Paleofuture, the future that never was

Researching and digging into future scenarios of past times (how in previous centuries we imagined the future) and see their hypotheses, successes and until today failures, I came across a fascinating term: Paleo-futurism. It’s something that we could compare to futuristic archaeologists, that is, historians who investigate how humanity imagined how the future would be in past centuries.

This term was coined by the American journalist Matt Novak, inspired mainly by the book “Future Days” by Isaac Asimov, which compiled a collection of drawings about the most absurd inventions that humans of earlier times were convinced would exist in the year 2000. Novak has made this concept his life, moving his blog to the Smithsonian to work full-time with it in 2011 and finally moving it again to Gizmodo in 2013. He collaborates with BBC Future, Pacific Standard, Slate, The Verge, GOOD, Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed… Always from this retro-futurist perspective.

I recommend you to visit his original blog because he has an archive for years, starting in 1870, of futuristic material of those times. Also, here you have an interview with Matt where he explains his beginnings and here is a compilation of recent interesting articles:

• This Solar Lawnmower Was the Dangerous Future of American Summers in 1959
• 99 Things That Robots Were Supposed to Be Doing by Now
• How a U.S. Military Contractor Wanted to Use Jetpacks in the Vietnam War
• The Futuristic Skyscrapers of 1923 Were Supposed to Solve Traffic, But Had a Notable Lack of Dwayne Johnsons

#365daysof #futurism #art #technology #day197