Something I was reminded of last night when I saw Elon’s slides in his We, Robot event regarding transforming parking lots to parks was how deeply important it is for our inventors and leaders to offer up competing visions of the future that are equal parts exciting and beautiful.
It used to be common place in America for the big thinkers of the time to offer up a better world and to start building it— in 1966 Walt Disney famously introduced EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), which was his vision for a utopian city. Disney aimed to create a community where innovation, technology, and urban planning merged to improve the quality of life for its residents immeasurably… unfortunately it just ended up being pivoted into a theme park (now Disney World).
And during this same era:
Frank Lloyd Wright offered up “Broadacre City” in the 30s— a decentralized rural-inspired urban landscape where each family had 1 acres to themselves (this evolved into the Chicago suburbs which inspired many other burbs— decent outcome… cool ass idea tho)
Buckminster Fuller offered the Dymaxion (dynamic, maximum, tension) lifestyle which gained popularity in the 50s— where living space and transportation would be extremely resource efficient and have entirely dynamic environments (the dymaxion house literally vacuumed itself).
I applaud Elon for bringing back a culture of defining where we are headed… We are in desperate need of bringing a culture of ‘tomorrow’ back to inspire hope and keep the kids stoked.
But what we had then that we don’t have now is competing visions… We pretty much just have Elon.
Which is great when you see the parking lots turn into parks and you go “fuck ya, he nailed that” but not so great when you don’t really want to go back to art deco and would prefer a more organic solar punk design for the vehicles of the future and less cyberpunk.
We need more people to be like Elon and be crazy enough to offer up a new future. Then we can take our bets by supporting their businesses and buying their products and land on the best future possible… If more people don’t dare to do so, we will almost certainly live in cyber punk, Tron legacy, great gatsby world (which tbh won’t be the worst thing but still)
More Elon’s, less SaaS-holes!
With all that said, the future is looking really bright today.
Great job Tesla!