uncanny valley

Concorde, Cold War Modern & Japan Car

Three exhibitions this year have proved quite revealing in what they have to say about global attitudes towards the future. Most recently, I caught the Concorde exhibit at Manchester Airport. The Great Bird is parked in a hangar, elegant and poised. All dressed up but with nowhere to go. Rather than criss-crossing the world as it is still capable of doing, the plane is grounded by that good ol' one-two punch - bad economics and lack of imagination. Concorde's future is lost, for now at least.

A quite different experience with the brilliant Cold War Modern show at the V&A in London at the turn of the year. That show looked at the period from 1945-70 from a design perspective, detailing some amazing products and structures - from the mundane to the awe-inspiring - as well as a whole host of artefacts that never came to be. Cyborg technology, immense Soviet architecture, Buckminster Fuller's domed cities and space stations all shone briefly on the drawing board and then came to nothing. It was a glimpse into other worlds - one that I grew up in, and one that might have been, both shaped by the splitting of the atom.

Japan Car at London's Science Musuem was a look at more likely futures - one where cars are either inspired by the kei car concept or are capable of zero emissions. It featured the Honda FCX Clarity, the unbelievably kawaii Toyota IQ and some interesting GPS-data-as-art from Tokyo.

Past trips to the US revealed that Cog and Kismet, two innovative social robot projects from MIT in the 90s and early 2000s, are already exhibited at the MIT Museum just outside Boston. At times it seems as if our future utopias are really destined to be just future museum exhibits. Relics of eras that falter once past the concept stage. One can easily imagine that we might find ourselves wandering through exhibits in 20 or 30 years, marvelling at Asimo or the Repliee androids, contemplating another world that might have been.

Concorde

Toyota iQ

Toyota iReal

G20 Protests & The Panopticon

Around 25 years ago, I took part in all kinds of protests - anti-capitalism, animal rights, anti-war demos at Hyde Park, Greenham Common, Upper Heyford and Burtonwood. Strange to see it all happening again in microcosm at the G20 in London - though in the 80s, many such events received zero media coverage. London today seems more like a press launch than a demonstration, with the cameras handily placed to capture windows being smashed. Back in the 80s, the world feared nuclear destruction, today the world fears a climate meltdown. Catastrophes come and go, plus ça change.

I stepped back from campaigning after a couple of years because often the aims of protestors were subverted by people with specific political agendas - vast teams of socialists treated the peace movement like a pool of potential converts. Jehovah's Witnesses could learn a lot from them. Some animal rights protestors would veer rather too easily from the misanthropic to the sociopathic to the psychopathic. Sometimes events were subverted by the police - on one protest in Hyde Park, what first appeared to be fellow demonstrators - mohawks, T-shirts and black combats - soon turned out to be undercover cops who started picking people out of the crowd and arresting them. It is naive to underestimate the depths to which the security services will stoop in order to monitor those who question the status quo. I was certainly no high profile agitator, yet phones lines would click away, cars were followed and stopped, mail routinely arrived 'pre-opened'.

The current furore about state surveillance in Britain seems to be a case of too little, too late. The state has been watching the population for decades, yet it is only with the visible rise of CCTV and ever more blatant infringements of civilian freedom since the War On Terror began, that the issue seems to have gained prominence. Indeed modern life resembles a Panopticon - a vast open prison where the state looks into every part of its citizens' lives. Technology is more than ever a tool that facilitates this intrusion.

From the moment you turn on your computer, everything you do through it is logged, somewhere. Journeys using satellite navigation are trackable, the 3G mobile network can easily triangulate your location when you make a call, some mobiles allow the police to monitor you even when they're turned off. And of course, CCTV is everywhere. In a final insult, the data of our daily lives is logged, repackaged and used for profit by corporations who acquire these inane and intimate details. Step forward Google Streetview and Experian.

Today, the BBC and Sky stream the G20 protests live on TV and the web. No doubt Twitter and Facebook are awash with real-time updates. These protests aren't ignored or subject to a D-notice, they are headline news in the circus of democracy. Frontline cops don hi-vis vests (while the Black Jackets wait in TAU vans in sidestreets until the cameras are turned off). It is protest as spectacle, a media event where messages are lost or marginalised - the front pages will carry images of bank windows being smashed, but perhaps few words about the points the demonstrations are trying to make.

This is protest in the 21st century, logged in real-time, GPS enabled, Twittered; for 24 hours it's rolling news straight to your phone, laptop or living room. Cops train cameras on the protestors, the press watch the windowbreakers, everyone else watches at home. And all the information is collated, somewhere, and put on your police file in the morning.

And the criminals behind the War on Terror, the inertia on climate change and the financial meltdown? They're at a banquet somewhere downtown... Nice food, I understand.