Bill Simmon at Candleblog has a pair of posts responding to yesterday's Salon piece on futurism, arguing that the "the future really is here and it's mostly better than the past." This is, certainly, true in many important ways—but the question of the sustainable grounding for all this technomagic is more than just a footnote to our prosperity, it's the elephant in the room. If we've really hit worldwide peak oil, or will in the next few years, the elixir than drives the digital paradise is going to start becoming scarce, and we haven't found a suitable replacement.

The other, related issue with Utopia-is-now technocratic optimism, of course, is who it leaves behind. Class divisions are being increasingly exacerbated within this country and even more dramatically worldwide—that the present might seem like a paradise to us is largely a function of our incredible wealth, vis-à-vis everybody else. (Likewise, the progress made in racial and sexual freedoms is largely tied to these same class differences.) Cribbing again from Jared Diamond, there's good reason why he called agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race.

I'd like to agree with Bill here, but Utopia can't be a ticking clock or Fritz Lang's Metropolis—it's got to be for everyone and it's got to be able to last. The older I get, the more the techno-optimism of my youth evaporates into a growing sense that neither will happen.