One World Government

Were you there when the One-World Government conspiracy seized control? Somebody asked me this question on the ACLU message boards. The, you know, "free speech area." Seriously, you want to know? Was I there?

Yeah, actually I was. One minute I'm outside a disco telling some chick why John Travolta bites. The next minute...

The black helicopters came. Then darkness...

And now they wake me. I've had a hard time adjusting, let me tell you, but the fact is, I do believe in a one-world conspiracy -- namely a conspiracy to turn Planet Earth into one vast market -- and to reduce everything in it to economic units. There'll be no need to unite the governments of the world into a "One World Government" because governments will have become irrelevant.

Along with politics, religion, and the expression of individuality.

Forget "One World Government." What will matter is the "One World Market."

The Universal Market absorbing ALL OF HUMAN LIFE even as I speak ...

Think about it.

It used to be extremely important what religion -- if any -- you belonged to. People in Western Europe and America routinely killed each other over this issue. People died, thanks to their opinion about a certain wafer. Now, except for a few throwback sub-cultures, religion is increasingly a non-issue in the West. The same indifference will soon apply to nationality. Please note --

If you're upper or upper-middle class, it pretty much does now. Well-to-do people from France very casually become Americans; well-to-do people from America move to Ireland or New Zealand. They don't think twice.

Planet Earth is rapidly turning into one big rotating shopping mall. But a few things have to happen first. Anything that gets in the way of buying and selling must be trivialized, subverted, co-opted or destroyed.

The three obvious obstacles are politics, religion and individuality.

The three obvious solutions are: buy politics, buy religion, buy individuality -- and then sell them all back.

Politics involves large populations and the possibility of war -- which cuts into trade and global markets. Politics is messy. Messy problem, easy solution. Buy off the politicians.

Religion (including that subset of religion called ideology) is the wildcard, and it's often what makes people crazy in the political realm.

Christian (Islamic, whatever) tub-thumpers paint lurid pictures of blue-helmetted goons putting padlocks on Vacation Bible Schools (or Madrasas). Unnecessary drama. You don't need government goons. Just make belief irrelevant...or turn it into a twisted mirror image of everything else. Just another product on the shelf. Religious types fear the one-world government. It's the one world market they should worry about.

As to individuality, close your eyes and imagine a Rock and Roll Rebel. Their hairstyle. The clothes they wear. You can see it, right? You can see it ... exactly. You see where I'm going with this?

The Universal Market can absorb anything.

It isn't even so bad when belief turns to fanaticism. Wars lead to arms sales; abortion clinic bombings lead to record earnings for security companies; every nutcase survival camp has its mailing list, its ammo catalogs, its bunkers of dried food. Whatever crap you can think of, extreme or insane as it may be (including religious crap), it's something that somebody's selling and somebody's buying.

The Universal Market isn't just the legit market. Up top, there's soybeans, cars and CDs. Down below, there's guns, explosives, drugs and Asian child prostitutes.

The Universal Market is simply the manifestation of desire: thought becoming physical. You want a gun? Here's a gun. You want to worry about dark conspiracies? Here's the X-Files. You want to be a strutting, self-righteous wanker? Here's the Promise Keepers.

To quote Bill Hicks, Earth is turning into "The Third Mall from the Sun." To quote R. Crumb, it's a "universal field theory of marketing bullshit."

People see this massive, unifying paranoiac pattern and say it's a conspiracy. The more logical explanation is an inhuman, amoral force changing everything without pity. I live in Florida. I see this force at work every day. The world around me resembles the world of H.G. Wells' Time Machine as the Time Traveler moved through time. Buildings melt, new buildings arise, everything changes in a blur...

Behind the relentless flux? The inhuman, immoral force is money. The Invisible Hand.

Money is moving through the world like electricity, remorselessly changing everything, burning a path to the sea like Sherman on his way to Atlanta...

And it's been happening for some time.

It goes back to the Industrial Revolution, when the machines were being born, when the Romantic poets, hearts breaking for a world they already knew was dying, dreamed of lakes, hills, forests, when Mary Shelley saw an undead face in the window in a lightning flash. The first nightmare of the modern age: Dr. Frankenstein (the "Modern Prometheus") gives life to the sewn-up pieces of a dead thing using electricity. His creation has the spark of life but no soul. The Monster's not-dead/not-alive existence is torment and it turns on its creator and kills him.

Frankenstein's Monster is our future. So we fight the future. (To quote the marketing campaign for the upcoming X-Files movie.) We do our damnedest to live in the past.

Almost all of us.

The hippies wanted to "grow their own" stuff on communes; the Christians want Jesus to lead them like sheep through green pastures; the Islamicists want to keep the walls up -- and keep our nasty, amoral technocratic world from spilling in. But the shining past is just something else they sell us. No walls can last anymore -- and there's no way to go back. The Monster is coming.

The peasants with torches may have been right all along.

Originally posted as "Jack Getz" on the ACLU "Free Speech" message boards.

Duh, what happened?

We think we can think clearly, when the truth is, here at the end of the 20th century, it's more like running into a tree and waking up on the ground with a circle of people looking down at you going "Are you OK?"

We're still stunned...

It is not exactly clear just what's happened to this miserable planet. This century was like the harrowing machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony," slowly raking its sentence of doom in humanity's back. What exactly?

Think, and what tends to come to mind is all the shit on the walls: slogans of the Left, slogans of the Right. What's really happening is outside the slogans -- and what's really happening is a network of buying and selling, an intricate matrix forking out over the world like tobacco mosaic virus. Whatever it represents politically, what you're talking about is the transformation of available energy. What the hell is really happening and what, exactly, is this global industrial system turning into?

The Left, in one form or another, said the workers must control the means of production. That the distribution of wealth should fit some notion of social utility and fairness...

The Right, in one form or another, said that nothing but the market should control the market. And that the Holy Market, itself, parcels out its rewards fairly in the long run. Because...

(A) So it has been ordained of God -- the old Calvinistic view that wealth is a sign of God's grace.
(B) So it has been ordained by that other face of the evolutionary process called market competition. Survival of the fittest...product or service. Losers lose, winners win and everything gets better. It's the natural order of things.
(C) Who the fuck said life had to be fair?

And now the Capitalists have, essentially, won. There is no real opposition to Capitalism in any sense, except a few harrying forces and insular societies. It's not a question of whether "Free Market Societies" will win the battle against "Controlled Market Societies." The question is: whose shit is going to sell in the no rules planet wide market called earth?

We read "1984" and think "How fucking horrible. TV sets watching you and telling you what to do." Then, everywhere you go, there's a fucking TV set telling you what to do, but you don't notice it because it ain't Big Brother -- it's advertising.

The Market sticks its nose into our homes via the TV, into our cars via the radio. Buying and selling is life; family, religion, friends and community are sorta out there on the edges...

What this will all look like 100 years from now is anybody's guess. What seems to be emerging now is the philosophy: whatever is is right.

The question -- on a down and dirty human level -- is this: if you are what you own and what you own is yours on the basis of a no-rules, fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on fight of all against all, where, exactly, is there room for love, friendship, loyalty, tenderness, and the luxury of integrity in a society based, absolutely, on competition?

Clintonectomy

Why is the Right so bug-eyed nuts about giving Clinton the sack? Are they really that morally outraged about his consensual BJ? Yes and no.

Here's my theory.

The Clinton investigation is not about any crimes he may have committed. It isn't even about his character. What it's about is his political philosophy...

Which, to folks of a certain philosophical pursuasion, is a crime and a character flaw in itself.

This is easy to spot in a number of call-ins to MSNBC and the like. Sputtering, outraged people call in and say "Convicted? Hell yes I think the pot-smoking, draft-dodging bastard should be convicted -- I was at Normandy, goddamnit! I was there!"

In their heart of hearts, the Clinton-haters don't want to throw him out because he's guilty of sexual harassment or lying to cover up his sexual harassment.

They want to throw him out because he's a pot-smoking, draft-dodging bastard. For which read: "late 60's liberal along the lines of Bobby Kennedy or Gene McCarthy." Hippy, in other words.

Which makes this, as Cartman might put it, the "Screw you, hippy" investigation.

The reason all the outraged callers want to throw him out is that, beneath his blow-dried hair, Clinton is a hippy -- and he attempted to implement his hippydippy philosophy in the practical, political world. Democracy be damned...we're turning this bus around right this INSTANT! You kids pipe down back there!

The outraged, true believer whackos on the Right feel they've got a right to subvert the democratic process because they know what's right....

They know.

It's a question of absolute truth.

* * *

By way of equal time...

To be broadminded and fair, I will admit from the gitgo that the Right has no monopoly on whackos and true believers. There are conservative nuts and, God knows, liberal nuts. There are feminists who think all sex is rape, leftists who think all property is theft, earth-firsters who'd like to rename America "Turtle Island" and send anyone of European descent swimming back across the Atlantic to the corrupt continent they came from. Fine. I'll admit it.

But the left-wing whackos tend not to have the monetary resources of multi-national corporations at their disposal and, what with the unpeeling of the former Soviet Onion, are severely underfunded and outgunned lately. These days, even Castro is getting into time-share and will probably come out with a line of cigars and designer fatigues any day now to make ends meet. It's bad, people. Bad. The Left is done for...

Which is why it's the wingnuts on the right I wanna talk about.

* * *

By way of background....

I'm not sure what "Left" and "Right" means in the first place. My hunch is that it's a vast collective hallucination that emerged when the human race freaked out at the concept of machines at the beginning of the industrial age...but let's hold on that and go for a rough working definition, at least of the Left and Right in America.

There two basic issues that divide us into Left and Right are culture and money.

The split with culture: some folks believe in absolute moral truth (God, the 10 commandments etc.), others believe that right and wrong is a creation of the human brain which varies -- and has no ultimate basis other than ad hoc agreements (the "Star Trek" prime directive theory).

The split with money: some folks believe that the power of the government ends where private property begins, (Randists, libertarians and anybody who happens to have a lot of private property), others believe in spreading the wealth and creating equal opportunity and "economic justice" (leftists, bleeding hearts and anybody who, coincidentally enough, happens not to have a lot of stuff). Social Darwinism vs. Social Mommyism. Scrooge vs Golden Crowns and Turkeys for Everyone....

It is possible to be a born-again Christian democrat who believes in spreading the wealth (Jimmy Carter). It is possible to be an avaricious I-got-mine Republican who believes in raising hell (P.J. O'Rourke).

But for purposes of expediency and political effectiveness, these differences are smoothed over in America. Spread-the-wealth democrats who think that abortion is sin have no "Christian Democratic" party to turn to. Athiest libertarians have to smile and put up with yahoos yapping about school prayer and the preordained presence of the eternal soul at the very instant of conception...

Ha-ha.

* * *

Most adults with brains can deal with contradictions, incomplete data, fuzziness and odd bedfellows...

Including a nation where both left-wingers and right-wingers can vote their ideas -- whether loony or sound -- into practice.

But the Right contains two factions that think they have a lock on absolute truth...

Christian conservatives and property rights fundamentalists.

The boundaries of these groups are fuzzy, but roughly speaking....

The Christian conservatives believe in certain absolutist positions concerning abortion, the nature of marriage (heterosexual, the husband is the boss), the protected status of institutions of religious indoctrination (vouchers for religious schools -- injecting prayer and "scientific creationism" into public schools --- if not dismantling public education entirely), etc. A lot of 'em believe that America is the "New Israel" and her armed forces the army of God. A lot of 'em also believe that any expansion of state power is a usurpation of God's authority...the evil State slouching like some rough rude beast onto the throne of God itself!

Which would be their viewpoint concerning the political program of a late 60s liberal...

Whom they would feel justified in stopping by any means necessary.

The property rights fundamentalists (Randists, libertarians, etc.) feel that the state has no more "right" to tax, regulate or redistribute private property than it does to sell certain people into slavery. If, for example, some latterday McGovernite wants to institute a plan of Socialized medicine, that latterday McGovernite has no right to do so -- and to hell with what the voters want -- their sweaty subjectivist "needs" are no claim on the rights, property or ideas of ANY free man -- somebody hand me the dynamite.

This faction, too, feels justified in stopping the blowdried secondrater in the White House by any means necessary.

What both groups tend to agree on is a need for American military primacy: Christians because we're the fist holding the sword of God, Libertarians and friends because America is the security cop in a shopping mall planet.

Clinton, while he hasn't exactly gutted the military hasn't exactly been its best friend either. Even if he were, does he have a right to be with his draft-dodging, demonstrating-against-America-on-foreign-soil background? As Whorf might say, his very presence as "Commander in Chief" is a dishonor to warriors everywhere! He is a coward has no right to lead -- eliminate him!

By any means necessary.

* * *

That's what these people think, with firm, unwavering moral conviction.

That's what they're angry about. That's what they're fighting against. That's why they swamp the call-in talkshows and bulletin boards. That's why they're willing to throw political strategy to the winds and hamstring the Republican party just to get the sumbitch...

That's what it all boils down to.

What they're angry about is what Clinton believes in and tried to do. It sure as hell ain't the oral office blowjobs. (Like any of these people give a flying shit about sexual harrasment in the workplace. Ha...HA!)

It ain't his dick. It's his doctrine.

Certain people feel that Clinton's political philosophy is evil -- whether Satanic or collectivist thuggery, take your pick. They don't want to let the man have a chance in hell of implementing his philosophy because they feel -- elections and such aside -- he doesn't have a right to.

Whether or not Clinton is actually convicted, I think it's safe to say they've won.

* * *

Which is why I think the next century is probably going to look like a cross between Neuromancer and the Handmaid's Tale. Leftism is dead. Liberalism is dead. The next war will be between the privatizers and the ayatollahs who, their other enemies crushed, will wake up one fine day to discover they really don't like each other all that much.

We've been living in interesting times for a long bloody, schizoid century...

But you ain't seen nothing yet.

Additional thoughts, possibly redundant:

Sci-fi Furniture Sale

Have made the point before, not sure I've posted it, so will make it again.

Yesterday's SF becomes today's reality, not just because of the predictive powers of the original SF dream, but because the expression of these ideas plants a seed in someone's head that eventually grows.

If I ever (ha!) get my reference clippings straightened out I could say I know that I know that I know -- but, once again -- Mr. Disorganized will shoot from the hip ...

I'm pretty sure that many of the original pioneers of rocketry (Von Braun, etc.) were fans of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells; many of the original Mercury/Apollo NASA engineers were fans of 1930s and '40s hard SF writers -- including Asimov, natch. I recall seeing a thing on the tube as to how plenty of the current NASA engineers were originally inspired by Star Trek -- which is probably a good thing as compared to Star Wars. We don't want any astronauts shutting off the guidance system and "using the force" after all.

Aside from cyberfunk, what the next SF wave will be depends on where technology/society actually goes. This is part of the ongoing feedback loop between predicted change and actual change -- the simplest example being the display systems on Star Trek (which had to change when the PC revolution made the original displays look dorky) or the working-in of movements of social change, like the women's lib movement -- no miniskirts in STTNG -- or technological change, like the PC revolution, which, as far as I know, no hard SF writer quite predicted. There's even shit that nobody would have predicted -- like society's general rejection of smoking in public places. The original Lost in Space pilot had a mission control center (set, I think, in 1997) where almost everybody -- including a TV anchor -- was smoking like fiends.

My hunch (I wrote an essay on this awhile back, this'll be a compressed form of it) is that technological change occurs in waves; the fictional adaptation to that change occurs in concurrent waves, just slightly out of sync and lagging behind. The waves of fiction and reality create interference patterns.

There's a simple reason fiction lags behind reality. Writers are lazy. Almost any genre starts out as the exploration of new territory -- and ends as rearrangements of old furniture. SF is not immune.

What happens with SF is that the furniture of the future becomes too nicely cut and dried. A general consensus congeals about what the future looks like --

As in the flying cars future of the Hugo Gernsback era ...

Or the warp drive/transporter beam/galactic federation conventions of the Star Trek franchise.

Or the teams of big-eyed warriors in anthropomorphic giant robot suits fighting aliens or other weirdos that you'll find in anime.

Or, more recently, the cyberpunk conventions of a consensual hallucination of cyberspace and a sweaty underground cyber economy of outlaws and cowboys swapping spare body and computer parts, dirty deeds and dirty data while jacking themselves up and in.

The consensus congeals; the conventions are worked out. SF writers and/or screenwriters are free to be lazy -- and stop sweating the details of a speculative world (or paying attention to the implications of the present day world). They're free to write soap operas or shoot 'em ups in an agreed-upon fictional reality whose details are as precisely worked out as the town in "Gunsmoke."

While these lazy, established writers are busy doing that, something changes out there in the real world. The writers don't notice it at first. It's off their radar.

This blindness is usually but not always, an age thing. The old guys are stuck in a rut. They're too busy moving futuristic furniture around to notice actual technological and social change.

Then some young Turk comes around -- like William Gibson looks around and notices a few things the established SF writers are ignoring -- things like the embryonic Internet and the PC revolution. He asks himself, "What about this shit? If this goes on ..." Then he thinks. He speculates.

And the young Turk writes something that shakes everything and everybody up. He writes something like Neuromancer. (I think Gibson was still in his early 20s when he wrote it.)

And -- blink, blink -- before you know it, the young Turk's radical new ideas become conventional cliches again. More furniture that other SF writers can move around and, occasionally, reupholster.

So it goes.

Bad President, bad

CJ tells me yet another scandal has bubbled up in the Drudge Report like so much methane farted up in Rush Limbaugh's hot tub. It seems President Clinton did the nasty with one of his aides. Gee, imagine that.

This fart will expand to fill the media universe.

The 60s ... what a movie

So, how come all the movies about the 1960s fall short? Some failures are more interesting than some successes.

Fact is, the 60s have been filmed to death and nobody got the 60s on film -- at least the warm, chewy center of the 60s. It's sorta like the Zapruder clip. You see JFK's head explode, but where's the shootists? The killer concept in Piers Anthony's Macroscope also comes to mind. Once you figure it out it fries your head...

Documentary films are documentary films -- the surveillance camera in the convenience store of life. And we've all seen the goddamn images too many times for them to mean anything...raise your hand if you've just visualized that Vietnamese guy getting his head blown off.

Ken Kesey never got his goddamn Movie together, now did he?

Easy Rider, strangely, seems like a premonition -- as if somebody in the old South had written Gone with the Wind before the South had even lost the war...

Somehow, it just doesn't feel like a movie made in the 60s. It's more like a movie somebody made in the 80s or 90s as a painstakingly accurate historical recreation of the period to see what went wrong. But it's all looking back at what's not there anymore. The commune ain't it. The road ain't it. America ain't it. What they're looking for is gone...

Medium Cool is a film about how it's impossible to get the truth on film -- even when you're there when it's happening...

Joe was excellent -- but, like a lot of 60's films, it's a chalk outline of a dead body on the sidewalk...

Movies like Little Murders, The Graduate, Getting Straight, the Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, etc. are less about the 60s and more about the death of attitudes and power structures left over from the 50s -- either in the sense of a world going to hell (as in Little Murders) or raising hell (as in most of the rest of 'em). These were sometimes (but not always) an excuse for middle-aged male fantasies about groping young chicks and taking drugs...

Just like the kids.

Paul Mazursky's stuff (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice...I Love You Alice B. Toklas, etc.) has flashes of insight and intelligence -- but is too obviously about something ripped out of the newspaper to be real. What real experience he shows is more beat than anything else. A beat in freak's clothing...

Much of the people making experimental movies were too ripped to make good movies...sorta like an acidhead putting his thumb on the camera. Hold your eyes open, kids! It's the Magical Mystery Tour!

Roger Corman's the exception here.

God bless Roger Corman, all praise to his name.

You got a few flashes. The Trip comes to mind. Supposedly supportive but just the least little bit hostile acid guide Bruce Dern holding out a chair in front of acid-bummed Peter Fonda. It's just a chair. What're you scared of the chair for?

Gahhhhhhhh.....

But Roger Corman movies are Roger Corman movies period.

Forget every earnest political tract -- like the Billy Jack movies, which are sorta like the leftwing antimatter equivalent of The Green Beret -- hold a reel of Green Beret in one hand, Billy Jack in the other, put them together and the universe explodes.

Ohmygod, they killed the rabbit! Ohmygod, they killed the kid!

Now I must kill for peace!

What's left is one-size-fits-all Hollywood bullshit and the cynical reality of various independent visions...

The bullshit: exploitation flicks for the youth market.

The individual reality...

Lots of films about squarepegroundhole loners like Five Easy Pieces. Lots of films made by smart aliened individuals about smart alienated individuals...

And Altman films. These are more (in an almost wierdly Japanese way) about individuals as they function in groups. Self and false self, status games, man/woman sex power games, the universal field theory of lying, the pecking order and pecking parties, insiders, outsiders, crossed messages and the shifting goalposts of us and them...

Altman knew how to present the fractured, surrealistic bullshit of American life -- smart, hip, cynical people walking through the broken glass doing their best not to stand on anything like the doctors in M*A*S*H. The people who do stand on anything get cut to pieces: like Shelley Duvall in Three Women or Brewster McCloud in the same-named film. Enthusiasm and commitment ends badly -- always. Detachment is a survival trait.

Believe the wrong speech and you'll bleed to death in the snow like McCabe...

Animal House is strangely accurate. But it's about the attitude before the storm hit...

Vietnam being, pretty much, the storm -- or the outward and visible sign of the storm. Every movie I've ever seen about it seems fake...movies that scream "I'm a movie."

Except for Full Metal Jacket. There's a cold, real ugliness about it...

But we're talking the woodsman who takes his kid out in the woods and leaves him there. It's not about the kid -- it's about the death-system Daddy throws the kid into...

What the storm wrecked was the center of it all -- the communal peace/love thing of the counterculture. Yes, I know it seems like bullshit now. But, apparently, at a specific place and time -- say Haight Ashbury in '67 -- there was something like a spontaneous youth movement...

If you believe the urban legends, those who weren't cynical, independent, grounded, and skeptical got sucked into a rush of tribal enthusiasm -- and got deeply fucked over. Nobody's ever captured what that felt like on film. Woodstock is on the outside looking in (and feels like a fucking commercial) -- but nobody's ever convincingly filmed what it's like on the inside being caught up in it all...and what it was like when it all went wrong.

Say a decent treatment of We're the People Your Parents Warned You Against...

Nobody convincingly caught the left-wing anger either -- as, in print, Turgenev and Dostoevsky once got inside the heads of their country's revolutionaries -- because, in this country, the non leftists didn't get it or want to and the leftists were so goddamn serious all they could do was make documentaries (or films that wanted to be documentaries -- or PRC type revolutionary opera). What they couldn't do is see themselves objectively as characters...their own contradictions, weakness and bullshit...

But nobody convincingly caught that sense of "Fuck! Daddy's going to take us out in the woods and leave us there!"

Nobody made a good movie about the demonstrations in Chicago in '68. What it was like to go there. What it was like to be there. (Medium Cool being about what it was like to be there and not be there...)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is more like the comedown after the high -- that bad, bad burned out feeling. Thompson's book was enough, of course. The film is as ugly and unneccesary as the vomit splattered all around your toilet from whatever it was you don't remember doing the night before...

That vomit is now the only record you've got that anything happened at all. And by the looks of it...

It must've really been something.

Days of Future Past

Yesterday's SF becomes today's reality, not just because of the predictive powers of the original SF dream, but because the expression of these ideas plants a seed in someone's head that eventually gets built...

If I ever (ha!) get my reference clippings straightened out I could say I know that I know that I know -- but, once again -- Mr. Disorganized will shoot from the hip...

I'm pretty sure that many of the original pioneers of rocketry (Van Braun, etc.) were fans of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells; many of the original Mercury/Apollo NASA engineers were fans of 30s 40s hard SF writers -- including Asimov, natch -- I recall seeing a thing on the tube as to how plenty of the current NASA engineers were originally inspired by Star Trek -- which is probably a good thing as compared to Star Wars. We don't want any astronauts shutting off the guidance system and "using the force" after all...

Aside from cyberfunk, what the next wave will be depends on where technology/society goes. This is part of the ongoing feedback loop between predicted change and actual change -- the simplest example being the display systems on Star Trek (which had to change as the PC revolution made the original displays look dorky) or the working-in of movements of social change -- like the women's movement, or technological change -- like the PC revolution, which, as far as I know, no hard SF writer quite predicted. There's even shit that nobody would have predicted -- like society's general rejection of smoking in public places. The original "Lost in Space" pilot had a mission control center (set, I think, in 1998) where almost everybody -- including a TV anchor -- was smoking like fiends...

My hunch (I wrote an essay on this awhile back, this'll be a compressed for of that essay) is that technological change occurs in waves, the fictional adaptation to that change occuring in concurrent waves, just slightly out of sync and lagging behind.

One reason is writers are lazy. Almost any genre starts out as the exploration of new territory -- and ends as the rearrangement of old furniture. 

What happens with SF is that the furniture of the future gets too nicely cut and dried -- even if we're not talking about a show with its own "future history" like Star Trek, a general consensus congeals about what the future looks like -- as in the warp drive, galactic federation, flying cars future of the Gernsback era -- or the consensual hallucination of cyberspace and a sweaty underground cyber economy of outlaws and cowboys swapping spare parts, dirty deeds and dirty data while jacking themselves up and in -- or, for that matter, the teams of big-eyed warriors in anthropomorphic robot suits fighting aliens or other weirdos that you'll find in anime...

The consensus congeals. The writers and/or screenwriters are free to be lazy -- and move away from working out the details of a speculative world (or speculating in the first place about the present day world). They're free to write soap operas or shoot 'em ups in an agreed upon fictional reality with details as worked out as the town in "Gunsmoke"...

While they're busy doing that something changes out there in the real world. Something that they don't notice. Something that they can get away with not noticing for awhile...

Like, say, the PC revolution.

Or the possibilities inherent in the internet...

This blindness is very often, but not always, an age thing. The old guys get stuck in a rut.

Some young turk comes around -- like William Gibson who, I think, was still in his early 20s when he wrote Neuromancer -- and says "What about this stuff? Hell, all you zombies seem to be unaware -- so I might as well write about it."

The young turk writes something that shakes everything and everybody up...

And -- blink, blink -- before you know it, the young turk's radical new ideas become a cliche convention again. And so it was that Neuromancer begat Tek Wars. And it was bad.

So...

Unfortunately....

I guess it's a question of some radical change happening out there in the big bad world first. SF, as much as it deals with imagination ain't pure imagination, which is why it ain't fantasy. Even if the writer isn't interested in being predictive per se, there has to be some tether to the real world. A new speculation implies a new reality to speculate about...

For a new SF direction to happen, there has to be a zig or zag in society or technology that nobody quite predicted. Something that a writer with eyes to see will notice when it's just starting out.

So, before Frankenstein you have to have Galvin's experiments with electricity...

Before Neuromancer there has to be at least the beginnings of a global computer network. 

Mary Shelley noticed. William Gibson noticed. But life kept going on.

What the hell am I missing?