Two Futurisms: One old, the other new

During a search for videos, we chanced on this fascinating eleven-minute discussion, featuring Jason Silva, director of a documentary titled Turning into Gods in an interview by Zach Weissmueller of the libertarian magazine Reason.

Silva, who speaks at a caffeinated pace, describes a techno-utopian future, where people are liberated by godlike technological prowess, reshaping the world to suit their desires.

The only obstacles, he declares, are old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud types who fail to accept the rapid advances and powers bestowed on humanity as we approach the Singularity, the moment when evolution takes a quantum leap forward, fusing the powers of Homo sapiens and technology into a new, godlike entity.

Heady stuff, with mind-altering chemicals, computational advances, and synthetic biology hailed as the gateways to a bright tomorrow.

We suppose that we fall into the category of left-behinds, the people who aren’t swept up by his ebullient enthusiasm.

In part, that’s because we recall another movement from almost exactly one century earlier, fueled by a similar fascination with the fusion of people and technology, albeit electrical-mechanical rather than electronics and genetic engineering.

We refer to Futurism, the movement founded in 1909 with the publication of The Futurist Manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Consider the following from Marinetti’s Manifesto:

We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

While Silva doesn’t embrace violence as Marinetti did, his vision brims with implicit violence.

One of the first political figures to embrace the Marinetti vision was Benito Mussolini, and Marinetti was one of the original founders of the fascist movement — even running for office on the same ticket with the future Il Duce in Milan in 1919 [both lost].

Marinetti and Mussolini parted ways as the politician realized that power flowed from a fusion of populism, rural thuggery, and the corporation, transforming fascism from a vague idea into a real and deadly force, realizing the destruction that was explicit in Marinetti’s vision. He also realized that Marinetti’s demand for the exile of king and pope would gain him no votes.

Again, from the Manifesto:

• We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
• We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.

By 1939, one of the last Italian Futurist painters, Tullio Crali, turned out an image that fully embodied the violence of the manifesto fused to the military power of the fascist state, Incuneandosi nell’abitato [In tuffo sulla città].

The view in Crali’s painting is quite clearly that seen by the bombardier of a dive-bomber.

The 21st Century Neo-Futurism

The same fusion of state, corporation, and violence that flowed from Marinetti’s vision is already flowing the dreams of his 21st Century successors.

Universities have melded with the military and corporations just as Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, turning out “intellectual property” in the formed of genetically altered organisms, weaponry, and super-computing complexes.

The University of California, Berkeley, is at the heart of Neo-Futurism, turning out next-general nuclear weapons at its national labs in Livermore and Los Alamos, developing genetic engineering and super-computing at it’s national lab here in Berkeley, and spawning start-up corporations by the score, which are allied with the world’s largest corporate powers.

Jay Keasling speaks with the same certitude as Silva when he talks of a glorious future achieved through genetically engineering creations of Berkeley scientsts.

Yet implicit in Marinetti’s vision were the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust, just as implicit in Keasling vision is the rising violence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as peasant farmers resist the encroachment of genetically engineered crops and corporate plantations that threaten to turn them into serfs, even slaves.

And just as Crali represented the god’s eye view of electical/mechanical Futurism, so does another god’s eye view represent the realty of 21st Century Neo-Futurism.

And the Singularity of which Silva waxes rhapsodic?

There’s no painting or screenshot for that. The autonomous drones now being developed by corporations for the Pentagon will require no human eye to direct their action, no human mind to tell them them to kill.

UPDATE: I am reminded by Mousquettaire that Futurism was many things, and Marinetti one of buy many highly creative figures working in many lands.