During this summer Yahoo tried to gain ground to Youtube-Google launching a webseries produced and written by Tom Hanks, ‘Electric city‘.
The plot is set in a post-apocalyptic era, where mankind has been reduced to small settlements whose main business is to produce electric power. With fossil and nuclear fuel sources mostly depleted, the communities are dependent on naturally created electricity, be it by air, water, or muscle power (the latter of which is used as a punishment for criminals and other undesirables of this society). Under the motto «All in service to all» everyone must contribute to society’s welfare.
Many things have been written about the future, how each of us envision it. During the seventies and the eighties, the spatial trips were in everyone’s mind and most of the sci-fi literature was about conquering the space. Nowadays we all have other worries:
– Energy scarcity
– Overpopulation
– Environmental collapse
And most of the things written about the next futur, talk about riots, wars, system collapse and fascist regimes.
What has been written still remains in the book’s shelves and the truth is, that future hasn’t yet been written and is upon each of us to write a better future than those ones of riots, wars and collapse, but to do it we have to go further than just imagining it, we have to move, we have to take a step forward and start making changes in our way of life, in our interaction with our habitat, in our habits.
We need to reduce consumption, to localise the economy, to establish sustainable policies in the natural resources’ extraction and we need to stop poisoning and polluting the place where we all live.
Sylvia García 