2H2K - March 2050 - Automation & Feminization: An Introduction

Interior of Amazon’s giant "fulfilment centre" (Photo by Ben Roberts) via James Bridle

Besides the trends of population growth and urbanization that have defined modernization - that perhaps are modernization, two other trends have ghosted the swelling of our global population and our cites; automation and feminization. Trends that started very gradually in the later Middle Ages and in the past fifty years have flowered into the promise of Artificial Intelligence and Feminism. That may sound to some like an arbitrary matching as well as a horribly mixed metaphor (to flower is to deliver on the promise of the bud, after all), but I'll argue that it's neither. Automation begins with relieving workers from drudge work. Though we see Hollywood images of oiled, muscle bound slaves, pulling things with ropes, the greater burden of drudge work has always been borne by women. We have both AI and Women's Liberation, and both remain a promise yet to be fulfilled.

2H2K - February 2050 - And its Discontents: An Introduction

Abandoned Spanish housing estates (Photographs by Simon Norfolk/Institute) via The New Yorker
[Part 2/12 - Return to Part 1/12]

I like to date the beginning of modernity to August 3rd, 1492 - the sparking of the Colombian Exchange that Charles C. Mann writes about in his 1st and 2nd books so persuasively. This was the moment when the relatively densely urbanized Europeans made contact with the long isolated Americas, and set off a global trade in plants, animals, diseases, technologies, and ideas. Many of the founding works of modernity were laid down in the opening years of the Exchange: Michelangelo’s David (1504), Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia (1516), and Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses (1517). It was the moment that gave rise to the densely urbanized world we live in now. And 2050 is the moment that will give rise to what comes next, what comes after modernity.

2H2K -January 2050 - Object Orientated Speculative Fiction: An Introduction

My sculpture, Die Die Die (2003), set just about where Frank Gehry's Downtown Guggenheim was slated to go.
  
This past spring I started a collaborative project with my friend Greg Borenstein. Greg came to me with an image: one of my sculptures scaled up until it dwarfed the New York skyline. Because of my interest in urbanism and SciFi, he wondered if I might work with him to imagine an urban future. While I had no idea this project was coming my way, I was immediately ready with two preconditions: No flooded cities and no dystopia. Not because I don't believe in Climate Change, or I because shit isn't horribly fucked up and might get much worse, but mostly, because in the realm of SciFi both mean streets and flooded streets are cliche. And while I am well aware that near-future predictions are some of the hardest to make (and for SciFi authors, some of the hardest to make convincingly), I had a very particular bracket of time I was interested in setting our project within. There are a number of demographic trends, all converging around the year 2050, that could easily make the second half (2H) of the 21st Century (2K) the most remarkable period of modernization we have seen yet.