Matt Novak, Author at Gizmodo

Machines! Machines! (New York Times, 1927)

I recently found a New York Times article with the headline, “Machines, Machines! The Futurist’s Cry!” from December 11, 1927. The article quotes Signor Azari as saying, “[In the future] ….our food will have to be mainly synthetic and artificial – machine-made. The cities of the future will contain no useless garbage of trees and…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 19 '07

Nuclear Holocaust Before 1999

Didn’t think it could get any weirder? Someone has found an audio recording of Hal Lindsey lecturing about the “End Times” coming in the 1980s. The LP shares the same title as the book, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon but doesn’t appear to be a direct reading from it. Talking about the Russians UFOs and…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 19 '07

EPCOT’s Horizons

The EPCOT attraction Horizons was a great introduction into the world of paleo-futurism. The ride took you through past visions of the future as well as “present” visions of the future. For this ride the “present” meant 1983, the year it was built. The ride was permanently closed in 1999 but Horizons is not completely…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 19 '07

Desolation Row

CantikFotos has a great collection of photos from Taiwan of a housing development that was never completed. The set is called Desolation Row and has a companion set called Desolation Row Redux. Someone posted it to Digg back in July. I contacted the photographer and he didn’t know the backstory to the development but “ahfoo”…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 16 '07

The Futurists of 1966 Looking Toward A.D. 2000

“Nearly all experts agree that bacterial and viral diseases will have been virtually wiped out. Probably arteriosclerotic heart disease will also have been eliminated. Cells have only a few secrets still hidden from probers, who are confident that before the year 2000 they will have found the secret that causes cancer. The most exciting, and…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 16 '07

Space Colonies by Don Davis

Donald Davis was commissioned to do paintings for NASA in the 1970s and is now offering them to the public domain. The “toroidal shaped space colony” above is an incredible piece of paleo-futuristic art from 1975. Click on the images to make them larger or visit his site to see all of his space paintings.

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 15 '07

The Simpsons go to EPCOT

Fans of Disney’s Epcot, (the theme park formerly known as EPCOT Center), seem to fall into three categories: 1. Angry 2. Bored 3. Nostalgic There are a number of websites devoted to EPCOT that critique the theme park and Disney management for letting it become the laughstock it now seems to be. (For the Simpsons’s…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 14 '07

The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon

Every so often you stumble upon a book that makes you wish you were illiterate. In Hal Lindsey’s The 1980’s: Countdown to Armageddon he boldly proclaims, “The decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it.” I bought this book (originally published in 1981) at a Goodwill…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 14 '07

Proposed Amendments to the US Constitution

While flipping through my pocket-size U.S. constitution I came across a section about amendments that were proposed but never ratified. There have been over 10,000 such proposals since 1789 and, “fewer than one percent of them have received enough support to actually go through the constitutional ratification process.” Looking through this abbreviated list I can’t…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 13 '07

The Future World of Transportation

I remember checking out this book at my elementary school library and being fascinated with the prospect of futuristic transportation. In the second grade I even did a science project on “Cars in the Year 2000.” (In 1992, the year 2000 still had some significance to a second grader.) My cars traveled on an electric…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 13 '07

Ray Kurzweil: The Paleo-Futurist of Tomorrow

I guess, by the logic of that headline, Ray Kurzweil would be the futurist of today. Just thought I’d share a fascinating interview with him from December 23, 2005.

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 13 '07

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

I started reading the 1888 classic utopian novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. I’ll be blogging about it on a “whenever I damn well feel like it” basis and I invite you to follow along at home. You can either read it free here or here or you can do what I did and buy…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 12 '07

Jetsons

I downloaded an episode of the first season of The Jetsons yesterday. It occurred to me that there is nothing more paleo-futuristic than the pneumatic tubes used to transport the characters. I can’t wait until the world of transportation catches up to 1960s bank teller technology. According to the Wikipedia post I linked to, (and…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 12 '07

Astuter Computer Revue

I don’t remember much about Communicore at EPCOT in Walt Disney World. It closed in 1993 and was converted into the half-rate Innoventions Pavillion. However, I did find a little gem of a song that was featured in the Communicore exhibit for just a few short years. The song is called The Computer Song and…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 9 '07

The Most Well-Documented Lives in History

Today we have two men that are either geniuses or completely crazy. While that fine line is usually difficult to discern in any worthwhile endeavor it is especially difficult in the context of futurism. We begin with Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), perhaps most famous for inventing the geodesic dome. What may be most compelling about…

Tech News Matt Novak Feb 6 '07

Chicago’s Grant Park: Fighting for the Future

I finally finished the PBS American Experience documentary, “Chicago – City of the Century” and found plenty to talk about in the paleo-future department. One particularly interesting element of the doc was the creation of Grant Park. Apparently plans were set in place to use the park for commercial purposes after the Great Fire of…

Tech News Matt Novak Jan 31 '07

The Future was Built on Steel

Apparently U.S. Steel never saw Dustin Hoffman in 1967’s The Graduate. According to this U.S. Steel commercial from the 1970s, the future will be built on steel rather than plastic. The future will also be built piece by piece in beige factories to make beige buildings. Disney’s Contemporary Resort in Walt Disney World, Orlando is…

Tech News Matt Novak Jan 28 '07

Hello and Welcome

I first came across the word “Paleo-Future” in a Flickr group of the same name. However, the topic first sparked my interest when I visited Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center, (now Epcot), and realized that Disney’s version of the future was based upon what they thought the future would look like in the 1980s. As…

Tech News Matt Novak Jan 22 '07

Matt Novak

Machines! Machines! (New York Times, 1927)

Nuclear Holocaust Before 1999

EPCOT’s Horizons

Desolation Row

The Futurists of 1966 Looking Toward A.D. 2000

Space Colonies by Don Davis

The Simpsons go to EPCOT

The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon

Proposed Amendments to the US Constitution

The Future World of Transportation

Ray Kurzweil: The Paleo-Futurist of Tomorrow

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

Jetsons

Astuter Computer Revue

The Most Well-Documented Lives in History

Chicago’s Grant Park: Fighting for the Future

The Future was Built on Steel

Hello and Welcome

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