The Amazing Century: 1926-2026

by Ezri Carlebach:

The story of the past hundred years is the story of technology driving change. Electricity, atomic energy, nuclear weapons, computers, the Internet, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, drones, rockets, robotics… but beyond that, it’s the story of how we communicate and, all too often, fail to communicate about these tools and their intended and unintended consequences.

The other day I ran into my friend John Helmer, in the aisles of a local organic supermarket. John hosts The Learning Hack, the world’s number 1 podcast on all things learning and development, and a couple of years ago I was a guest on his show. Among other things, we talked about how technology now makes everyday business processes look like science fiction, and how anthropologists are helping business leaders and employees figure out how to deal with that. “How’s the whole ‘anthropology-and-science-fiction’ thing going?” John asked. In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that back in the 1980s John and I played together in a band called Pookiesnackenburger. So it’ll be no surprise that I plan to take you to some weird and wonderful places in this series of three special articles for Strategic. 

Amidst the headlines about all the unprecedented changes driven by new technology, we’re going to delve into what I see as the single most significant change, for business communicators and, indeed, for the whole world. I characterise that change as a shift from information and communication technologies to imagination and communication technologies. Luckily, we get to keep the same acronym. But the ‘new’ ICT is radically different from the old, because imagination is a more powerful tool than information, which has in any case been profoundly disrupted by tech innovation since the arrival of the Internet. As UK journalist Carole Cadwalladr writes in her Substack channel, How to Survive the Broligarchy, we have already reached the point of “information collapse”. Among other places, you’ll have seen ‘information collapse’ in all those charts and graphs showing declining public trust in media, government, and business. 

In order to grasp the implications of the new ICT, we need to go back one hundred years. The New Yorker magazine first appeared on news stands in 1925. According to the curators of an exhibition at New York Public Library marking the centenary, “The New Yorker has informed our understanding of almost every aspect of society, war and violence, race and gender, the environmental movement, the distinctiveness of American fiction writing, and more”. You might say that The New Yorker represents what’s good about ‘traditional’ or ‘mainstream’ media, with its information, education and entertainment roles. The magazine continues to attract a loyal readership, but it looks out of step in today’s fragmented and polarised media landscape populated by artificial intelligence (AI), virtual and augmented reality, and ‘deepfake’ content. None of which would be possible, obviously, without cheap, on-demand electric power. In 1925, only about half of households in the US and the UK had electricity, and both nations were on an urgent mission to electrify their industrial capability, due to strategic and security concerns, as well as for the economic benefits. It wasn’t easy; by 1930, only 10% of US farms had access to electric power. Meanwhile, Lenin was describing communism as “Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” Globally, the rate of electrification increased rapidly in the years leading up to World War 2, sparking (no pun intended) much uncertainty about training and skills, job opportunities, and social and economic disruption.

The dawn of the Amazing Century 

Enter Hugo Gernsback, in many ways the quintessential European immigrant to the US. Gernsback was optimistic about the ability of science to solve fundamental human problems, he was future oriented, technically minded, and individualistic in outlook. He trained as an electrical engineer in his native Luxembourg, and on arrival in New York in 1904 established a dry-cell battery business. But he was surprised to find a lack of knowledge about, and interest in, the potential of electric technology. Drawing on a love of literature that was characteristic of his European heritage, he began writing and publishing to spread the word about the Electric Age. He designed a cheap, easy-to-assemble radio set, and got his instructions for building it published in Scientific American. Spotting a commercial opportunity within his desire to share his passion, he soon founded his own magazine, Modern Electrics. A growing cohort of hobbyists, engineers and technically-minded business people subscribed, but despite the magazine’s success, Gernsback remained disappointed by the lack of interest among the public at large. So he started writing fiction for Modern Electrics, because he understood that storytelling has greater power than information when it comes to influencing or persuading people.

In 1911, Modern Electrics carried the first instalment of Gernsback’s serialised novel, with what must have been a bewildering title at the time – Ralph 124C 41+. In a nutshell, the story is about the eponymous hero, a ‘supermind’ from the year 2660, explaining a series of fantastical-sounding inventions. Among them are clearly prescient versions of radar and television, and something very close to what we now call virtual reality. Eventually, Gernsback decided that there should be a magazine devoted purely to this kind of story, blending fiction with credible science and advocacy for new technologies. He even coined the term ‘scientifiction’. Not surprisingly, it didn’t catch on. It became ‘science fiction’ (which I abbreviate as sf), and in April 1926, Gernsback launched the first true science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. 

A glance through the first issue is instructive. For a start, the cover boasts contributions from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe. Not bad for a ‘pulp’ magazine… And on the inside cover? A full page ad headed ‘Be a Radio Expert’, promoting jobs in “the great new Big-Pay Industry – Radio”. Gernsback used his introductory editorial to stake a claim for Amazing Stories as an “entirely new” type of magazine. “Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading,” he notes, “they are also always instructive. They supply knowledge that we might not otherwise obtain – and they supply it in a very palatable form”. This is the crux of the matter, the reason why science fiction has grown into arguably the most relevant and urgent form of literature as we head into the second quarter of the twenty-first century. Gernsback was urging his readers to use their imagination, seeing imagination not as a trivial pastime but as a form of knowledge, critical to succeeding – even surviving – in the new technological age. Keep going through the pages of Amazing Stories, volume 1 number 1, and you come across tales such as ‘The Man From the Atom’, ‘The Thing From Outside’ and ‘Off on a Comet’, along with more ads for tech-related training and jobs. While some of the stories, understandably, appear dated to us now, I would urge you to read ‘The New Accelerator’, the contribution from H.G. Wells. It is still an extraordinary piece of imaginative writing. 

Strange new worlds…

I’ve been gripped by sf since I first saw Star Trek on TV, as a seven-year-old, in 1969. It premiered in the UK just a few months after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The two events became inextricably linked in my mind and, despite significant problems with both the real exploration of space and its fantasy version, I remain convinced that creating proactive stories about reaching for the stars – along with other core sf themes, from AI and robots to parallel universes – is vital for the future of humanity. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once defined sf as “the literature of ideas”, but imagination precedes ideas. It precedes science and art. It precedes even language, and thus every form of human communication. I would argue that the power of imagination is not only the single most important evolutionary development in humanity achieving its unique position among life on Earth, but it is also essential for protecting all life on Earth. 

Yet despite the attention given to imagination by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, scientists – including, famously, Albert Einstein – and artists of all kinds, the business world remains sceptical. Business leaders might pay tribute to the role of imagination in creativity and innovation, but few will give any systematic thought to how it works, or what it means for them and their employees. It just isn’t seen as ‘strategic’. The question for us all, then, is how to build imaginative capabilities for ourselves, with our coworkers, and in our communities. The new ICT demands nothing less. We can no longer separate imaginative from informational content, any more than we might separate a glass of milk from the ocean into which it has been spilled. Instead, we must learn to wield imagination as a technological tool in its own right, and – as with all tools – put accountability and human decency at the heart of its deployment. If we don’t, the consequences of all those dystopian sf stories from the past 100 years will collapse on our heads (if you don’t believe me, just watch Black Mirror…). As author J. Michael Straczynski put it, in The Last Dangerous Visions, “with every day, advancing technologies move what was once science fiction incrementally closer to being birthed in a petri dish that simultaneously contains our best and our worst impulses”.

We will return to this theme in the second article of the series later this year, before wrapping up the discussion with a final article to coincide with the centenary of Amazing Stories, in April 2026. In the meantime, why not share your views here on the pages of Strategic, or on LinkedIn (with the relevant tags). Or, if you’d like a direct conversation, feel free to drop by my home page at ezricarlebach.com.

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Ezri Carlebach is a double-bass player and consultant on all things sf. After a career of more than 30 years in publishing, marketing, public relations and corporate communications, Ezri is writing a series of graphic novels set in Brighton and Orkney.

Written by: Editor