanded time at the mike and circulated a letter questioning whether the conference was for \u201cdiscussion or brain washing.\u201d Waskow, today the rabbi of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, was an S.D.S. alumnus attending the conference out of a sincere interest in the future\u2014but he was skeptical of futurism. By 1968, he\u2019d already been working for more than a decade on a never-finished epistolary sci-fi novel, \u201cNotes from 1999.\u201d \u201cBut,\u201d Waskow explains, \u201cI was interested in changing the world\u2014not trying to predict the future, but to create<\/em> the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker The 1968 Book That Tried to Predict the World of 2018 By Paul Collins For every amusingly wrong prediction in \u201cToward the Year 2018,\u201d a speculative book from 1968, there\u2019s one unnervingly close to the mark. \/ Illustration by Robert Beatty If you wanted to hear the future in late May, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}