History's boldest predictions, aged to perfection.
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.
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.
For most of the twentieth century, America's most credentialed economists looked at rising productivity and made a perfectly reasonable, completely catastrophic prediction: that prosperity would soon deliver everyone a twenty-hour workweek and oceans of glorious free time. The average American is now working more hours than when the promises started. This is the story of the most optimistic forecast in economic history, and how it aged.
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.
In the 1980s, retail visionaries declared the enclosed shopping mall the eternal crown jewel of American civilization — a climate-controlled paradise that would only multiply and conquer. Then Sears turned off the lights, the food courts went quiet, and someone opened a trampoline park where the Mervyn's used to be.
For several delirious decades, Nobel Prize winners, supplement entrepreneurs, and your aunt Cheryl were all in agreement: megadosing vitamins would effectively end human disease and make conventional medicine look like medieval bloodletting. The science eventually disagreed. The industrial tubs of fish oil did not get the memo.
For well over a century, a rotating cast of linguists, newspaper columnists, schoolteachers, and professionally scandalized grandparents have issued solemn warnings that the latest generation's slang would permanently corrupt the English language beyond all recognition. The flappers' 'bee's knees' is now charming. 'LOL' is in the dictionary. The language survives.
In the 1980s, America's leading economic minds were so certain Japan would swallow the U.S. economy whole that bestselling books, Senate hearings, and panicked magazine covers all delivered the same verdict: start practicing your bowing technique. Then Japan's bubble popped, the dot-com boom happened, and the prophets of Tokyo's inevitable triumph went very, very quiet.
Mid-century social scientists were convinced that television would make the American suburb obsolete — why drive to the city for culture when the city could come to your living room? Instead, Americans watched TV in their suburbs, then built bigger suburbs, then bought bigger TVs for those suburbs. The raccoons are still waiting.
For the better part of a century, a rotating cast of nutritionists, futurists, and pharmaceutical optimists swore that the messiness of actual food — the chopping, the chewing, the cleanup — would soon be engineered out of the American diet entirely, replaced by a tidy daily capsule delivering perfect, scientific nutrition. Americans responded by spending $50 billion a year on supplements they wash down with a cheeseburger.
Every generation since Eisenhower has produced a fresh set of experts warning that the latest sedentary technology — the car, the remote control, the smartphone — was finally going to complete humanity's evolutionary surrender to the horizontal. Every generation also produced a new fitness craze to feel guilty about not doing. The Americans are still, technically, bipedal.
For six decades, America's most enthusiastic nutrition evangelists promised that the right combination of vitamins would render hospitals quaint relics of a more ignorant age. The hospitals are still here. The supplement aisle, however, now occupies roughly the same square footage as a small airport.
Since roughly the time bell-bottoms were considered a reasonable fashion choice, futurists have been confidently announcing the imminent death of the American shopping mall. The mall responded by building a food court and selling them an Orange Julius. This is the story of the world's most resilient retail obituary.
In the groovy 1970s, nutrition experts and social scientists confidently predicted that America's newfound obsession with health food would bankrupt every burger joint by 1985. They were watching McDonald's stock price while counting bean sprouts.
In the 1980s, state officials promised that lottery revenues would transform America's schools into gleaming temples of learning. The reality turned out to be significantly more creative accounting than educational revolution.
For half a century, every new communication technology has arrived with experts solemnly declaring the phone call finally, officially dead. Spoiler alert: Americans still make 2.4 billion calls daily.
For four decades, America's economic prophets have confidently called the next Great Depression every eighteen months with charts, graphs, and very serious faces. Their track record suggests astrology might be more reliable.
From Senate hearings to pediatric panic, America's establishment spent decades warning that video games would create a generation of brain-dead sociopaths. Instead, those Mortal Kombat kids grew up to build the internet and save lives as doctors.