The Year Is 2010: Two Visions—Gloom vs. Hope (Excerpt from The Popcorn Report, 1991)

Pure logic can lead you down the wrong road: things don’t always go from A to B, from bad to worse. Following the trend indicators, it’s possible to see that they can go from bad to better to, even, best. Here are two distinct scenarios: Linear Logic vs. Trend Prediction; Gloom vs. Hope.

It’s 2010.

Try to open your door and you can’t, because there’s too much garbage piled up outside. While you once spent about 10% of your salary to buy nonessential items, now it costs about 10% more of your salary to get rid of these nonessentials. You’ll know who has money and who doesn’t by who gets his or her garbage picked up. The newly rich of 2010 will have made their money not by creating new products, but by making the garbage go away—these are the garbage barons. And the owners of any remaining landfills will have a stranglehold on the community.

Or:

We will adopt a consume/replenish approach to living. Replenish and consume. Consumers and corporations alike will have learned that production and consumption aren’t the end of the line. The cycle ends with replenishing, giving back.

It’s 2010.

More and more systems are breaking down. The pileup of toxic waste has gotten worse. Every year there’s another mid-sized city in America that has to be evacuated.

The air’s so bad you’re only allowed to drive your car three days a week—which is all you can afford to drive anyway, because filling the tank costs about eighty dollars. Different-colored license plates will tell you on which days it’s your turn to drive. Someone owns the air franchise. Air conditioning is now called air purifying. And it costs a fortune.

Another mogul has bought and regulates the water sources. A bath is a metered luxury.

Or:

Corporate America as we know it today is over. All the smartest people have left the mega-companies to start socially and ecologically responsible businesses of their own. Given the choice, consumers are more than willing to buy “correctly.”

No one has to drive much anyway. Life feels smaller in scale—we’re working at home, involved in the world with networks of friends through the electronic systems that bring in and send out information day and night.

Living within our means and resources, we’re slowly healing the planet.

It’s 2010.

An armed guard picks up your children at school and brings them to your walled community. The streets are an arena of drugs and crime, ruled by those have-not generations who were never educated to participate in the world in any responsible way.

Or:

You rarely go outside alone, unless safe passage is guaranteed. Public parks are anarchy. To enjoy the outdoors, you pay to join a private fortified park.

Or:

Life seems to make more sense now. In your new neighborhood, you’re surrounded by single and family co-housing units—a loose collective. You’ll share goods and services: a communal office with all the latest equipment, state-of-the-art kitchen and entertainment areas, a day care center, medical clinic, and parkland.

There are still problems with drugs, crime, and poverty, but much has been done to alleviate conditions: every corporation does more to help educate, employ, and provide for the disadvantaged. And every individual who volunteers for community work gets a bonus of a tax credit.

It’s 2010.

America is now a third-rate power. We never caught up. Everything we were afraid of in 1990 happened.

Or:

America has regained its full strength; it’s smart, sound, and physically healthy. We’ve caught up. After the socioquake, old-style management has been replaced by a new participatory way of running businesses. The gap between worker and management has narrowed; we have a new respect for the individual. We’ve finally reemerged as a country that can make quality products well, competing in the world marketplace. We’ve leveraged our service self. Systems are decentralized, humanized. We’re again a leader of innovation.

Culture is back in the hands of the people. Creative talent is flourishing. We’ve reconciled business with civilization. We finally understand that the archetypal givens—earth, air, water—are the real currency of the future.

Values have done a turnaround.

Happiness used to be part of our birthright. When Thomas Jefferson talked about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he meant that the more opportunities a society allows us, the happier we’ll be. The post-doom value system will offer us the happiness of opportunity.

This is the scenario that will triumph—the healing vision. It’s the future that consumers want. We can only tolerate disaster for so long before we hunger for a change in outlook.

Then we change our outlook.