So I'm poking around YouTube looking at promotional and educational videos about The House of Tomorrow and Magic Highway USA and other such futurismo and find myself trying to articulate to these white, male, crewcutted engineers why the future won't look like that.
"Well, as it turns out building air conditioned tunnels to drive through the desert wasn't a great use of resources. In fact, resources will be finite, instead of infinite. And there's a fair amount of environmental fallout from trying to pave over the planet. Also, women wind up going to work, family farms turn into agribusiness, drugs and gay sex are fairly common and now our biggest economic rival is China. Which owns most of our debt. Oh, but this is funny, it turns out tanning is bad for your skin but people still want to look tanned so they spray their skin with an orange-ish color. Also, because it's cheaper than plastic surgery, people inject botulism into their foreheads to make it smooth. No, seriously!"