Commentary: On Predictions for the 21st Century

Now that we’ve entered the new millennium, we’ve become inundated with predictions of what the future holds in store for us. This is nothing new, of course. Some will remember that back in the 60s, a regular feature in the Sunday comics section of many daily newspapers was a strip called Our New Age, which gave us visions of a future spent commuting to work in private helicopters and dining on cheap and plentiful food harvested from the ocean floor. There were other predictions that seem more reasonable in retrospect, such as the notion that Americans would quit relying on trains and buses for long distance transportation since airline travel would become both convenient and affordable.

The sages have probably been right about as often as they’ve been wrong. We know that private helicopters and cities on the moon didn’t happen, but video conferencing, the equivalent of the TV telephone considered to be the coming thing in the 50s, is now a daily reality for many people. The oceans may have turned out not to be as limitless as we thought, but soybean products have become indispensable ingredients in our diets.

Figuring-out in advance where the predictors are right or wrong is an impossible task, a lesson that I learned back in the early 80s from David Bean, who was then the CEO for the Pacific Arts Corporation.

The company was owned by Michael Nesmith, who has the distinction of being the only member of The Monkees who was a musician before joining the TV rock group. After the demise of the television series, he returned to his hometown of Monterey, California to start Pacific Arts Records and released albums of his own music that were critically acclaimed even if they didn’t sell. But in January of 1981, Nesmith announced that he had seen the future, that he was closing his record label to start Pacific Arts Video Records.

At that time I was writing a rock n’ roll column for a Monterey newspaper called The Weekly. In May of 1982, my editor thought that an article on this new video records concept would be a great idea and sent me off to interview David Bean who was running the outfit for Nesmith.

When I arrived at the modern and lavish offices, I was escorted by a young PR person into a viewing room for a private screening of Michael Nesmith’s Elephant Parts, which was the companies first release. Much of the material I’d seen before, since most of the production consisted of skits that Nesmith had done on Saturday Night Live and the old ABC copycat series Fridays.

After the screening, I was taken into David Bean’s office for our interview. My first impression of him was that he was pretty much your typical California businessman. If memory serves, he was balding and wore an expensive suit. I assumed that he would want to hype the tape I’d just seen, but I was wrong. He wanted to talk about the future of consumer electronics.

“The diamond needle on a plastic record is the next dinosaur,” he said. “It’s going to become like the old gramophone machine. You’re going to watch it go extinct in the 1980s.”

I didn’t think so. After all, I’d heard this all before. In the 1960s, the eight-track tape was going to replace vinyl. Then, in the 70s, it was the cassette that was going to liberate us from the pops and scratches of the record album. None of that had come to pass, of course. The vinyl disc was just too convenient to be replaced. As far as I was concerned, it would never happen.

I was polite, however. I bit my tongue as he explained how digital technology and the laser was going to change how we listened to music. But when he told me that one day, all record albums would be recorded with accompanying video tracks, I was compelled to tell him how wrong he was. People didn’t want to watch music, I told him, they wanted to listen to it.

When I returned home, I wrote my article which was basically a review of the video tape I’d seen. I was convinced that Pacific Arts Video Records was doomed to failure, that they were no more than a bunch of kooks.

The rest is history. Not long after that interview, the radio station where I worked scrapped their turntables to install CD players. Less than a year after that, the local cable outlet was piping rock videos into Monterey Peninsula homes. In the years since, I’ve learned that at the time of my interview, Michael Nesmith and his company were working closely with the founders of MTV to invent the rock video and that most of the “videos” seen during the early days of music television were produced by Pacific Arts.

So, as the sages make their fantastic predictions about life in the 21st century, I’m going to take a wait-and-see attitude. I’ve learned the hard way that just because it doesn’t seem likely to me doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.

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