Future Texas
Expand the cosmic scale a tad.
I am increasingly convinced the book I'm writing on Texas futures-thinking needs to exist. I have not found the story told anywhere: Harris County Sheriff's Department providing a group of Vietnam-era Huey helicopters to a 1999 spectacle production of orchestral music and a multi-story illuminated future cone conceived by a futurist architect, to be interpreted in 2099, and sponsored by Microsoft no less. Or the tangential connection to the crash of a Robinson R22B helicopter at Mercer and W. Alabama that killed two people weeks before the scheduled event.
When I wrote about Houston's helicopter boom in my Kohoutek essay, that detail felt superfluous. I nearly cut it. Now I'm glad I didn't.
My research continues to surprise me. I'm happy. I'm writing the book now.
October 9, 2025—
I've been thinking of a new theme focus. Something more dynamic, more inspired, a tribute to creativity, a fanfare to the spirit of creation. You know, expand the cosmic scale a tad. Trumpets and choppers are only the instruments, the medium... not the message. —Doug Michels
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A Sharp Blade of Progress
Animal futures and the city of the future: a place with space for people.
Image: City of Edmonton Archives
In 1965, Edmonton's Metropolitan Edmonton Transportation Study (METS) proposed a six-lane freeway through MacKinnon Ravine. The METS plan would have destroyed a big chunk of pristine, forested river valley. Episode 58 of the podcast Let's Find Out - The MacKinnon Ravine Mystery tells the story of women who challenged this vision of progress.
The most delightful thing, to me, that the researchers found buried in the archives was a doodle.
Woodland creatures discussing what had happened to them as a result of the proposed freeway through their home. One of the women had drawn animals trying to make sense of their future. Bears and squirrels and birds working through the logistics of survival in a concrete ravine. I can't think of a more serious and silly piece of impromptu speculative futures work!
My grandmother, Marie, appears in a 1965 Edmonton Journal photograph from this story, holding a protest sign with other women who had just walked down onto the freeway roadbed to stop the machines. Her group was the Save Our Parks Association, and her voice cuts through the archives with remarkable clarity. "They (the city) are out of their minds doing this," she said. "It's the old colonial spirit, just exploit for material convenience with no regard for what comes afterward."
Their group understood that true progress might mean choosing not to build. They had even contacted Robert Moses, the legendary master builder who had transformed New York with bridges and highways, not to ask how to build, but how to stop building. Even Moses might have wisdom about what not to do.
My grandmother had studied philosophy and philology at Jagiellonian University. My grandfather was an engineer and forester who had run Tatra National Park. Another woman in the group, Margaret Chappelle, was an accomplished artist who served as president of the Federation of Canadian Artists, with work displayed at the Smithsonian Institution. Yet the press consistently diminished them as housewives whose environmental concerns were somehow less legitimate than engineers' traffic calculations.
"Our city fathers think this ravine is a dump. It is not. The city of the future will be a place with space for people. Has the city no foresight? Our future generations will need parklands more than we do," my grandmother is quoted as saying. The dismissive coverage missed what these women were doing. They possessed expertise, but more importantly, they were asking questions about what we were building towards.
It took eighteen years, but they won. In December 1983, city council dismissed the river valley policy that allowed major roadways through the valley. Progress, it turned out, sometimes cuts in the opposite direction from what planners expect.
Speculations that included human-invented animal voices offered ideas that were different from way the technical studies, focused purely on traffic flow.
The worried woodland creatures sketch points toward systematic approaches researchers are developing today. The US Forest Service has published work on Multispecies Storytelling in Forests of Dense Settlement that explores how different species might experience and respond to environmental change. I am not affiliated with this research, but it examines how storytelling can help us understand landscapes from multiple perspectives simultaneously, much like those Edmonton protesters imagining animal conversations about freeway construction.
Houston Foresight has explored interspecies communication futures through research on AI-enabled animal communication. The More-than-Human Futures Research Group at Queensland University of Technology develops multispecies speculative design approaches. The RSPCA's Animal Futures Project created five scenarios examining different futures for animals to 2050.
Other resources include the Interspecies Future Initiative through LAS Art Foundation exploring new rights for nonhuman life, and the Multispecies Lab at The New School imagining different ways for more-than-human life. (My other essay Kohoutek touches on dolphin and human futures, leading to bigger and weirder questions about whose voices are included when we try to design tomorrow.)
Worldview shapes how we imagine tomorrow. The engineers saw traffic problems requiring highway solutions. The women saw living systems requiring protection, generating entirely different preferred futures. Building from this notion of worldview, the question becomes one of legitimacy: who do we see as legitimately able to imagine consequences and advocate for alternatives, and whose voice do we feel we can legitimately exclude? Interestingly, the podcast touches on the hangover of the McCarthy era and self-censorship, or self-exclusion for protection, which adds another dimension.
The drawing of woodland creatures asking questions is more sophisticated than it seems. Picture people gathered around a table, sketching conversations between animals about a highway that didn't yet exist. They were running scenarios. Alternative futures are inevitably going to be shaped by who gets to participate in the conversation. The exercise was simple but also strategic: applied foresight both radical and practical.
October 5, 2025—
References
Binlot, Ann. 'The Woman Who Saved Old New York', BBC Culture, 9 May 2017, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170509-the-woman-who-saved-old-new-york, accessed 26 September 2025.
Chappelle, Margaret. 'Margaret Chappelle: The Artist Who Saved the MacKinnon Ravine', City Museum Edmonton, 2 November 2021, https://citymuseumedmonton.ca/2021/11/02/margaret-chappelle-the-artist-who-saved-the-mackinnon-ravine/, accessed 26 September 2025.
Front Image
Harold Cohen - Landscape Remembered. 1966
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Options for Tomorrow’s City
A process exhibition and futures maze mounted over the winter of 1972/1973 at Dallas Museum of Fine Art.
Image: Lidji Design
Image: DMA
Options for Tomorrow's City was a process exhibition mounted over the winter of 1972/1973 at Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, in partnership with the Department of Planning and Urban Development of the City of Dallas.
A guide would take visitors through a maze, starting with the past, of course, to see how problems had evolved. Next they'd walk through today's Dallas (the Dallas of 1972), but experiencing it in a manner "very different from your everyday contact", according to the press release.
Getting deeper into the maze, a visitor was prompted to decide what kind of city they'd like to live in tomorrow, keeping a record of their solutions by placing stamps in designated sheets provided to exhibition visitors. The idea was the sheet would then become a picture window illustrating the kind of city you had designed, one that you could take home with you.
The final segment of the experience was to explore many different kinds of tomorrows and future environments, utilizing six big screen audiovisual displays, called "The Talking Stamp Map".
Without being able to see the video work, Options for Tomorrow's City appears to be relatively standard public engagement and planning research, with additive cultural authority in the museum space. Guides were members of the Department of Planning and Urban Development. Visitors were asked questions such as "Do you want more deserted inner city streets or more pedestrian malls?" and "Would you let water pollution be continued or stopped?" The bias built into such questions is obvious. Who advocates for pollution? This straightforward approach to foresight planning reveals something about how institutions believed citizens should engage with urban futures.
What I like about this moment is the backdrop: those in Dallas with the means and connections had the bright idea to link the museum with the planning department. This suggests a cohesion and functional exchange between cultural leaders and city governance that feels necessary from a purely progressive (in the sense of making progress) perspective. The collaboration implied a shared belief that futures-thinking could belong in public space, that citizens could meaningfully participate in designing tomorrow's city through guided interaction. (A more cynical interpretation might be that the design was a gimmick, a means to an end).
The whole effort becomes a little richer when considering what else was happening in the space. Alongside this civic exercise in democratic “museum futurology” was an exhibition celebrating Expositions of the 1930s. That earlier Dallas fair had imagined futures through monumental architecture drawing from archaic Greek, Mayan, and Aztec forms, blending technological optimism wrapped in ancient aesthetic authority.
This created a funky, and very 1970s, layering of eras and anticipation. There was also work very much of its moment being shown: artist Robert Graham was creating miniature worlds using small human figures positioned within plexiglass boxes and domes. His approach to scale created intimate universes where viewers peered down at tiny scenarios.
These contained environments, almost like mini pavilions, suggested more ambiguous relationships with futurity than the stamp-collecting literalism of the planning department. Where the civic exhibition promised agency through participation, Graham's sealed worlds questioned whether the future might be something we observe and who’s in control. The term “worldbuilding” comes to mind.
The retrospective celebrated past visions of the future wrapped in timeless architectural forms. Graham's figures, in transparent containers, suggested something more uncertain about human agency within the systems we construct to contain possibility. The civic exhibition assumed citizens can vote their way to better tomorrows through guided choice-making.
All three approaches had emerged from the same cultural moment, yet pointed toward entirely different relationships with time and change. Perhaps the simultaneous approaches to tomorrow is itself the most accurate representation of how alternative futures work: not as singular destinations but as complementary invitations.
September 24, 2025
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Image: DMA. 1972
Image: Robert Graham. Untitled. 1969
Images
Brettell, Richard R., NOW/THEN/AGAIN: Contemporary Art in Dallas 1949-1989 (Dallas, 1989) [Design: Lidji Design]
Robert Graham sculptures are plexiglass, wax and various materials. 11" x 18" x 30"
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New Earth 21
Japan’s New Earth 21 was a century-scale premise in a revolutionary time.
Image: アイデア IDEA Magazine. 1982
The year 1990 crackled with the energy of collapsing certainties. The Berlin Wall had fallen the previous November, Eastern European governments were toppling monthly, Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years of imprisonment by South Africa's apartheid government, and the Soviet Union was visibly disintegrating. Everything that had seemed permanent since 1945 was suddenly negotiable.
Environmental anxiety was becoming impossible to ignore. Two years prior, NASA scientist James Hansen had testified before Congress during a record-breaking heat wave, declaring with 99 percent confidence that human activity was warming the planet. His testimony made front-page news and brought “climate change” into public consciousness. The same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established. By 1990, the scientific consensus was solidifying around a problem that seemed to demand immediate action, yet required solutions that might take decades to develop.
Japan found itself economically ascendant but geopolitically constrained. Japanese banks dominated global finance, its GDP per capita had surpassed America's, and its companies were on a buying spree, snapping up U.S. landmarks from Rockefeller Center to Pebble Beach, yet it remained locked within the constitutional and diplomatic framework of the postwar settlement.
Into this uncertainty came a moment of grand thinking. Japan announced New Earth 21, a 100-year plan to clean up the natural environment that had been degraded by human industry.
In other words, a scheme to save planet Earth.
The timing and methods are worth examining. Three months after Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu sat with six other world leaders at the G7 Summit in Houston, where they proclaimed the necessity to protect the Ozone layer, Japan proposed nothing less than global environmental restoration.
This wasn't summit rhetoric. The Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE), founded specifically for the New Earth 21 program in 1990, was institutional infrastructure designed to address worldwide environmental challenges across an entire century.
New Earth 21 consisted of five interconnected elements: energy conservation, alternative energy, environmental technologies, international technology transfers, and systems analysis. RITE served as the coordinating hub, bringing together researchers, engineers, and policy analysts to work on these challenges simultaneously.
The institute operated within the broader context of Japan's systematic approach to foresight, including the government's KIDSASHI methods for long-term forecasting (which I explore in a companion essay). What New Earth 21 specifically contributed was building detailed scenarios for how these technologies might be deployed globally. Rather than pursuing isolated projects, New Earth 21 was designed as an integrated system where breakthroughs in one area would accelerate progress in others.
What Japan proposed seemed to defy the logic of democratic governance and the revolutionary moment surrounding it. While the entire geopolitical architecture was being redrawn, Japan committed to century-scale environmental restoration with concrete backing. This represented a fundamentally different approach from either military power or economic dominance: authority based on scientific capability and moral responsibility for planetary repair.
The scale was genuinely global. The Japanese program was proposing to reverse two centuries of industrial environmental degradation through innovation. Preserve tropical forests, restore atmospheric balance, develop clean energy systems, green deserts, and do it all while maintaining economic growth. New Earth 21 positioned Japan as coordinator of this planetary rescue operation, offering both the framework and scientific solutions needed to address existential threats.
Most environmental programs operate through predictable project cycles. Politicians announce targets, diplomats negotiate agreements, and everyone hopes something gets implemented before the next election cycle changes priorities. Japan flipped this approach —they built the machine first. Establish the research institutes, hire the scientists, create the analytical systems, then figure out how to deploy permanent infrastructure for century-scale thinking, globally.
The timing reveals both Japan's strategic place in the new environmental diplomacy and the remarkable range of approaches to planetary challenges that converged in Houston that summer.
While the world's most prominent leaders gathered at Rice University and dined on tortilla soup at Bayou Bend mansion, on the other side of Houston at the modest Astro Village Hotel, a group of politicians, academics, activists, and populist leaders gathered at an alternative summit called The Other Economic Summit (TOES). The goal of TOES was to build an "international citizen coalition for new economics grounded in social and spiritual values to address concerns the G7 consistently neglects, such as poverty, environment, peace, health, safety, human rights, and democratic global governance."
Houston itself reflected this global ferment, made more intense by the sweltering July heat. Among the TOES guests at the hotel by the freeway was a metalworker named Luiz Inácio 'Lula' da Silva, decades away from becoming President of Brazil. The alternative summit was caught between competing demonstrations: a Cure AIDS Now rally that had narrowly avoided overlap with a KKK march, which faced off against anti-racist counter-protesters from The Human RACE (Racial Acceptance and Class Equality), featuring speakers such as former mayor Ray Hofheinz and NAACP representatives. Each group carried their own vision of America's future.
These grassroots movements, like their diplomatic counterparts, were increasingly thinking in global terms.
The contrast was telling. At least three different visions for addressing global challenges emerged from Houston in 1990. The G7 approach emphasised diplomatic protocols and international agreements. The TOES alternative focused on global organising and economic justice. Japan's announcement of New Earth 21 three months later represented a third way, one based on century-scale planning that transcended both diplomatic cycles and activist movements.
Why would a single country propose to solve problems for the entire planet? The impulse has a long history. Visionary individuals, international organisations, and ambitious nations have repeatedly offered grand solutions to global challenges, each reflecting their particular strengths and worldview.
Japan had been building toward this moment for years. Since the 1970s, it had refined sophisticated forecasting methods, including Delphi surveys, where panels of experts make repeated predictions about future technologies until they reach consensus. These techniques helped Japan anticipate which innovations to pursue and when they might become viable. South Korea adopted similar methods in the 1990s. Both countries used systematic future-thinking to guide their development strategies.
But planetary schemes extend beyond government forecasting. In the 1960s, designer Buckminster Fuller promoted his World Game concept, using early computer simulations to show how global resources could be redistributed to eliminate scarcity. The Club of Rome's 1972 Limits to Growth report used systems modelling to argue that unchecked development would hit planetary boundaries. More recently, scientists have proposed planetary boundaries frameworks that treat Earth as a single system requiring coordinated management.
Image: HMCJ / CSPAN. The Other Summit. 1990
Image: RITE in Kyoto / 公益財団法人地球環境産業技術研究機構
What these initiatives share is the assumption that global problems require "global solutions", though they differ dramatically in their methods. Some emphasise changing human consciousness, others focus on better resource management, still others advocate technological breakthroughs.
New Earth 21 was distinctive because it combined the institutional commitment of a major economic power with an exclusively technological approach. Unlike most planetary thinking initiatives that emphasise social transformation or consciousness change, Japan's program avoided the messy work of changing how people think. It simply offered to build the technologies that would secure the future.
The entire enterprise rested on a massive assumption that rational solutions would inevitably be adopted. If the technologies worked, if the economics made sense, if the environmental benefits were clear, then implementation would naturally follow. This reflects a particular view of how change happens in the world, one that sees human behaviour as fundamentally logical rather than driven by emotion, politics, or cultural inertia. It's the kind of assumption that makes sense on the designer's page, but becomes more questionable when you're trying to reshape how eight billion people will live.
The program emerged as systems analysis capabilities made planetary-scale modelling more feasible. Humans could now better calculate global environmental flows, model interventions, and project outcomes across century-scale timeframes. The analytical capability to think "planetarily" had arrived and environmental stewardship offered a pathway to moral authority that transcended traditional geopolitical limitations. Unlike foresight processes that are inclusive and accessible, ensuring that diverse perspectives are integrated from the outset, Japan could, through New Earth 21 and other efforts at RITE, subtly position itself as the world's environmental problem-solver through scientific excellence alone.
New Earth 21 embodied a technocratic faith that engineering solutions could transcend political divisions. Japan had found its own approach to global influence through innovation rather than confrontation or social transformation. The logic was appealing. Build better technology and political arguments become irrelevant.
This required an extraordinary leap. New Earth 21 was audacious because it committed to technologies that didn't yet exist. Japan was placing a century-scale bet on breakthroughs that remained purely speculative in 1990.
The gamble proved prescient. RITE went on to develop world-leading technologies for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it underground, something that, in 1990, was largely theoretical. The institute also pioneered sophisticated computer models for analyzing global climate systems. While New Earth 21 didn't explicitly anticipate artificial intelligence, it recognized that managing planetary systems would require computational power far beyond what existed at the time.
Japanese leadership understood something crucial about planetary-scale environmental challenges. They would require solutions that hadn't been invented yet. Rather than limiting themselves to existing technologies, they built the institutional infrastructure to develop breakthrough innovations over decades.
Importantly, New Earth 21 contained virtually no social or cultural considerations. The program’s premise was that scientific solutions, properly developed and deployed, could address planetary challenges without requiring changes in how people actually live, think, or organize their societies. Implementation was an engineering task rather than a social one. In their presentations, getting people to actually adopt these technologies appears as a simple point on a slide, as if the hardest part was inventing the solutions rather than convincing the world to use them.
This reveals something crucial about the psychology of proposing global solutions (and where looking back thirty-five years on a plan to extract the planet from environmental demise becomes increasingly poignant). They often reflect the proposer's strengths rather than the problem's actual requirements. Japan proposed scientific solutions because Japan excelled at innovation. Whether the problems were primarily scientific, rather than social or political, remained a secondary consideration.
Cathedral thinking in a revolutionary time
Cathedral thinking is about planning across multiple generations rather than single lifetimes, rooted in the medieval church's approach to building sacred architecture that would not be completed in one lifetime. Japan applied this approach to planetary stewardship precisely when everything else was changing by the month. One would expect that most revolutionary moments produce short-term thinking and immediate responses to urgent crises. New Earth 21 did the opposite, creating the longest time horizon for addressing the ultimate long-term crisis.
The program's unusual name, either by coincidence or intention, hints at deeper currents. New Earth 21 echoes the biblical Revelation 21, which promises a "new heaven and a new earth" after the first earth has passed away. Whether consciously or not, Japan's century-scale vision of planetary restoration carried theological undertones that its purely technological veneer might not immediately suggest. The idea of systematically repairing a damaged world through human effort reflects themes that run deeper than engineering alone.
RITE has since achieved world-leading breakthroughs in carbon capture, bio-refinery systems, and climate modeling. Looking back, it is remarkable how rational the mandate of New Earth 21 was in 1990. The scientific capability existed. The institutional framework was built. The international cooperation mechanisms were established. The promise made at that Houston summit led to Rio in 1992, then to a succession of climate conferences: Kyoto 1997, Paris 2015, and dozens more. The feasibility was proven; the collective adoption was not.
New Earth 21’s premise stands out even more starkly today. While a few other century-scale projects exist, such as nuclear waste repositories designed to last 10,000 years, the Svalbard Seed Vault, and the Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Clock, most focus on preservation rather than active planetary management. New Earth 21 remains one of the most ambitious examples of governmental cathedral thinking in modern history.
Thirty-five years after that sweltering July in Houston, RITE continues operating, still producing environmental research and technological solutions. The program reveals both the possibilities and limits of long-term institutional planning.
There's something profound about this kind of speculation: being compelled to plan furthest into the future precisely when we know least about what that future holds. The greater the time scale, the greater the uncertainty. Whether such planning represents human hubris, practical necessity, bureaucratic folly, ecological philosophy, or simply the mundane work of governance depends largely on one's perspective.
What remains, today, is the apparent urgency of the same question from 1990. The question is whether such comprehensive, long-term environmental planning is collectively achievable.
August 29, 2025—
Zenmai (Clockwork) - Susumu Yokota 横田 進 from Acid Mt. Fuji. 1994
A beautiful sound from Yokota that merges Japanese new age, house, and minimal techno and the birth of a new scene in Japan emerging during the Employment Ice Age, where the so-called "Lost Generation" came of age during the economic stagnation following the 1990s economic bubble bursting. Remastered on Sublime.
References
The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 78, No. 1, Ed. 1, Monday, June 4, 1990.
Climate Justice Museum, 'The Voice of a Changed City: How the 1990 Other Economic Summit Changed the Environmental Justice Movement in Houston', Climate Justice Museum, https://www.climatejusticemuseum.org/blog-posts/the-voice-of-a-changed-city-how-the-1990-other-economic-summit-changed-the-environmental-justice-movement-in-houston, accessed 29 August 2025.
Images
IDEA Extra Issue – The World’s 10 Poster Artists Exhibition. A catalogue of the exhibition held at Nihonbashi Takashimaya in 1982. It features 30 works by five of Japan’s leading designers, including Nagai Kazumasa, Tanaka Ikko, and Yokoo Tadanori, and Holger Matthies, and Milton Glaser, for a total of 300 pieces. Under the theme of “Protect the Green, People, and Earth,” 10 designers with unique personalities and talents competed, and the collection of works is overwhelming. Even a universal theme cannot be expressed universally because the qualities, styles, and techniques are completely different. Publisher: Seibundo Shinkosha
アイデア 世界の
ポスター
10人展Stills from C-SPAN footage of The Other Summit. From Houston Climate Justice Museum. 1990
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Kohoutek
It’s the future! A new opportunity to create relationships with change, rather than just commentary.
Image: Luboš Kohoutek talks with Skylab 4 astronauts from Johnson Space Center, Houston. 1974
Image: Skylab 4 astronauts confer via telecom with Earth.
Image: Ant Farm at CAMH. 1973-1974
Winter 1973 delivered two Kohouteks, one a cosmic disappointment and the other a brilliant act of architectural theft. That year, the Comet Kohoutek, named for discoverer Luboš Kohoutek, was expected to be a celestial spectacle visible in daylight, outshining even Venus. William Safire, writing in the New York Times, predicted the so-called comet of the century would be one of the biggest, brightest, most spectacular astral displays that living man has ever seen.
By the summer of 1973, sales of telescopes quadrupled, religious fundamentalists interpreted the comet's arrival as being a harbinger of God, psychiatrists said the impact on patients had already been "profound", Carl Sagan was invited to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to discuss the new cosmic age, and comet-themed merchandise and apparel was in demand.
But when it finally arrived, Kohoutek proved far dimmer than expected. Bright enough to see, but far from the exuberant projections that had captured public imagination. Kohoutek became synonymous with spectacular disappointment.
The month the comet had been predicted to reach maximum brightness, December 1973, the art and architecture collective Ant Farm opened their own Kohoutek exhibition at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Alternately titled Exhibit of Visions of the Future, A Scan on Tomorrow, 20/20 Vision, and Visions 4-2MAR0, the wordplay in their printed ephemera was an obvious but brilliant appropriation: "KO - knockout, HOU - Houston, TEK - tech".
Ant Farm had formed in 1968 when Doug Michels, a Yale architecture graduate, met Chip Lord while guest lecturing at Tulane, where Lord was studying architecture. The two founded their collective in San Francisco, then eventually moved to Houston as visiting professors at the University of Houston. There, Michels and Lord planned free-form events such as trips to the beach to play with giant inflatables, a downtown scavenger hunt, and a sleepover in the Astrodome with parachutes suspended by helium balloons.
They weren't dropouts from serious practice but serious practitioners who had abandoned professional conventions. In California they had built big inflatable environments using cheap fans and polyethylene (picture inflating a plastic grocery bag, but at scale). Their hundred-foot-square "pillow" was used as the medical tent at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in 1969.
As trained architects and artists, Ant Farm possessed something most futurists lack: the ability to draw, blueprint, and physically craft their speculations. While academic and professional futurists work with probability curves and scenario matrices, Ant Farm created architectural drawings, installation plans, and visuals that made abstract possibilities tangible. They could draft technical specifications for impossible (so far) buildings and hammer speculative futures into floor plans.
While astronomers and the media narrowed their calculations around a magnificent orbital and cultural possibility, and got it famously wrong, Ant Farm were considerably looser in their imagination. At CAMH they produced predictions saturated with play, creating tangible and gently ridiculous expressions of our relationships with American past, present, and future.
Their 20/20 Vision - Kohoutek exhibition folded time and inflection points together, mixing allegory and reality. A 1959 Cadillac convertible sat in the gallery, while visitors could look through round portholes into The Living Room of the Future and see an active video feed from Skylab, the United States' first space station, where, at the same time, astronauts might have been conferring over cosmic distances with a deflated Luboš Kohoutek.
Teleportation and biology fused in the museum presentation, and surveillance was imagined by the architects as a gland, part machine, part living organism, monitoring evolution. Their playfulness was genuinely strange, and never preachy. The Doll House of the Future in the exhibition hosted a colony of Barbie dolls with access to an experimental sperm bank, while all intelligence was imagined to be collected in a brain bank made of living tissue laced with electronic amplifiers controlled by insects (ants of course). Ridiculous, certainly, but not superficial.
"Any useful idea about the futures should appear to be ridiculous," says futurist and educator Jim Dator, because "what is popularly, or even professionally considered to be the most likely future is often one of the least likely futures". Ant Farm had by 1973 already established a consistent track record of being both ridiculous and prescient.
But the infinite expanse of "anything can be anything" futurism, especially for artists, is easy to get lost in. Ant Farm avoided this kind of total untethering. Unlike freeform hallucinations that treat the future as a blank canvas, they anchored wonderment to observable technological developments. In California, they practiced optimistic pessimism, reflecting their belief that too many architects were waiting to see what technology NASA and various defense projects would produce. In their Inflatocookbook they appealed for exchange between scientists, manufacturers, architects, and social administrators in investigating new material applications and technology.
Crucially, they avoided lecturing or hardening into total satire. Nothing in 20/20 Vision feels mean or proposes an overwhelming sociology assignment. Their invitation to visitors was to get on a warped freeway with them and steer through a constellation of emerging realities.
The Information Age was gaining momentum the year of their CAMH show. Electronic innovations, breakthroughs in data storage and display technologies, expanding satellite networks, and shifting cultural attitudes converged to fuel widespread anticipation about what was "just around the corner".
Information and its movement was the connecting thread between these developments, and theorist Marshall McLuhan's writings on mass-media intuited a collapse of traditional boundaries between here and there. Ant Farm positioned themselves not as detached critics but as engaged interpreters, responding to the new personal computing industry emerging in their own region.
Houston, where they found themselves working, had become America's clearest expression of flow-based urbanism. The first official document to guide the city's future was a thoroughfare plan put together in 1942, a mere three decades prior to the CAMH show. The future was rendered as traffic. Transportation remained the organizing framework for Houston into the 1980s, and growth revolved around moving people and things efficiently: freeways threading through subdivisions, the ship channel pushing material toward the Gulf of Mexico. Johnson Space Center and NASA, rocketing people to the moon and back, carried forward this logistics theme.
Ant Farm's work naturally drew from this car culture vocabulary. The 1959 Cadillac and line of gas pumps inside CAMH, their earlier Media Van projects, Truckstop Network (which proposed highways creating new information networks), and later on their Cadillac Ranch in North Texas (and maybe, too, their worksheets for the World's Longest Bridge and World's Fastest Turtle) all rearranged the language of transportation-aspiration.
The link between physical flows and information flows wasn't explicit, but it was there. "Image mobility will replace physical movement," predicted Michels in 1978. This position would lead him to co-found Universal Technology with artist Alexandra Morphett, a company that seems to have produced no actual products but instead toyed expertly with how information networks might reshape cities and, audaciously, the universe.
In nearby San Antonio, Texas, engineers Phil Ray and Gus Roche, who worked on various NASA programs, including the Apollo missions to the moon, founded Datapoint Corporation in 1968. Their ambition was to have a piece of the technological future, and they would do this by developing products that moved information around.
Datapoint existed to solve efficiency problems, the opposite of play in spirit and process. Their prototypes and terminals were things someone could respond to and build around. In Texas there began to be tangible and physical elements for techno-folk collage, and the future wasn't just an abstract possibility. In other words, there existed a new opportunity for artists, architects, scientists, or tinkerers to "hook in" and create relationships with change, rather than just commentary.
Enter Universal Technology, who, delightfully, convinced these serious-minded engineers to hire them for their Corporate Data Station project.
Universal Technology's core identity is not easy to decipher. On blueprints they called themselves The Creation Corporation, and they operated in an unusual domain where experimentation, pranking, techno-utopianism, and straight-faced entrepreneurship weren't mutually exclusive.
They called what they were doing "pre-enactment," a sophisticated alternative to random speculation. Their 1979 design for the Corporate Data Station described a structure that rehearsed the future of networked computing, including a Datavision media system of screens and audiovisual equipment, word-processing offices, and housing for networked Datapoint computers. Users could enjoy tangible, tactile interfaces and the whole thing existed in a nautical form, like the bow of a boat, made of aluminum tubes wrapped in lightweight nylon.
A cold reading might be that pre-enactment was an elaborate word that simply meant play, and the Corporate Data Station was just cubicles. The Data Station looked like a combination yacht and a space capsule, suggesting nautical movement and aerodynamic efficiency. A generous aesthetic gift to the work of word-processing contained within it.
It's tricky to surmise whether their plans to headquarter their company in the Philip Johnson-designed Two Post Oak Central building in Houston's Galleria district was serious or absurd: while simultaneously designing satellite-enabled workstations suitable for corporate contracts and factory production, they had a growing obsession with dolphin-to-human interchange and dreams of a watery interspecies "embassy" for dolphin-human communication. (Official dolphin embassy letterhead was printed). Later Michels would propose Bluestar, a glass space station operated jointly by humans and dolphins.
Image: Philip Johnson-designed Two Post Oak Central
Image: 2020 Vision at CAMH ephemera. 1974
Image: Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy
The connecting line was networking technology that would entirely reshape both human communication and work patterns, as well as our relationships with animal intelligence. Academics might now call this Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), more-than-human design, or critical posthumanism. Universal Technology was experimenting with concepts decades before academic terminology formalized.
Universal Technology, skilled at image-making and branding, were valuable enablers and collaborators. Both companies understood that naming new or unproven technologies shapes how people think about them. Datapoint had its own adventure with terminology when, amazingly, they initially planned to call their ARCNet system "Internet," but switched the name just weeks before launch, worried that customers would reject something that sounded too complex.
Working alongside architect Richard Jost, Michels created the most precise and prophetic example of these combined skills through a private commission from Houston patron E. Rudge Allen. The project showed their approach to playing with the moment. Allen wanted to stay ahead of the technological curve. While Allen wanted to turn time into money, the architects turned Allen's money into a sofa that talked to space. Possibility actualized, and upholstered.
They called it a Teleportation Unit, alternately Media Room, and it combined computing, telecommunications, media projection, and comfortable seating. In blueprints it sits right next to an open floorplan kitchen, dining room, and living room. One of the first, if not the first, Apple II series computers in Houston is on the desk in publicity photos. The term teleportation unit captured what the technology promised (being elsewhere instantly) while making it sound like the future made real.
Image: Richard Jost / Belle Magazine. 1980
The unit essentially anticipated remote work, and would be one piece of the eventuality they imagined: thousands of cities connected to Eden Satellite systems. This built upon Ant Farm’s earlier proposal for an experimental city of 20,000 people between Dallas and Houston, which they presented at Rice University in 1972. The teleportation unit was a prototype for how people might live and work in such networked settlements.
When Ant Farm subtitled their CAMH exhibition Kohoutek, they were betting on cosmic spectacle. The comet was supposed to be the show of the century, and the architects couldn't have known it would fizzle. But they had grasped something special about scale and invitation. Like presenting a prospectus for a new city in Texas, spectacle, at any level, even anti-spectacle, resonates if it remains participatory rather than prescriptive. And they understood McLuhan: "The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of.”
The future recedes relentlessly. Even the most astute targets recede and ambitions deflate in unpredictable ways. Astronomers plotted probable brightness, projecting a spectacular show. What they got instead was a lesson in the limits of prediction. The social obsession with Comet Kohoutek would later echo in Year 2000 Problem (Y2k) anxiety. Both are moments when collective anticipation far exceeded what came to be.
Houston, and Datapoint, learned this painfully. The year of Ant Farm’s CAMH show kicked off a Texas oil boom, peaking when one in every 20 commercial Bell helicopters sold on the continent were flying above Houston. When prices dropped to earth in the 1980s, the city was in such bad shape people facing foreclosure gave the banks the keys to their homes and walked away. Datapoint’s arc lifted them to a Fortune 500 company down to bankruptcy in 2000, after losing hundreds of millions of dollars in market value during a 1980s accounting scandal.
Rather than mapping futures from a distance, Ant Farm and Universal Technology give us clues about how to create relationships with emerging realities. The point is not that they had discovered a replicable methodology for futures thinking or even visualization. It is that they were actually good at play: genuine, unforced, and driven by curiosity.
This is harder than it sounds. A sleepover in the Astrodome is, in 2025, the stuff of corporate offsite dreams. The awkwardness of contrived ideation sessions and team-building exercises only highlights how naturally play and fun came to Ant Farm and the people associated with the collective. Wonder resists over-engineering.
Poetically, much of Ant Farm’s archives were destroyed in an unpredicted storage fire. Michels, who died in 2003, was still working on the future at the turn of the millennium, developing a hundred-year vision in a University of Houston seminar called Houston 2100, which addressed the city’s flooding problem. And Allen, the patron, died sitting in his Saarinen chair in the room where the teleportation unit had once promised he could be anywhere.
August 15, 2025—
Video: We Make Computers. Datapoint. 1978
References
Dewan, Shaila. 'Back to the Futurist'. Houston Press. 16 December 1999. https://www.houstonpress.com/news/back-to-the-futurist-6565939?showFullText=true.
Flyntz, Liz. 'Ant Farm's Visions for 2020: A Wilderness of Tomorrows'. Vesper. Journal of Architecture, Arts & Theory 3: Nella Selva | Wilderness (Fall-Winter 2020): 175-183. https://doi.org/10.1400/283007.
Lazowska, Edward D., Henry M. Levy, Guy T. Almes, Michael J. Fischer, Robert J. Fowler, and Stephen C. Vestal. 'The Architecture of the Eden System'. Department of Computer Science, University of Washington, Seattle, 1981.
Nakamura, Randy. 'The Architect as Corporation as Media: Doug Michels, Alexandra Morphett, and Universal Technology, 1978–1980'. In Play with the Rules: 2018 ACSA Fall Conference Proceedings, p. 159. 2018.
Oettinger, Anthony G. 'A Convergence of Form and Function: Compunications Technologies'. In The Information Resources Policy Handbook: Research for the Information Age, edited by Benjamin M. Compaine and William H. Read. MIT Press, 1999. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3771.003.0008.
Images
Dr. Luboš Kohoutek, discoverer of the Comet Kohoutek, is seen in the Mission Operations Control Room in the Mission Control Center during a visit to Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. He is talking over a radio-telephone with the Skylab 4 crewmen in the Skylab space station in Earth orbit. Dr. Zdenek Sekania, who accompanied Dr. Kohoutek on the visit to JSC, is on the telephone in the left background. Dr. Sekania is with the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. NASA Identifier: S74-15064
The three members of the Skylab 4 crew confer via television communication with Dr. Luboš Kohoutek. This picture of the three astronauts was reproduced from a TV transmission made by a TV camera aboard the space station in Earth orbit. They are, left to right, Gerald P. Carr, commander; Edward G. Gibson, science pilot; and William R. Pogue, pilot. They are seated in the crew quarters wardroom of the Orbital Workshop. NASA Identifier: S73-38962
More notes
Rebalancing Revisited
The world's destiny largely depends on America's development vector. Five years of change allows for an assessment of projected crisis scenarios.
Image: James Mitchell, When They Only Dream. 1984
Scenarios about tomorrow tell us the shape of present concerns.
This note emerged from an idea I had last spring, for World Futures Day, to post an archived scenario every hour for twenty-four hours, for no reason other than to create a collage of tomorrows.
In 2020, Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev, writing in World Futures, explored how US power might rebalance in the future. Among the seven American weaknesses they identified as potentially reshaping global order, huge and constantly increasing national debt and large and persistent foreign trade deficit caught my attention.
Five years of change now allow for an assessment of not just the accuracy of these projections and contingent scenarios, but what they reveal about futures research. I want to take a close look at what these particular scenarios say.
Grinin and Korotayev are academics writing from Moscow's Higher School of Economics. Their 31-page analysis looks at seven actual and potential weaknesses of the US, and the idea that global political structures (a.k.a. "The World System") periodically reorganise to catch up with economic changes, often through turbulent periods of crisis and realignment.
The authors suppose that these seven weaknesses will inevitably cause a crisis that makes it more difficult for the US to maintain its influence. Despite the deterministic undertones they stop short of predicting outright loss of American hegemony, instead outlining how vulnerabilities create pressure points.
With section titles like "How to Exacerbate the Weaknesses?" a suspicious reader might take their paper as a set of instructions. But, importantly, they emphasise that some of these weaknesses double as strengths. More on that shortly.
The seven American weaknesses selected by Grinin and Korotayev are: 1) large and persistent foreign trade deficit trending upward, 2) large and chronic fiscal deficit which is impossible to drastically reduce, 3) huge and constantly increasing national debt, 4) declining dollar, 5) peculiarities of the healthcare system especially given the country's ageing population, 6) growing demographic disproportions, 7) the weakness of the American political system in the context of globalisation.
Their rationale centres on the premise that vulnerabilities accumulate over time and that America's imperial obligations increasingly conflict with its republican political framework. In other words, imperial appetites clashing against a creaking republican machinery and grinding down until something snaps.
They position current policy chaos (writing in 2020) as symptomatic of deeper structural disease, a real web of decay where each weakness feeds the others, within what they term the ongoing global reconfiguration process.
While they've produced a bit of a skewering, the authors are straightforward in their position. They begin by asserting that the world's destiny largely depends on America's development vector, a starting point that shapes how they read these scenarios, and one I basically agree with.
Of the seven selected vulnerabilities, trade imbalances and mounting debts deserve examination. I am not an economist, so what follows is not economic analysis but an attempt to read what these projections reveal about anticipating change from their particular moment.
Five years after the authors published their ideas, I watched a livestream of the US Senate and House of Representatives sign into law the so-called big beautiful bill, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will increase federal deficits by $3.3 trillion over the next decade. The authors remind us: this isn't money from thin air; these are debts future generations will have to pay. Simultaneously, the US has engaged in international trade warfare. Grinin and Korotayev's scenarios prove prescient.
That their underlying pessimistic certainty seems to be bearing out in 2025 makes revisiting their declarations feel like watching tomorrow's news from yesterday's broadcast. Ah… the strangeness of prediction. Structural pressures in 2020 have moved from theoretical concern to active policy terrain.
The authors suppose that the constantly increasing fiscal deficit will be one of the most important causes of a future crisis (italics theirs). A trillion dollar deficit has become usual. But that represents only planned spending. Actual deficits can, and often do, exceed projections.
As an aggregate, these seven weaknesses conjure multiple pathways to American fracture. A reader of futures (a field concerned with uncertainty) might be intrigued by how certain such statements feel. Fiscal deficits are described here as "impossible to drastically reduce" and demographic shifts as inevitable drivers of conflict. Very little, perhaps nothing, can be done.
Declarative confidence that penetrates policy discourse is no bad thing, if that's the goal. Perhaps certainty functions as a rhetorical strategy, making complex probabilities digestible by collapsing multiple contingencies into clean predictions. The authors sketch several scenarios for how American lives will deteriorate:
A persistent fiscal deficit has become an immanent feature of the United States' contemporary reality. It allows the country to live beyond its means, serves as the most important social mitigator empowering implementation of the largest social programs (pensions, medical care, etc.), and also supports the country's important institutions. If budget expenditures were brought in balance with incomes, social relations would sharply worsen, the standard of living would sharply decline, and the most important sectors of economy (such as health care, pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, etc.) would be in crisis.
The large trade deficit (combined with the fact that consumer goods are produced in low-wage countries) is one of the reasons for low inflation in the USA. In general, this deficit is profitable for Americans. They get much more from trade than they give. However, it still weakens the already de-industrialised U.S. economy in many respects, making it less competitive and increasingly dependent on this deficit.
The recipe for collapse, or mitigation, depending on how you look at things, continues:
Many in the U.S. are concerned about this, which has led to extravagant actions to address the issue with the introduction of import tariffs and increased pressure on trading partners.
Pretty accurate for 2025, and I don't think I need to explain how. An ominous seed is planted, and we are left to our imaginations:
In the long-term, given a loss of confidence in the dollar or the U.S. national debt (which is more realistic), it would be impossible to preserve the existing volume of imports into the country. It is easy to imagine the possible consequences.
They go on to predict nearly impossible-to-solve financial quagmires and defaults, escalating civil conflicts, enormous systemic crisis in the US, high death rates, and various economic emergencies. They stop short of predicting the end of globalisation as a long historical process, but do foresee the end of the American phase of globalisation.
The article collects known problems in and of the US, scans their interrelations, and from this makes generalised forecasts, all unpleasant for America. It obviously has no aim to cover everything under the sun, but scanning their 2020 writing reveals intriguing absences. Climate disruption barely registers, despite reshaping everything in the world system from migration to infrastructure, and energy transitions get little attention.
This isn't a flaw but how anticipating works. We view tomorrow through the amber of today's concerns, frozen by understood fears and values. What could we do differently?
It follows, then, that this article locks the reader in an industrial framing, where global dominance flows from shipping containers and currency exchanges rather than entirely new categories. The delight of a close reading isn't in catching thinkers being wrong or incomplete, but observing how ideas become specimens of their moment. What seemed peripheral in 2020 has become central by 2025.
Digging through old scenarios uncovers assumptions buried in their time and place. From 2025, we can see how quickly those assumptions became partial. Again, not wrong, but incomplete in ways that weren't visible from their original position. This gives us a clue that scenarios can work as prediction engines as well as diagnostic tools for making sense of change.
(I'm essentially doing a case study with n=1. One 2020 article about American decline doesn't necessarily prove broader claims about how scenarios function. But I soldier on.)
The authors' "World System reconfiguration" theory attempts to contain a whole lot, from Arab Spring to demographic shifts, pandemics and geopolitical tensions, through one grand framework. It's an attempt to find patterns and discern which phenomena evidence civilisational rebalancing. Sweeping theories can hold curious blind spots, and I’m aware of how much I don’t know: there is reasoning in their research-backed framework that isn’t apparent to me from close reading one paper.
The question the article leaves me with isn't whether America will decline, but whether America as a meaningful category of analysis is adequate on its own.
The scenarios the authors write assume nation-states remain the primary units of influence indefinitely. But the governing systems of 2025 operate through additional logics. Consider the daily reality: Apple processes more transactions than most central banks, while Google shapes information access for billions, and Amazon and Walmart want to launch their own digital currencies. When Apple's market cap exceeds France's GDP, that is an example of authority reorganising around a different principle.
Grinin and Korotayev mapped American vulnerabilities within a familiar framework: competing nation-states. Yet influential entities transcend geographical borders. They own our data, shape our reality, and increasingly determine the conditions of daily life.
The authors are writing at a moment when the nation-state is transforming into something else entirely. They analyse American vulnerabilities using familiar categories like trade deficits and fiscal policy, but capacity is already accumulating in different, overlapping layers of territory and sovereignty. This is why their scenarios feel partial despite their accuracy.
Yes, corporate influence still depends heavily on state infrastructure, military protection, and legal frameworks. I think of the company town scaled to planetary dimensions, or what happens when corporations become the primary organising principle of our existence. Power will continue to flow and imbalance in new old ways.
When we read predictions of American decline, fiscal collapse, or systemic crisis, and there are a lot of them, the question isn't whether they will be correct, but whether the frameworks that generate them will, in the future, capture how power works.
Accepting this, there are at least two ways to go. The first way is philosophical, and the second is actionable.
First, the 2020 analysis mapped vulnerabilities within familiar containers such as nation-states, currencies, trade balances. A "radically futuristic" question would ask whether reorganisation of power will flow through different logics entirely. Perhaps the most subversive response to doom scenarios is to take them seriously enough to identify where their logic breaks down, then imagine what emerges in those cracks.
Old scenarios (and the boundaries of old are debatable) remind us that writing them is an act of creative constraint. The challenge isn't to predict better, but to hold our frameworks very lightly.
The second, actionable, escape hatch from bleak scenarios might be recognising where their assumptions constrain our imagination. What if the real story isn't American decline, but the emergence of entirely new organising principles?
While I don’t think the authors intended to imply or explain a dystopia, in general a productive response to dystopian predictions isn't to argue with their methods, but to see where those methods become a trap. Some might call this a conceptual crisis. Instead of asking "Will America decline?" we might ask "What new forms of governance are emerging?" and then place ourselves as operators within new forms. The scenarios we write today will look as partial from 2030 as the 2020 predictions appear now.
July 11, 2025—
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip. - John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces▮ References
Grinin, Leonid, and Andrey Korotayev. 'Seven Weaknesses of the U.S. and the Future of American Hegemony'. World Futures 77, no. 1 (2021): 23-54.
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