Express Elevator

Your stories about the future get really interesting when they're simultaneously post-apocalyptic and Utopian--when the worst and best outcomes happen at the same time...

Don’t ask me how I know that there used to be a drug-culture term express elevator. That was what you rode when you took uppers and downers at the same time: simultaneously soaring through the roof and crashing through the floor.

In futures work and science fiction, we’re generally trained to pop either the uppers or the downers. The future is either Mad Max or The Jetsons. There’s a deliberate strategy behind this: Foresight practitioners want to drive the discussion to illustrative extremes so that all the stakeholders in a project can get a sense of, well, the stakes. SF writers don’t want to confuse their readers. As a result, our scenarios are usually constructed across a simple continuum, of good to bad.

In Foresight, the most well-known framework for scenario development is the quadrant approach, where you research the weak signals of change your horizon scanning process has found, and render them down into a small set of drivers. Then, you take two of these drivers (say, creating Artificial General Intelligence and Degree of Environmental Collapse) and create a four-sided table out of these axes. One quad represents a high-AGI/low-collapse situation, for example, another low-AGI/high collapse, etc.

What usually happens when it comes to analyzing and reporting quadratic scenarios, in my experience, is that the two most extreme ones are chosen as being of most interest, and these get written up. We end up with a report about a high-AGI, high-collapse future, and a low-AGI, high-collapse one. It’s asymmetrical, yes, but futurists go for the drama.

So do SF writers. Where’s the Mad Max future where a fairly effective police force representing a distant but functional government patrols the wastelands? Where Max keeps getting ticketed for speeding on the Flats? Or, conversely, a post-capitalist eco-paradise where the suicide rate is high?

The sad truth is that coherent, single-message futures are easier to understand. That’s why there are more of them. Full stop, end of story. They’re easier to dream up, easier to flesh out if you’re worldbuilding or developing a scenario, and they’re easier to explain. “It all goes to shit!” is a concise enough description of the year 2050 for most people to nod their heads and get right into the action.

But the real world doesn’t work that way.

For example: ending fossil fuels is unquestionably a good idea. But as it turns out, aerosols in the air, mostly produced by burning those fuels, currently mask about .5 degrees C of global warming. There’s a term in geoengineering—”termination shock”—which is the sudden spike in temperature that would go along with ending a geoengineering effort to manage global temperatures. Termination shock is such an evil thing that Neal Stephenson wrote a whole novel about it (guess what the title is). Meanwhile, even as we pontificate about how bad geoengineering is because it has the potential to cause termination shock, we are experiencing actual, for-real termination shock because we’re eliminating coal plants, and the aerosols they’ve blanketed the Earth with for decades.

Coal phase-outs are an express elevator: simultaneously good and bad. As is nuclear energy, which could replace fossil fuels for baseload power (as it has in France) but also enables the construction of the most diabolical of weapons.

Partisans For Oversimplification

The Internet and Social Media positively teem with pundits pushing narratives and counter-narratives about the impact (or lack thereof) of new technologies such as electric cars. It’s a spectrum with a blue end and a red end, and nothing in the middle: EVs are either The Answer, or they’re a failed attempt by Big Government to jam a green ideology down our throats. And it’s not that the truth lies somewhere in the middle; both of these perspectives could be right. What I object to is thinking that it has to be one or the other.

At this point the Hegelians in the crowd are going to nodding their heads sagely, murmuring “aufheben” and other crap. The Hegelian theory of change (not in all its subtlety but as it’s usually bastardized) is the old “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” sequence. According to this model, you’ll first think EVs are wonderful, then discover their downsides (like increased microplastic pollution), and finally come to a balanced understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.

Well that’s not what I’m talking about. The express elevator does not resolve the contradictions, we don’t achieve some magical overview where decarbonization and more microplastics somehow cancel each other out. Instead we’re left with an unalloyed good and a big mess, both at the same time. These ideas don’t converge, they’re centripetal, propelling us simultaneously in two directions. That’s the nature of an express elevator. Instead of an expression of dialectic, it’s a nod to complementarity—the idea that in the real world, you sometimes have to use two or more mutually exclusive models to understand something. For example, EVs are simultaneously great for the environment because they emit no tailpipe exhaust, and terrible for it because they perpetuate automotive culture. (Apparently, 78% of ocean microplastics come from car tires, and since EVs are heavier than ICE cars, they have the potential to produce much more. What’s in the ocean is also in your body.)

Hegel never used the formula “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” anyway. The closest he gets to this is in the first two pages of the Being section of the Logic. The way his dialectic works is more like, “You start with a good idea; then when you try to apply it in the real world everything goes wrong because the real world doesn’t follow your tiday schemas; finally, bruised, battered, but older and wiser, you have a concrete understanding of what it was you only thought you knew at the beginning.”

Looking Back on the Electric Car

Viewed as an express elevator, electric cars come into new focus as a transitional idea. To make the idea of “moving away from fossil fuels” comprehensible to ourselves, we invented the EV, and renewable energy, as mental plug-in replacements for ICE cars and coal plants. In this oversimplified scenario, we just swap over to EVs and solar panels, and Bob’s yer uncle, we’re done changing. The reality is far more complex, because of course it’s not just how we power our cars that matters, it’s the whole idea of the car and all that it entails (massive industrialization, mining, global supply chains, the paving over of forest ecosystems and prime cropland). It’s not just the car that has to go, it’s the roads, and that means that ultimately, our whole economic system does as well—whether it’s capitalist or communist is entirely beside the point, it’s industrialism’s dependence on blacktop and vehicles that’s the problem.

EVs are way more compelling as express elevator artifacts. If you keep them in this complementary state of tension, they’re a kind of dynamo of change, inherently unstable—just like the Mad Max future which, if you think about it, could only last a few years because it is feeding itself off the last dregs of available gasoline.

What’s interesting about the Mad Max scenario is what happens when the last of the gas runs out. What’s interesting about EVs is what happens when we realize that they don’t solve our fundamental problem, namely our utter dependence on industrial growth.

If for a minute you stop being a partisan for one end of the oversimplified scenario spectrum, you’ll see just how fascinating is to imagine looking back on the EV from a future where it too has become obsolete.

To pull on that thread, let’s look at one possible future. In this post-EV world, battery technology and pervasive renewables, including next-gen geothermal, mean electric power is available essentially everywhere. The popularity of drones has driven the development of cheap autonomous eVtols and a global matternet. Instead of thousands of airplanes crisscrossing the globe carrying shipping skids packed with packages, millions of small drones carry individual boxes, day and night, anywhere they’re wanted. Inter-city travel by airplane has priced itself out of the market (even now most of us dread dealing with the airline industry), and in its place light, nimble eVtols can pick you up from the landing hub that used to be your local intersection, and take you directly to the corresponding pad next to your hotel in another city. Your neighbourhood has been rejigged as a 15-minute walkable one, you use an ebike to get groceries or send your robot to do it, or have them delivered; urban streets have been given back to walking but you’re never more than a few minutes from a subway, streetcar—or an eVtol pad from where you can go anywhere you want. The highway system has crumbled or been torn up to recreate the continent-wide migration corridors of a rewilding renaissance. This is a high-tech, high-mobility future where you can live in the middle of the Yukon and still get next-day delivery from Amazon. The matternet and eVtols are public goods the way the interstate highway system used to be, but they have far lower environmental impact.

Of course, this too is an Express Elevator scenario, because a lot of things are lost in what this future gains you. Your feeling of freedom is enhanced, because when flying you can detour to look at interesting sights, whereas with the highway system you could only ever see them from a distance, constrained as you were to follow the road. On the other hand, you likely don’t own the Evtol you’re flying in. Depending on where you live, the eVtol system is either socialized, like medicine is in Canada, or privatized, in which case your ability to travel is potentially controlled by the tech bros. Most likely, there’s a mix and constant tension between the two models.

And there’s that little matter of literally every job and business that serves or depends on automobiles being gone. If you think this is inconceivable, just consider how pundits are blithely saying that AI is going to take all our white collar jobs. Well, if it can do that, why can’t drones and eVtols eliminate our current blue collar ones on the same scale?

Societal unrest and upheaval would be huge, and global: mass migration, strikes and civil disobedience, Luddite terrorism, populism and fascist oversimplification as a sop for “useful idiots”… it’s all there too, and happening at the same time and in the same places as this Solarpunk Utopia. How and what that looks like—that’s up to you to explore.

Stay With The Troubles

It’s in the elaboration of how the positives and negatives play off against each other that express elevator scenarios become really interesting. By not rejecting one partisan position for another one, you can discover astonishing possibilities and nuances impossible to see from either of the extremes.

This is how worldbuilding is done in good science fiction (and good Foresight)—not by chasing some “what if?” down a rabbit-hole but by riding the wave of ambiguity and confusion that comes with futures that are inherently self-contradictory, and for which there is no synthesis.

—K