Sixty years in the past, the animated sequence The Jetsons completed its first and solely season earlier than being canceled.
Simply 24 episodes had been broadcast between September 1962 and March 1963. Regardless of this, the cartoon has achieved large affect in well-liked tradition, with numerous reruns, a reboot within the mid-Eighties (51 episodes over two seasons), and a feature-length film in 1990.
The Jetsons was created by the Hanna-Barbara animation studio in Los Angeles as a futuristic model of the studio’s hit sequence The Flintstones, the primary cartoon sequence to achieve a prime-time slot.
However whereas The Flintstones was set in a distant, legendary stone age 1000’s of years prior to now, The Jetsons was set in a really close to future – in 2062.
Like The Flintstones, the present was aimed largely at kids and performed with concepts concerning the future for laughs. It’s not a severe work of futurology. Even so, it’s nonetheless an attention-grabbing cultural artefact, serving to us respect our current and our expectations of the long run.
The primary episode was broadcast just some weeks after US president John F. Kennedy gave his well-known “Moon speech,” promising “to go to the Moon on this decade and do the opposite issues, not as a result of they’re simple, however as a result of they’re laborious.”
The Jetsons’ title sequence.
Whereas that promise was motivated by fears of the Soviet Union successful the House Race, the long run depicted is usually optimistic. Know-how holds the promise of a greater world.
Among the many whimsical expertise imagined are flying vehicles, robotic maids, video calls, smartwatches, meals printing and area tourism. A few of this appears far-sighted. However there are huge blind spots. These flying vehicles, for instance, nonetheless want a driver.
There are three issues its creators received manifestly flawed: the place of girls within the workforce, how a lot we’ll work, and the place we work.
Gender stereotypes
Just like the Flintstones, The Jetsons revolves round a nuclear household in mid-Twentieth century industrialised society. There’s George (aged about 40), his spouse Jane (about 33), their teenage daughter Judy (15), youthful son Elroy, a canine named Astro, and a robotic maid.
We will calculate that Jane was nonetheless in her teenagers when she turned a mom. She’s the head of a recycling firm however it doesn’t appear to contain a lot work. For many half she’s typical TV homemaker.
That is now the norm in solely a small variety of societies. It appears unlikely the development in ladies’s workforce participation will reverse within the subsequent 40 years.
Girls in workforce
Had the present been made a decade later it’s attainable the affect of the ladies’s liberation motion and books corresponding to Germain Greer’s The Feminine Eunuch (revealed in 1970) would have altered this imaginative and prescient of 2062.
Within the 1990 film, for instance, Jane is an environmental activist. In a 2017 relaunched comedian she is a scientist engaged on the Worldwide House Station.
Working hours
One clarification as to why Jane doesn’t work is that George, the breadwinner, barely has to work both.
He goes to work simply two days per week, for one hour a day, as a “digital index operator”. This includes him pushing buttons to take care of an atomic supercomputer named RUDI (brief for “Referential Common Digital Indexer”).
George’s working hours replicate the optimism of the Sixties that beneficial properties made by staff within the first half of the Twentieth century – with a 40-hour, five-day workweek turning into the norm by the Nineteen Fifties – would proceed within the second half of the century. Optimists hoped productiveness beneficial properties from automation would imply a “leisure society” by the yr 2000.
George Jetson at work. Hanna-Barbera
This has not proved the case, with solely marginal reductions in working hours for many since then.
As US economist and sociologist Juliet Schor famous in her 1991 e-book The Overworked American: The Sudden Decline of Leisure, the concept expertise alone can result in working much less fails to account for the financial system through which work is finished. That’s, capitalism is geared in the direction of growing consumption (and thereby income). The emphasis has due to this fact been on making extra money as the important thing to happiness, and due to this fact working even tougher, not much less.
We will see this even within the present four-day week motion, which guarantees the prospect of reducing the 38-hour, five-day workweek to 32 hours and 4 days, however solely as long as the identical productiveness is maintained.
Trials of this 100:80:100 mannequin (100% of the pay, 80% of the hours, 100% of the productiveness) have been heralded a fantastic success, however as work researcher Anthony Veal has famous, huge questions stay as as to whether these outcomes are relevant throughout the economic system.
At this stage, the chance of serious discount in working hours for most individuals over the following 40 years appears doubtful.
Distant work
Despite the fact that George solely has to work two hours per week, he nonetheless has to go to an workplace (at Spacely House Sprockets) to push his buttons.
This will replicate the very fact the web and the non-public computing revolution had been but to happen. Futurologists didn’t begin enthusing concerning the prospects of distant working till the Nineteen Seventies.
Extra importantly, that’s simply how issues had been conceived – work was one thing accomplished beneath the watchful eye of administration. It additionally created alternatives to play with acquainted motifs involving George’s boss, the short-tempered Mr Spacely, a personality just like Fred Flintstone’s boss, Mr Slate, and Mr Burns in The Simpsons.
Administration resistance to distant work was sturdy up till the COVID-19 pandemic compelled a cultural shift.
The way forward for the place and the way a lot we work will little question be formed by expertise. However our perceptions and expectations about what might be achieved are simply as essential.
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