History's boldest predictions, aged to perfection.
Since the 1950s, sociologists have been absolutely certain they knew exactly how Americans would arrange themselves under a single roof. They were wrong in every direction—sometimes predicting the death of the family unit, sometimes its glorious communal resurrection, and occasionally both at once.
From the arrival of email to the Slack notification to the fully remote office, each new wave of workplace technology arrived with a prophecy attached: this would finally be the thing that ended idle human conversation at work. It never was. People kept talking.
Beginning in the early 1960s, economists and futurists declared with remarkable consistency that prosperity and automation would soon deliver Americans into a golden age of leisure—a retirement boom that would redefine what it meant to grow old in the richest nation on earth. Americans, for the most part, kept showing up to work.
Since the Eisenhower administration, America's nutritional prophets have been issuing solemn death sentences for one food group after another. Butter was finished. Then it was back. Red meat was over. Then it was a lifestyle brand. The only thing that has reliably disappeared is the confidence we should have had in any of these predictions.
For a full century, economists, engineers, and excitable journalists have been warning that the machines were finally coming for our jobs — for real this time. The machines arrived. The jobs changed. Then we invented several thousand new jobs to manage the machines, worry about the machines, and write think pieces about the machines.
Since roughly the time Nixon was sweating through Watergate, educational futurists have been confidently announcing that the physical textbook was on its last dog-eared page. Microfilm, CD-ROMs, tablets, and learning management systems all took their swings. The textbook is still here, still heavy, and still costing $280 at the campus bookstore.
Since the early 1960s, a rotating cast of visionaries has solemnly declared that some new gadget was about to render the humble pencil, the dog-eared textbook, and the long-suffering classroom teacher obsolete. Six decades later, American students are still doodling in margins, and the prophecies keep arriving on schedule.
Every decade or so, a new technology arrives and a fresh chorus of experts announces that human concentration is finally, irreversibly finished. MTV was going to do it. Then video games. Then the internet. Then smartphones. Then TikTok. The brain, characteristically, did not check its notifications.
For fifty years, futurists have been confidently predicting that American workers were about to abandon their downtown offices forever. Some predicted it in 1973. Some predicted it in 2020. The office, battered and bewildered, is still there — and somehow rents in Manhattan have never been higher.
From radio ruining the youth of the 1920s to TikTok dissolving the last functioning synapses of Generation Z, every new communications technology has arrived with a complementary prophecy of cognitive catastrophe. The prophecy is always wrong. The technology always wins. And yet, somehow, the prophecy is never quite entirely wrong either.
Since the early 1980s, a succession of financial prophets, self-help authors, and investment newsletter editors have assured Americans that radical early retirement was not only possible but practically inevitable — for anyone willing to follow a simple system. The system kept changing. The retirement kept not happening.
For half a century, sanitary visionaries have promised that bidets, wet wipes, and assorted moisture-based alternatives would consign the humble toilet paper roll to the dustbin of history. They were wrong — until a Tuesday in March 2020, when they were briefly, chaotically, and accidentally right.
Since the 1950s, visionary technologists and breathless medical futurists have sworn on a stack of manila folders that computers would abolish the patient record forever. Decades later, you are still writing your mother's maiden name on a clipboard in a waiting room that smells like anxiety and disinfectant. The revolution, it turns out, was just running a few minutes behind.
For more than seventy years, sleep researchers, wellness gurus, and productivity experts have issued increasingly urgent warnings that modern Americans are dangerously, catastrophically under-slept and hurtling toward civilizational breakdown. Americans have responded by staying up until 1 a.m. watching television and feeling, honestly, pretty okay about it.
Since the 1970s, a dedicated corps of environmentalists, scientists, and alarmed magazine editors has been issuing the planet specific, dated ultimatums — extinction by this year, ecological collapse by that one, irreversible tipping points by the next. The planet has declined every appointment. The question of what this tells us about the art of prophecy is more interesting than the doomsayers would like.
For a hundred years, engineers, futurists, and optimistic magazine editors promised Americans that the daily commute would be transformed beyond recognition. Personal helicopters. Pneumatic tubes. Monorails gleaming against the horizon. Instead, we got the I-405 at 5:15 p.m. on a Friday. This is their story.
Depending on which decade you asked and which expert held the microphone, television was either the destroyer of the American mind or the salvation of the American republic. Sometimes it was both, occasionally in the same magazine. The story of TV prophecy is really a story about experts who needed to calm down.
In 1975, futurists gazed into their humming mainframes and saw a gleaming, paper-free tomorrow. Half a century later, the office printer is still the most passive-aggressive appliance in America. Here's the story of technology's most embarrassing broken promise.
From the moment the first kid nailed a plank to some roller skate wheels, respectable adults have been confidently announcing that skateboarding was moments away from embarrassing itself into extinction. Those adults are now watching skateboarding at the Olympics. This is their story, and it is not flattering.
Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes, which is two more than most of us will ever win, and he used that extraordinary credibility to convince a generation of Americans that massive doses of Vitamin C could cure the common cold, fight cancer, and generally reverse the indignities of being mortal. The medical establishment disagreed. The supplement industry did not. The orange juice people were delighted.