Reader's Digest: February 22, 2025

James Gleick’s NYRB essay on the history of futurology begins on a mordant note:

Invited to compose a message for posterity to be buried in a time capsule at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and opened five thousand years later, Albert Einstein sounded a dour tone: “Anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.”

But the highlights of Gleick’s review—drawn from Glenn Adamson’s book, A Century of Tomorrows—are ostensibly utopian. For instance: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, which seems to have invented Spotify and the Universal Basic Income:

Its hero sleeps into the future Rip Van Winkle–style and finds that hunger, war, poverty, and unemployment have been abolished. Money is obsolete; every man and woman is issued a “credit card” sufficient to their needs. Manufactured goods flow out from a central warehouse through pneumatic tubes. Likewise, musical entertainment comes to every home by way of electric wires…

Bellamy’s utopia is a socialist monopoly, “notabl…