Sources: technology

About the glamour of the future as anticipated early in the 20th century — specifically, glamour in the sense of enchantment and illusion. Tracks the glamour of the anticipated technologies, the marketing promises of ease and control, through the collapse of the illusion beginning in the ’70s where the dream turned to disillusion, betrayal, and dystopian anxiety. Discusses the responses arising from this disillusion: Theodore Roszack’s counterculture, the rising value of authenticity in food and products, Jane Jacob’s defense of the messy city as an organic response to human-scale needs and desires. Aks what now fills the role of glamourous ideal but doesn’t answer.