I'm nostalgic for BoWash, and for ChiPitts and SanSan. These are the putative supercities, the imagined megalopolises that futurists once predicted would reach from Boston to Washington, Chicago to Pittsburgh, San Francisco to San Diego. The predictions of these megacities represent a sort of big-think, futurist planning that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. This sort of futurism is at work in Toward the Year 2000, a timely reprinting with commentary of papers and symposia that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences held beginning in 1965 and published two years later.
The year 1965 may have been the height of American power: before campus unrest, before the worst of Vietnam, before the inflation of Johnson guns-and-butter budgets had kicked in. It was a time when sages believed it was possible to shape the future. The commission whose thoughts are recorded here mixed technocrats and wise men. It was headed by Daniel Bell, creator of the concept of postindustrialism, and one of its stars was Herman Kahn, who specialized in thinking about the unthinkable: nuclear war. They constituted an intellectual BoWash in which Boston professors rubbed elbows with Washington undersecretaries and each could easily imagine swapping jobs.
The resulting discussion and essays offer a remarkably balanced view of, say, the possible effects of computers, seen at the height of the mainframe era as centralized, possibly dominating, devices. But, the summarist for the computer committee noted, "it is possible that a computerized society may have effects that are quite opposite ...
It may promote decentralization as much as centralized control; and, as it replaces much routine activity that now passes for intellectual work, it may create new problems of identity and the use of freedom."
The book's misses are just as useful as its successes: they caution us about looking at the next century. One vital reminder: technologically, the world of 2000, the predictors noted 30 years ago, will be more like that of 1967 than different. For all of today's emphasis on the impact of technology, a glance back shows where the really big changes came: the telephone, the automobile, and the television. There's a warning here: on the edge of the new century, we run the risk of envisioning BoWashes that remain mere visions.
STREET CRED
Smooth in the Crud Speedpass Gas
Intellectual BoWash
