The sci-fi mystique of 2020

“It is the year 2020 and the first annual conference of sentient artificial persons is about to begin. One of the first agenda points is a resolution demanding that humans stop using the derogatory term “robot,” which comes from the Slavic word for “work” and gives the connotation that we should be the servants of humans forever…”

Wait a minute. That won’t work anymore. Sci-fi writers always have to push their stories ahead a couple of decades to give themselves enough room for imagination.

As a kid, I was confused about why George Orwell thought the year 1984 had a dire, futuristic feel to it. For me, it was just the mostly boring year I had our near neighbor as a second grade teacher, so that when my mom called me in sick so that i could go sledding in the first fresh snow of the winter, I got caught.

Photo by Arie Farnam

For my generation, 2020 was the year that sounded futuristic, cool and a bit scary. 2019 and all the other years since 2000 just looked weird written down and we had a hard time saying them at first. We were used to saying, “Nineteen ninety something.” So we naturally tried to say “Twenty” but then we had to say “Twenty O one” and “twenty O two,” so it just didn’t work.

But “twenty twenty” works nicely and it was safely remote enough that we could freely imagine a futuristic world, either utopian or dystopian. We were really expecting flying cars, robot soldiers and at least basic food replicators by now. Touch screen tablets actually turned out to be way cooler than our sci-fi could imagine and drones are a bit more boring than we pictured.

However, our sci-fi failed utterly to predict social and cultural changes. To be fair, sci-fi pretty much by definition has to go to extremes. Either the culture will be hopelessly jaded and cruel or we will somehow banish racism, ableism and bigotry of all sorts along with the common cold. Naturally, neither of those situations has fully materialized.

Sure, today’s culture is jaded and unhealthy in ways that we couldn’t have dreamed in the 1980s or 90s. The effects on general mentality and interactions that social media, nonstop video games and blanket advertising have had are way more depressingly banal than sci-fi authors of the past would have envisioned.

But I recently got a kick out of explaining to an ESL student studying professional English usage that the pronoun “his” is now simply considered wrong—rather than “politically incorrect”—in the sentence, “I’m the kind of employee who always stays late when his boss asks,” given that the student is female.

The ability to choose any music, video, book or magazine in a second and surround yourself with ad-free, thoughtful and wonderfully diverse voices (if you so choose) is also pretty amazing. The ability to buy almost everything online and rarely have to go to any store except the local mom-and-pop store on the corner is downright awesome.

Knowing that the casual homophobia my kids are exposed to in elementary school will be countered with a much more open-minded online world once they are a few years older gives me a little peace, while the continuation of deeply engrained racism and ableism in almost all social spaces fills me with despair.

Other than the touch-screen devices, the thing that is probably the truest to the science fiction and fantasy of my youth is the global disaster of climate change looming, while political and cultural leaders enact the modern equivalent of “the folly of Rohan”. Tolkien would only have been perplexed about how our Gandalf turned out to be a teenage girl with pigtails.

While it looks like life in 2020 is going to be just as mundane as it is every year while we’re living it, this coming year is the year we once envisioned as dramatic and decisive. And although it is just one more year in a series of numbered years, we could take that up. We could choose to make our resolutions less about losing weight or saving money and more about the kind of world we want to make real through our actions.

In 2020 Americans will participate in the election of another president, very likely the last president to have a real chance of averting catastrophic climate change. Vast numbers of people in Asia, Africa and South America are gaining a middle-class lifestyle, and through global interpersonal communication, we have more opportunity than ever before to expand our concept of “us.”

And yet many of us are struggling with personal lives that already feel survivalist, where every day is on the edge. My. hope for the new year is to find a clear path through the storm, a sense of direction.

May 2020 be a year to remember for much needed change.