Don't Look Up: Impostor and the Future

"There wasn't always a war with the Centauri, but in my lifetime it's all I've ever known. By the year 2050, six years after the first attack, we'd lost so many things. We'd lost the sky to electromagnetic domes, to shield the Earth from frequent air raids increasing in intensity. We'd lost the uncovered cities that the government forgot. We'd lost democracy to global leadership. We didn't expect peace anymore with the Centauri, because we came to see that peace wasn't their goal. Their goal was Earth. The ultimate land war, with no boundaries."

Gary Fleder's (2001) Philip K. Dick adaptation, Impostor, trots out merrily and seemingly without too much self-awareness all the old dystopian science fiction cliches: the violent, uncompromising homeland security agents with their baroque torture devices; the CGI-generated post-Metropolis, post-Blade Runner hypermodern city-scape; the scarred 'Zone' inhabited only by a brutalised underclass (including amongst their number, of course, one street-tough-but-still-scared cute little girl); on the bonus 'behind the scenes' documentary on the DVD the film-makers trot out the names of Kafka, Orwell, and so on, as though reciting an ecclesiastical litany; we even have the omnipresent propaganda posters with their Churchillian slogans - "Victory at Any Cost", "The Project is Your Future". But then, amongst the phrases familiar from 1984 and its imitators, we have one propaganda slogan familiar from another source, Thatcher's old mantra, increasingly also the motto of the Conservative-Liberal coalition: "There Is No Alternative."

Despite the association of the phrase with a PM deposed two decades ago, it is probably this one slogan, more than the smouldering iMacs and the ubiquitous iPads and the whizz-bang police technology, that makes this film (whose special effects, jerky camera moves and all over orange-and-teal-ness have otherwise aged very badly) feel like it still just might have something to say.

So, Spencer Olham and his wife (Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe) can still take a trip to the woode for a picnic and the national parks still look green and verdant just like they always did - until, that is, you look up and notice the vast electromagnetic dome which shields the sky from attack. And Olham can get in the shower and use his voice-activated music software system to play some tunes while he washes, but he can quickly get rid of that frenetic drum and bass which comes on first and replace it with John Lee Hooker with a simple voice command.

Slavoj Zizek is fond of saying that at the end of the 1980s many of the communist leaders in Easter Europe resembled those Warner Brothers cartoon characters who had run off the edge of the cliff but not yet looked down. Today perhaps we are in the reverse position. It is not the past, down there, which has unexpectedly caught up with us, but maybe the future is here, already, up there in the sky, but we consistently refuse to look up and see it. And perhaps iTunes, iPods and all the other tools that are supposedly making music, in Gerd Leonhard's words, "like water," are not so much "the future of music" but in fact the very things that are blinding us to a future already present, and maintaining the safe cushion of the old familiar classics around our ears.

The Future: Not Worth Paying For, Apparently

There's an interesting feature in the latest issue of The Journalist, in-house organ of the NUJ, about the decline in fortunes of newspaper and magazine horoscope columnists. In 1988, Russel Grant popularised the astrological phoneline, accepting only a modest fee from his publisher in exchange for the free advertising the column generated for his highly lucrative pay-per-minute chatlines. Before long, this became standard practice. All astrologers had to set up their own phone line. Unfortunately, without Grant's celebrity status, few made much actual money out of them.

By the late nineties, the bottom had rather dropped out of the chat line business, but by that time the low fees for astro-copy had become standard practice. Nowadays companies on the internet will generate horoscope columns for syndication for no more than £3, where once a star gazer could expect a hundred times that for their talents.

While we may snort and think good riddance to bad rubbish, it's worth remembering that horoscope columns remain as popular as ever with readers - it's just that the people who write them are no longer getting paid properly. Aside from the rather obvious parallels with the music industry, there's something broader at issue here, concerned with the question of who is authorised to write the future.

Once upon a time (not that long ago) the future was written by artists, and by speculative thinkers like Buckminster Fuller. At a certain point, artists seem to become embarrassed by the question of the future, epitomised perhaps by Gyorgy Ligeti's notorious (1961) unlecture entitled The Future of Music, in which he stood silent, impassively before the class, only responding to the calls and jeers from the audience by writing musical terms on the white board as 'directions' to the noise-makers.

Mostly, the people talking and writing about the future today work in marketing, or in computer software. That is, if they have anything positive to say about it. Of course, there are plenty of different artists and theorists prophesying some form of catastrophe or other on practically a daily basis. But the astrologists task of looking forward with hope, and with the kind of optimism that actually makes doing stuff a bit easier, is steadily proving itself to be as easy to generate automatically and artificially - with the right software - as a Chopin etude.