President Trump and the Federal Communications Commission chairman are demanding more positive media coverage of the Iran war. On Saturday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued yet another threat to revoke licenses from news broadcasters, claiming without evidence that they are running "hoaxes and news distortions" related to the war in Iran.

In an X post, Carr shared a complaint about an Iran war headline that Trump had made on Truth Social and added his own commentary. "Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up," Carr wrote. "The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."

Carr making vague threats about enforcing rules against hoaxes and news distortion is nothing new. Given how difficult it is to actually revoke a broadcast license, and the fact that no TV station licenses are up for renewal until 2028, the threats so far have been attempts to intimidate news organizations without any concrete punishment.

What's slightly odd about Carr's latest threat is that it's based on a Trump complaint about a newspaper headline, not broadcast news coverage. The Trump post that spurred Carr's latest threat was about a Wall Street Journal article.

Carr has repeatedly claimed he's only targeting licensed broadcasters because they have an obligation to operate in the public interest as users of the public airwaves. Carr said in his Saturday message, "The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves." But the only example Carr provided was Trump's Truth Social post that didn't mention any broadcast reports.

Trump's quibble

Trump's complaint said, "Yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly struck down at an Airport in Saudi Arabia, and of no further use. In actuality, the Base was hit a few days ago, but the planes were not 'struck' or 'destroyed.' Four of the five had virtually no damage, and are already back in service. One had slightly more damage, but will be in the air shortly. None were destroyed, or close to that, as the Fake News said in headlines."

The only specific news outlets Trump's post mentioned were The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but he was referring to a Wall Street Journal article. Even if Trump's version of events is true, his complaint wouldn't meet the legal standard for proving a hoax or news distortion, or even prove that the Journal got anything wrong. Trump claims the planes were not "struck" but said four out of five "had virtually no damage," which seemingly indicates that all five were struck and suffered some damage.

Trump's post seems to accuse the Journal of falsely reporting that the planes were destroyed and would not be used again. But the Journal article makes it clear the planes were merely damaged, not destroyed, and would be repaired. It said:

Five US Air Force refueling planes were struck and damaged on the ground at Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, according to two US officials.

The tankers were hit during an Iranian missile strike on the Saudi base in recent days, the officials said. US Central Command declined to comment. The tankers were damaged but not fully destroyed and are being repaired, one of the officials said. No one was killed in the strikes.

The Journal article was published on Friday, and Trump issued his complaint on Truth Social on Saturday morning. The Journal article was updated on Saturday afternoon to include a quote from Trump's Truth Social post. As far as we can tell, the article never claimed that any of the five tanker planes were destroyed. A Reuters article on Friday that quotes the WSJ report also uses the phrases "struck and damaged," and "not fully destroyed," undercutting Trump's claim of false reporting.

The Journal article's only reference to destroyed planes is related to a previous crash that killed six US military members. It said:

The news brings the total number of Air Force refueling planes damaged or destroyed to at least seven. It comes after two Air Force KC-135 refueling planes collided on Thursday, leading one of the aircraft to crash into the ground. All six crew members were killed, the Pentagon announced on Friday.

Trump "thrilled" by Carr's latest threat

While it doesn't appear that the Journal got anything wrong, it was the only example Carr provided in his complaint about fake news, hoaxes, and news distortions.

"It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news," Carr wrote. "When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in [sic] the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen. Time for change!"

Carr has repeatedly made statements of this sort during Trump's second term despite writing himself in 2019 that the government should not "censor speech it doesn’t like" and that the "FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the 'public interest.'"

Trump wrote last night that he is "thrilled to see Brendan Carr... looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic 'News' Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, 'FIRED.'"

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is also demanding more positive media coverage of the Iran war. Criticizing CNN reporting at a press conference on Friday, Hegseth said, "The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better." Hegseth was referring to Paramount Skydance's planned purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that was helped along by the Trump administration.

Carr's threat to broadcast licenses was roundly criticized by Democrats. "If Trump doesn't like your coverage of the war, his FCC will pull your broadcast license. That is flagrantly unconstitutional," California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote, "Constitutional law 101: it’s illegal for the government to censor free speech it just doesn’t like about Trump’s Iran war. This threat is straight out of the authoritarian playbook." Carr replied by quoting the Supreme Court's Red Lion Broadcasting decision in 1969, which said, "No one has a First Amendment right to a license or to monopolize a radio frequency; to deny a station license because 'the public interest' requires it 'is not a denial of free speech.'"

"This is worse than the comedian stuff"

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote, "This is a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed. This is worse than the comedian stuff, and by a lot. The stakes here are much higher. He’s not talking about late night shows, he’s talking about how a war is covered."

Schatz was referring to Carr's previous threats to stations regarding late-night talk show hosts such as ABC host Jimmy Kimmel. Even some Republicans criticized Carr's Kimmel threats last year.

FCC Democrat Anna Gomez said the agency's threats are dangerous because they have a chilling effect on media coverage. But the threats themselves have no legal backing, she said.

"Once again, this FCC pretends it has the power to control news coverage," Gomez said in a statement today. "In reality, the FCC has vanishingly little power over national news networks. It licenses local broadcast stations, not networks, and no licenses are up for renewal until 2028. Early renewal attempts are exceedingly rare, and the process is so demanding that any effort would almost certainly fail, especially given the well-documented First Amendment violations underlying these moves. These threats are grounded in neither reality nor law and would not survive judicial scrutiny, just as other recent attempts by this administration to push beyond constitutional limits have repeatedly failed in court."

At least one Republican seems concerned about Carr's latest threat. On Fox News yesterday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was asked about Carr threatening broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage, and whether he thinks it is the role of government to police that kind of coverage.

"I'm a big supporter of the First Amendment," Johnson responded. "I do not like the heavy hand of government no matter who's wielding it. I'd rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible. And really, the federal government's role is to protect our freedoms, to protect our constitutional rights."

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Fixing up old cars is good for the soul. It might not always feel like it between fixing old bodges and shovelling bulk greenbacks into the parts counter furnace, but it’s a slow and methodical process in a world full of instant gratification. The flipside is that it usually isn’t an investment, in the sense that you’ll almost never see the money you spent return to your account. Just ask Kia Chief Designer and Autopian podcast guest Tom Kearns.

He recently sold a strange and special project on Bring A Trailer, a wonderfully weird Porsche that often slides under the radar. It’s an oft-forgotten model from the 1990s that’s both very much if-you-know-you-know and relatively cheap for how rare it is. It’s definitely the car you fix up because you adore it, and that tracks with what Kearns wrote on Instagram:

It was a passion project and I spent way more on it than it will ever be worth. My loss is your gain! These are incredible cars, drive one to find out.

Off the bat, a Porsche 968 certainly isn’t an obvious choice for a project car. Essentially the final evolution of the 924 coupe, this re-jigged ’70s machine for the ’90s wasn’t a massive commercial success. Thanks in part to unfavorable Deutsch Mark exchange rates and the early-1990s recession, only 4,665 of these flip-forward-headlight sports cars ever made it to North America. The split between coupes and convertibles? Pretty much even.

However, take a second and look at the lineage: The 968 built upon the 944, which was once lauded as the best-handling car in America. Indeed, balanced weight distribution and a high polar moment of inertia thanks to a rear-mounted transaxle makes any of these four-cylinder water-cooled cars sweet treats to enjoy today. And that’s before we get into the relative firepower under the hood of this 968.

How much displacement must a four-cylinder engine have to be considered big? Anything over 2.5 liters is usually enough to do the trick, but the 968 took things a step further with a three-liter inline-four. To be precise, that’s 747.5 cubic centimeters per cylinder. Enormous stuff, yet it sort of makes sense. A four-cylinder engine worked best with the harmonics of the car’s torque tube, and a combination of 16 valves, two camshafts, variable valve timing, and an 11:1 compression ratio resulted in a strong 237 horsepower. Mitsubishi-licensed balance shafts kept everything smooth, and a six-speed manual transaxle converted rotation into forward motion. The result was zero-to-60 mph in about six seconds, enough to put a naturally aspirated Nissan 300ZX in its place.

Tempting stuff, but of course Kearns didn’t settle on just any 968. First, he managed to find one of the best colors Porsche offered. Called Wimbledon Green Metallic, this lovely shade of teal pulses with post-Cold War optimism as it shifts from near-blue to green depending on light and shadow. Then Kearns found the single U.S.-spec 968 in Wimbledon Green Metallic with a Light Grey leather interior. While that sounds a bit dreary, Porsche’s Light Grey leather of the time was more of an off-white, meaning the ambience inside is simply superb.

Of course, it would’ve been one thing to simply enjoy an older car for a couple of seasons, but it seems that Kearns wanted it done right. As the listing states:

Over $20k of work under current ownership included reupholstering the seats and portions of the interior, dent repair and paintwork on the left quarter panel, installing replacement 17″ Cup I alloy wheels, tires, front control arm bushings, tires, timing belt, engine mounts, door lock solenoids, window felts and outer seals, knock sensor, heater valve, accessory drive belts, and assorted air conditioning components.

That might seem like an insane amount of money to spend on a 108,000-mile car normally worth between $20,000 and $25,000, but weirdly, I understand. Refreshing rubber bits like bushings and window seals makes a car drive tighter and quieter, taking care of the cosmetics makes it look nicer, ensuring everything works makes it more pleasant to live with, and knocking out the major maintenance items adds huge peace of mind. In some ways, it’s not dissimilar to what I’ve been doing with my Boxster, a true labor of love.

However, perhaps because Kearns found a unicorn spec and because he lavished so much attention on this 968, the hammer price came out to a tidy $43,218. Still a lot of money for a non-CS, non-Turbo S Porsche 968, but again, love makes us do funny things. There’s a certain sincerity about this 968. It’s not a car you restore for Instagram likes or cars and coffee flexing or any sort of clout, and that’s part of what makes it cool. Kudos to Tom Kearns for taking this 968, making it really nice again, and putting a few thousand miles on it in the process.

Top graphic image: Bring A Trailer

 

The post Kia’s Chief Designer Just Sold A Weird Porsche He Spent ‘More On’ Than It’ll Ever Be Worth appeared first on The Autopian.

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FORT COLLINS

Electric Mayhem loves being a “jammer.” She’s the star of the roller derby squad, the sprinter, the point-scorer, the focal point for the crowd as everyone waits for the whistle to blow.

When the game begins, she rushes forward and mashes into “blockers” from the opposing team. The pack writhes around the track while a “pivot” shouts numbers at her blockers, indicating to them where the jammer is trying to break through. 

One! Two! Center! Three! Four! Three! 

She will do anything to break through the wall of bodies and sprint around the track. If she manages it, the blockers will do anything to prevent her from completing that lap. 

“The crowd loves a big hit,” said Electric Mayhem, known as Jordin Frey away from the track. 

Frey joined FoCo Roller Derby in Fort Collins in 2022 as a “fresh hop,” the league’s name for rookies making their way through the mandatory 12-week training program. 

Over the course of the training, the new skaters build a shared trust that’s essential to participating in the league. It’s both a practical matter (every skater has to serve on a committee), and a cultural one, since joining the league means joining a community beyond the rink. That community has shifted and grown amid the recent, often caustic, national dialogue on gender and sport.

This year, FoCo Roller Derby is celebrating its 20th anniversary in the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, an international governing body of the sport, and for 20 years it has taken its role as a community refuge very seriously. 

If the fresh hops don’t wash out of basic training and show up to officiate a certain number of games, then they’re invited to weekly practices with the rest of the league — a stage called “fermented hops.” After another 12 weeks practicing alongside experienced players, they get to scrimmage. Finally, six or so months later, they can skate in their first “bout,” the roller derby term for a game. 

The slow build is a matter of safety. Roller derby is an extremely physical sport. There’s pushing, shoving, hip-checking, shoulder-slamming, sprinting, ducking, jumping, spinning and all of it on quad roller skates.

“It seems so long, but every step is so fun, I just want to soak it up,” said Atlas Wylde, who goes by Rebel Yellow, after their first league practice as a fermented hop.

The rookies navigate the new sport together stacking up skills as the intensity increases. For 19-year-old Cyrus Van Briggle, aka Chameleon, and 18-year-old Toby Campbell, aka Ruby Doom, that camaraderie is what keeps them coming back to the rink. Both started as junior roller derby skaters and are playing their first season in the FoCo league. Van Briggle started skating for a now-defunct league in Greeley when he was just 7 years old. Campbell was introduced to the sport by his mom. 

“This is one of the only sports you can be in just to be in,” Campbell said. “It’s not like everyone is striving to get to the big leagues — there isn’t a big league.”

“At the beginning the culture was really just about welcoming all body types, all backgrounds and all body types, all shapes and sizes,” said Jayne Niemann, aka AR-15, who started skating in the league in 2009. But the league naturally attracted people who felt unsafe or pushed out of other circles, including skaters from the LGBTQ+ community and victims of domestic violence.

“It’s empowering, it was where they were finding confidence again,” Niemann said.

That empowerment was largely enabled by the fact that roller derby was considered a women’s sport. 

“There was no room for men on the track,” said Alex Cohen, author of “Down and Derby,” and a consultant and skater in the 2009 film, “Whip It.” “There were male refs and male mascots. But I think it was this unspoken rule that, like, you all get to have a place everywhere else, this is our place.”

Over the past few years, though, as a slate of political campaigns, state laws, court cases and executive orders has squeezed transgender athletes out of sports, some local roller derby leagues — including FoCo Roller Derby — have moved in the opposite direction, absorbing potential players of all genders, including men.

“Roller derby is not often one of the sports that people think about when they think of ‘sports.’ I think we get overlooked quite a bit,” said Mad Rodenbaugh, aka Mad Cow. “But I cannot overstate how important this place is for people who are trans and queer, who really don’t have a space elsewhere in sports.”

The sport with nine lives

That roller derby is once again rebranding doesn’t come as a surprise for anyone who has been tracking the sport’s history. 

“Roller derby is like the sport that had nine lives, right? There were so many moments in time where it was like, all right, this is it. This is the end of the line, no more roller derby,” Cohen said.

The sport started in the 1930s when people would gather for dayslong walkathons and dance-till-you-drop contests. Looking for a new way to draw Depression-era crowds, an event promoter in Chicago came up with the idea of two-person teams skating 57,000 laps around a flat track, racing a total of 2,700 miles, or the equivalent of skating from New York to San Diego. These events took weeks to complete.

The sport was revised a few years later into the fast-paced, full-contact format that it’s known for now. It waxed into the 1940s, waned in the 1950s, reemerged in the 1960s and in the 1970s got a full Hollywood makeover, blending the athletics of the game with flashy feuds and all-out brawls televised on local TV. 

Then, in the mid-1970s, the two main derby leagues consolidated and shut down. A couple of attempts to revive the sport followed. 

“In the ’80s there was this whole roller jam television show that, believe it or not, was like part roller derby, but with an alligator pit? It was just insane, right?” Cohen said. “After that, I think everyone thought, ‘OK, that’s it. Roller derby is dead.’”

Then a guy in Texas who went by “Devil Dan” had an idea. 

“He thought of it as kind of a get-rich-quick scheme, like, ‘Let’s put on a derby show, it’ll be women and roller skates and people will pay money to see that,’” Cohen said. He promised fire breathers and live music. But “Devil Dan” Policarpo spent the money that four teams of women had raised for the new league and skipped town shortly after the first event. 

“The women were really pissed off, but they were also like, you know what, just because he took off doesn’t mean that we can’t keep doing this,” Cohen said. “So that’s really where modern roller derby, as we’ve known it for the past 20-plus years, comes out of: Austin, Texas.”

The Austin founders came up with the idea of playing with pun-laden pseudonyms — reportedly inspired by Austin’s drag performers — and the whole scene swerved toward the fish-netted, feminist crowd.

“Here was this sport that, regardless of how you felt in the quote-unquote real world, you could be a badass. Right? You could wear fishnets and roller skates and have this pseudonym, and you could be whoever you wanted to be outside of your job or your student life or your family or whatever,” Cohen said.

Redefining who can play

On Feb. 5 of last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which leans on Title IX — a 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in schools that receive federal funding — to prevent transgender athletes from participating in sports as a matter of “safety, fairness, dignity, and truth,” according to the order. 

(In 2023 the Biden administration proposed a rule change that interpreted Title IX in the opposite direction, using the law to prevent schools from categorically barring transgender athletes from sports based on gender identity.)

Though Title IX is only enforceable at educational institutions that receive federal funding, the language of the order is deliberately broad, suggesting all “sport-specific governing bodies” ought to overhaul their gender policies as well, including international associations. The global implication seems directed at the International Olympic Committee, whose policy is to leave eligibility up to each individual sport. But it chilled the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, or WFTDA, which moved their 2026 global championship to Sweden from the U.S.

The day after Trump’s order was signed, the association also issued a gender clarification statement on its website: 

“Any individual of a Marginalized Gender, regardless of presentation or the gender they were assigned at birth, is welcomed and encouraged to participate in the WFTDA in any capacity, including skating on a WFTDA charter or holding elected office.”

The association included an extensive list of what they meant by “marginalized gender,” including, but not limited to: trans, cis, intersex and gender expansive women; genderqueer, genderfluid, and nonbinary individuals; and two spirit individuals; followed by a note that the list “is not exhaustive and will be updated as needed.”

They also launched an open division test season, meaning teams composed of any gender — including men — can apply to have games sanctioned by the association. The test season is a way of gauging interest in the creation of an all-gender division for their more than 400 active leagues worldwide, and to collect data that will inform an appropriate rankings program and competition structure. The test season runs through June. 

FoCo Roller Derby started an open division team in 2024, but so far uptake and competition has been slow, according to Niemann. And discussions about launching the team weren’t always smooth considering the sport’s women-focused foundation. 

Despite initial pushback, the sense of inclusion that has defined roller derby for the past 25 years ultimately trumped the discomfort of expansion in Fort Collins, where players look out for each other on and off the rink. If someone needs help moving they’ll easily find extra hands, if someone gets sick others will set up a meal train, Niemann said. 

“If anyone in the league is going through a hard time they can lean on the league,” Niemann said. “It was like that from the start, and it has taken a lot of work to keep it like that.”

There are 55 skaters either training or competing for the five teams in the FoCo Roller Derby league. The league’s A-team, the Micro Bruisers, travels to regional tournaments and competes against teams in the North America-West division. Of the 96 teams in the division, 10 are from Colorado, including two teams from Denver Roller Derby — Mile High Club and Bruising Altitude — that rank in the top 10. (Mile High Club is ranked second behind Portland’s Rose City Rollers at the time of writing.) 

FoCo’s B-team, the Brew Crew, doesn’t compete for rankings, but will travel to play tournaments and against other leagues’ B-teams. The league also has two local teams, the Ale Marys and the Growlers, who compete in scrimmages — mostly against each other — and serve as a landing spot for skaters who are either working their way up to the travel teams, or want to compete more casually. The fifth and newest team is their open division team, The Taphouse Titans.

Open division teams only play one another, a way of consenting to the fact that there might be a male on the opposing team. At practice, players wear different colored wristbands to show their comfort levels without subjecting anyone to invasive assumptions: a red wristband means that they play by WFTDA’s gender policies, which excludes men whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth, while a blue wristband means they don’t care. Most players wear both. 

“We’re still adjusting to it, we haven’t had a lot of cisgender men wanting to skate with us,” Niemann said. “I think that makes sense, I mean, they can feel the history too.”

A place of their own

One of the FoCo league’s long-term goals is to purchase their own practice space. For now, they collect $50 per month from their skaters to help pay the annual $25,800 fee to Rollerland to rent the space out one night per week, a schedule sometimes preempted by birthday party takeovers. 

Since 2018 the league has been meeting regularly to scope out a space of their own — all they need is about 10,000 square feet of smooth concrete — and has been setting aside a small savings pile since 2022. But the national focus on trans athletes, along with the Trump administration’s various bans against “gender ideology extremism,” have dried up potential corporate sponsors and grant funding. 

“We can’t touch anything having to do with federal funding,” Rodenbaugh said. “They wouldn’t touch us with a 10-foot pole, anyway.” Until then, they’ll keep watching each other’s backs and pressing forward together. 

“Roller derby changes a lot of lives. That’s the only reason it works,” Frey said. “Why else would you want to do something that you have to pay to play, travel, have to work a full-time job during and then train late at night? It changed my life. It has made me more self-assured. Now when I have to do something scary, I’m like, this isn’t scary, I play roller derby.”

We love imagining the future. Much of the news is taken up with guessing what will happen next: weather, sports, the election, the stock market… And betting on the future is the engine that drives Wall Street as well as Las Vegas. Science fiction, often described as “stories about the future,” is prone to being judged by the degree to which it succeeds in predicting what is yet to be, and mainstream commentators often praise science fiction writers for being prescient, as though they are modern Delphic oracles or Philip K. Dick’s precogs come to life. 

This is all very ridiculous to people who enjoy science fiction, since the genre has an abysmal record of making accurate predictions. Just look around you. The year 2000 has long come and gone, and we don’t have killer robots with humanoid skeletons roaming a post-nuclear hellscape, nor do we have manned missions to Jupiter supervised by a sentient AI nostalgic for its childhood. (To be sure, we do live with chatbots capable of writing haikus about Bitcoin—but one may well consider that the actual dystopian scenario). We don’t have flying cars, despite them being regularly predicted for a century and becoming de rigueur in science fiction milieus¹.

To be sure, many science fiction authors explicitly reject the idea that their work should be read as predictive. Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance, writes, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”² However, enough authors embrace the prophetic role that “science fiction tells us our future” remains the defining view of the genre. Moreover, despite the lack of accurate, concrete predictions, science fiction continues to exert a powerful influence on how the general public thinks about new technology. Concepts like “Big Brother,” “virtual reality,” “metaverse,” “cyberspace,” and so forth have entered the popular lexicon. They are used to describe contemporary technologies, even though the real-world versions are nothing like their original, science-fictional depictions.

One example of this phenomenon is the ubiquitous, constant state of surveillance we now live under in the West, accomplished mainly by individuals making rational, voluntary choices over the last few decades to progressively trade away their privacy for convenience. There are indeed cameras and recording devices everywhere at all times, but our Big Brother is not the Orwellian hyper-totalitarian state; instead, it’s a many-tentacled monster cobbled together from technology companies, advertisers, governments (at all levels), “agentic” bots that seek to make us their agents, bad laws, internet mobs and trolls, loneliness, laziness, the false promise of genuine connection via social media, and above all, our imperfect selves. When we say Orwell is “prescient,” we are really praising his skill at crafting an evocative metaphor, not his predictive ability. 

Why is science fiction so bad at predicting the future, even as we continue to use science fiction terms to describe reality?

The best way to work through this paradox is through a concrete case study. In 1899, as part of preparations for the 1900 Paris Exposition, a group of French artists led by Jean-Marc Cotê created a series of images imagining life in the year 2000. Intended as cigarette box inserts or postcards, the images were not widely distributed and largely disappeared from public awareness until Isaac Asimov rediscovered a set and published them in a book in 1986, Futuredays: A Nineteenth-Century Vision of the Year 2000. The images draw heavily on the science-fictional imagination of Fin de siècle writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and thus constitute a kind of visual distillation of 19th-century futurism.

The retro-futuristic scenes depicted are full of whimsy and steampunk charm: multi-limbed robot barbers groom satisfied patrons while a human operator fiddles with levers and buttons nearby; a pair of firemen equipped with angelic bat wings fly to the upper stories of a burning building to save a baby and its mother, who’s posing like a medieval Madonna; a bespectacled scientist armed with a huge syringe faces off against dangerous microbes, who, magnified by a microscope, now resemble clawed dragons; a girl carefully places eggs into one end of a dial-festooned, smoke-belching machine, while baby chicks emerge from a slide on the other side of the machine and head for a pile of feed, which instantly bulks them up into ready-to-eat broilers; schoolchildren sit in neat rows with beatific smiles while a set of wired helmets pump knowledge into their skulls, which is drawn from a nearby machine—cranked by a fellow pupil under the supervision of the schoolmaster—that crushes books into information much the way LLMs pulverize human knowledge into³ …

It’s easy to critique the collection’s blind spots regarding social and cultural evolution—race, class, gender roles, colonialism, and so on—and its confident assumption that the Paris of 1899 had reached the very pinnacle of human fashion and style. But look beyond these obvious faults, and you begin to see the anxieties that drove their imagination persist as potent specters long past the year 2000. 

Take, as an example, this house-cleaning robot. Seeing the image today, our first instinct is to shout “Roomba.” But a real Roomba—sleek, autonomous, stuffed full of sensors and machine learning—is nothing like the gangly device pictured here, which apparently requires a tethered human operator to supply all the smarts so the cleaning can be done. There’s no need to belabor the point; clearly, Cotê’s team missed the mark.

Or did they? The messy secret behind much modern gadgetry and “labor-saving” devices is how little they can actually do on their own. Even after two decades of nonstop improvements, robotic vacuums and mops aren’t much smarter today than they were at their inception. They get stuck on the tiniest of thresholds between rooms, entangle themselves in dangling charging cords, lock themselves in bathrooms, crawl into nooks from which they cannot extricate themselves, and somehow always run out of battery before they can find their way home. Not only do they take longer to clean a room than if I simply did it myself, but I have to spend the entire time they’re working on babysitting duty, either rescuing the robots or anxiously waiting to be summoned for a rescue. (You could get around this by reconfiguring your home so that it’s robot-safe, but surely we can agree that conforming your life to the needs of robots is not the future we signed up for?) So, in a manner of speaking, I really am still tethered to the robot vacuums, just like the woman in the picture. The artists may not have anticipated the challenge of constructing an autonomous machine that navigates a home, but they somehow nailed the false promise of home robotics⁴.

There is a consistent throughline here. The images often tapped into some form of social anxiety—the need for more food, faster transportation, freedom from the tedium of household tasks—but the proposed solutions, often based on the prevailing technology vocabulary of the time, turned out to be off the mark. (The images usually do resonate metaphorically, which is also important, but more on this later.)

But why are the proposed solutions so wrong? If we examine the history of technology, things seem to flow logically. Consider the history of passenger vehicles: constant improvements in the construction of carriages and the art of horse breeding reached a technological plateau until the advent of the steam engine, which was then supplanted by the superior efficiency of the internal combustion engine, which is now in the process of being displaced by electrical motors as a result of our desperate need to reduce carbon emissions. Every step of this history follows the previous one logically, so why can’t the evolution of technology in the future be predicted according to a set of ironclad laws, much like the psychohistory of Asimov’s Foundation series?

This is because history, insofar as it’s misunderstood as delineating a sequence of logical syllogisms that explain the sequence of what has occurred as inevitable, is nothing more than a story, a mere fiction. Reality is messy and complicated. There is no ineluctable flow of logic, no intelligible prime mover guiding the past to the future. The past is just the path we left behind as we stumbled through a wilderness of potentials, passing by worlds that could have been.

Let’s reexamine the history of cars. If you were to travel to America around the time when Cotê’s artists painted their predictions, you would have found that about 40% of the cars ran on steam, 38% on electricity, and 22% on gasoline⁵. If you were to ask an observer of the time to predict the future of automobiles in America, how would she answer?

If history were a matter of inescapable logic, then here is the evidence before the observer. First, consider the steam car. Steam engines, after decades of refinement, were very quiet and could produce a wide range of torque without a transmission, resulting in fewer components and easier construction (compared to, say, the internal combustion engine). In addition, since steam was an old technology, responsible for the Industrial Revolution and turning America into a global power per techno-determinist accounts, there were many skilled engineers familiar with steam, which meant steam cars were easy and cheap to maintain and repair. It was true that steam cars required time (as long as half an hour) for the boiler to reach the desired operating temperature, and water freezing in winter was an issue, but people were working on solutions for these problems. All in all, steam seemed a very good technology bet for the industry.

Second, consider the electric car. Electricity was the buzzy technology of the time, with electrification being synonymous with modernization and the future. Electric cars started instantly and were quiet, clean, and easy to operate (again, no transmission, no gearshift, etc.), making them especially popular with new drivers. Electric cars were also powerful, holding some of the earliest speed and hill-climbing records. Although electric vehicles were limited in range, this was not considered an insurmountable problem. After all, Thomas Edison, the most well-known and trusted innovator of the time, was actively working on improving battery technology for electric cars. If you had been asked to invest your money in the growing automobile industry, electric vehicles definitely would have seemed a very good bet as well.

In last place, technologically speaking, was the gas car. This type of car seemed plagued with problems. Hand-cranking, required to start the engine, could injure the inexperienced. The need for a transmission not only made construction difficult but also increased operational complexity (and there was no standardization of interfaces among different gas car makers). The internal combustion engine, powered by a series of small explosions, was loud, dirty, and prone to stalling. Against these drawbacks, the only definite advantages of the gas car were a relatively long range (though even this was questionable, as early gas cars had similar ranges to electric vehicles) and the ease with which the exhausted power source could be “refreshed” by refilling the gas tank (as opposed to the slow process of recharging a battery). It was hard to see how this troublesome technology could beat out trusted steam and the new darling, electricity.

We all know what happened next—the “reasonable” predictions and extrapolations that picked electric or steam cars turned out to be science fiction. It’s fascinating to read accounts of why history turned out the way it did. Literally hundreds of different reasons have been proposed for the eventual triumph of the gas car: the discovery of cheap oil in Texas, the failed business model of renting electric vehicles to customers that ruined the largest EV maker, the American cultural preference for long drives and what we would now call “glamping,” the invention of the electric starter, the dogged determination of Henry Ford, the low quality of early roads, the slower-than-expected rate of urban electrification, the faster-than-expected rate of innovation among gas car makers … Every single account is plausible and justified by evidence; every explanation tells a perfectly logical story. 

This is always the pattern in technology, whether we’re talking about advances in sailing ships, automobiles, touch screen interfaces, home automation, the global food supply, or artificial intelligence. Confronted by a challenging problem, thousands of innovators hack away at it, trying out dozens of different solutions. All the solutions have advantages and disadvantages, and plausible paths to victory could be charted for each. 

A sequence of random events follows: new resources are discovered, a war breaks out, a tremendous new mind decides to work on the problem, a different political party comes into power, a company goes bankrupt, a technology wins out in a seemingly unrelated field, everyone suddenly decides one thing is cool while another is not… Somehow, the random sequence results in a breakthrough, where one particular solution achieves an insurmountable lead over competitors. People will never agree on how this happened; countless stories can be told, all incorporating some of the factors and leaving out others. All that matters is that suddenly, all the attention, resources, “oxygen” go to the winner. Winning begets more winning, leading to faster improvement, more innovation, higher profits, and lower costs, until all other potential solutions are forgotten and the winner seems obvious. But that is only because we have mistaken the consequences of winning for its causes.

Chance and fortune bounced our world this way and that, and humans strove and squabbled and lied and fought until we got to where we are. To justify everything, to make sense of the random walk that took us here, we must craft character arcs, identify heroes and villains, and fashion the world as it is into the conclusion of a morality play. We are here because this led to that which turned to this and then that—it all makes sense, right? So the winners must have always meant to be winners, and the losers must have always meant to be losers.

The prospective view, in that moment before the breakthrough, when all the potential solutions are vying for attention, is completely different from the retrospective view, long after the breakthrough technology has transformed the world and secured its own triumphalist narrative. Survivorship bias, confirmation bias, selection bias, hindsight, narrative fallacy, wishful thinking, arrogance… there are countless names for the cognitive biases humans exhibit when we try to tell the story of the past from our place in the present, and we must constantly remind ourselves that the way it is is not the way it has to be.

Finally, we have an answer to why science fiction is so bad at predicting solutions. Science fiction authors imagine the future based on present dreams and anxieties. But they’re confined to their moment, which lies before the breakthrough that will usher in the future. Even those who consider themselves rigorous futurists can only see a field of competing potential solutions to the anxieties of their age. No matter how much care they put into researching the strengths and weaknesses of each solution, they cannot know the random sequence of events that will ultimately decide the winner. All they can do is guess, pick a winner (or make up one), and then reimagine the whole world to justify that choice. Plausibility is then secured through a web woven from character arcs, heroes and villains, and a satisfying sense of moral resolution. Science fiction authors craft stories, and stories always turn effects into causes.

The future is not plausible (and the present scarcely more so; how many of us could have believed—before given incontrovertible evidence—the cruelty we are capable of to realize the dream of fast poultry in our industrial farms?). That is why science fiction can never predict the future. However, by crafting entertaining stories, authors invent powerful metaphors that shape how we imagine our technological future and understand our technological reality. These metaphors are why science fiction matters. Science fiction is, as many have long recognized, a myth-making literature, best understood as a young province in the ancient empire of fantasy. Like all fantasy, it draws from the collective unconscious, giving substance to beings that have no weight, voicing thoughts that cannot be put into words, depicting forms that cast no shadow. However, unlike other, older forms of fantasy, science fiction draws its metaphors from our scientific understanding of the universe. Thinking machines that interrogate their makers; immortality achieved by rewriting the code of life; new cities and ways of life on distant planets; strangers who don’t share our evolutionary history; yes, even immaculate houses with autonomous mops and instant poultry emerging from a thumping engine—these are all metaphors that allow us to make sense of a world in which the products of our imagination and craft, technology and invention, increasingly dominate not just our own evolutionary future, but the future of the planet as a whole. We live in a world in which the possibility field is growing ever grander, and new myths are needed to make sense of it.

Ursula K. Le Guin describes the myth-making function of science fiction in her 1976 essay, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction”:

The artist who works from the center of being will find archetypal images and release them into consciousness. The first science fiction writer to do so was Mary Shelley. She let Frankenstein’s monster loose. Nobody has been able to shut him out again, either. There he is, sitting in the corner of our lovely modern glass and plastic living room, right on the tubular steel contour chair, big as life and twice as ugly. 
…
Such myths, symbols, images do not disappear under the scrutiny of the intellect, nor does an ethical, or aesthetic, or even religious examination of them make them shrink and vanish. On the contrary: the more you look, the more there they are. And the more you think, the more they mean.

On this level, science fiction deserves the title of a modern mythology⁶.

Read as prediction, Frankenstein is a failure. But prophecy was never the point. The power of myths does not depend on oracles.

A more recent example of science fictional mythmaking may be found in Silvia Park’s Luminous. In this near-future world of ubiquitous robotics and extensive body modification, the line between human and machine has blurred to the point of nonexistence. Society, long used to the idea of using robots to perform emotional labor and caretaking tasks, now considers robot children as a suitable replacement for (or even improvement on) human children. As we contemplate, delight in, or are revolted by the implications of this change on the role of children and the meaning of parenthood, we’re in fact engaging with another variation of the archetype of the Abdicating Parent. It matters little whether the scenario in Luminous will come to pass; just like the Titans and the Olympians, Milton’s God and Satan, Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, Park’s human parents and robot children give us a new way to understand and talk about the fraught relationship between mortal beings who seek immortality via generation. Park, I suspect, cares no more that future parents will actually pick out robot children than I care that future artists will really use AI to help their audience to dream together—it is the archetype, the dream, the myth that matters, that will last.

In the fullness of time, when we look backward from the other side of technological revolutions, we can see that science fiction authors got all their predictions wrong. They failed to imagine all the intervening cultural shifts, inventions, economic twists and turns, war and peace, politics, the actions of little birds and the dreams of leviathans. We laugh at the gap between their vision and reality. However, in that wrongness, we also find solace and hope. So much of science fiction is dystopian because extrapolating anything to its logical end is terrifying and also because stories that scare us are more entertaining and serve as warnings of worlds we do not want. But science fiction is not future history. There are no laws dictating the future from the present. We make the future, and it won’t be dystopian unless we build it that way.

And long after the predictions have been forgotten, the metaphors the Promethean authors invented to make sense of a changing world remain true and full of power. Frankenstein’s monster endures, as do instant poultry and helpful machines that are helpless and needful. These modern myths become part of our vocabulary, the framework and tools with which we make sense of the impossible present and then construct the unimaginable future.[end-mark]

1. We can argue about what was the first example of a ‘flying car’ (in the sense of an everyday vehicle meant for the average commuter). My pick is Hugo Gernsback’s Helicar in 1923. ︎
2. Le Guin, Ursula K. Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, i-iv. New York: Ace Books, 1976. ︎
3.  Given the lighthearted execution in some of the images, one could argue that the intended audience wasn’t supposed to take these “predictions” any more seriously than we take the “predictions” in Futurama. Still, the amount of detail put into the inventions is more than necessary for a joke, and there is a compelling sense of sincerity in all the scenes. These were not just absurd scenarios devised for laughs, but entertaining attempts to imagine future solutions for real problems. ︎
4. Recent “advances” such as humanoid household robots that are, in fact, just shells operated via telepresence by exploited workers add another dark layer to this drama of lies, deceit, and failed promises. ︎
5.  George C. Cromer, Orville C. Cromer, Christopher G. Foster, and Ken W. Purdy. “automobile.” Encyclopedia Britannica, November 4, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/technology/automobile. ︎
6. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction,” Parabola, Vol. I, No. 4, (Fall 1976). ︎

Buy the Book

All That We See or Seem

Ken Liu

Book 1 in the Julia Z scifi thriller series

Buy Book

All That We See or Seem

Ken Liu

Book 1 in the Julia Z scifi thriller series

Book 1 in the Julia Z scifi thriller series

Buy this book from:

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• Target

The post Why Science Fiction Can’t Predict the Future (And Why That’s a Good Thing) appeared first on Reactor.

For the past few years, one question has been at the back of sports car fans’ minds: What’s going on with the electric Porsche 718? What began as a bold move has, over time, faced setbacks and delays. Now there’s a chance Porsche might shelve it altogether to trim expenses. As Bloomberg reports:

New Chief Executive Officer Michael Leiters may scrap the planned 718 line of Boxster and Cayman EVs because of development delays and rising expenses, said the people, who declined to be named discussing internal deliberations.

While a final decision certainly hasn’t been made yet, a credible report that cancelling the electric 718 Cayman and Boxster is on the table represents a serious about-face. Let’s rewind the clock four years to the time when Porsche announced that all variants of its next-generation 718 mid-engined model series would be battery electric vehicles.

At the time, electric performance cars were still pretty hot. An electron-powered sedan arms race was brewing between the Tesla Model S Plaid and the then-forthcoming Lucid Air Sapphire, the Rimac Nevera was putting out some astonishing figures, and to some, an all-electric near future looked feasible. The initial plan involved batteries from Northvolt, an evolution of familiar styling, and a new architecture. It didn’t take long for spy shots to start appearing on the internet. In 2023, mildly disguised versions of the electric 718 Boxster were spotted by automotive paparazzi, which lined up with a targeted launch for 2025. Yeah, that launch didn’t end up happening on schedule.

Perhaps the first real sign of trouble came in 2024, when an Automotive News report claimed that the switch to electric power in a sports car wasn’t going smoothly for Porsche, and it was going even less smoothly for battery pack supplier Valmet Automotive.

The automaker is finding it difficult to match the driving characteristics in the sport cars with the move to a battery powertrain from a mid-engine combustion one.

The challenges that this presents have led to Porsche to seek frequent changes from battery supplier Valmet Automotive, which has built a factory in the German state of Baden-Württemberg specifically for the order. Valmet is seeking compensation for the extra work that Porsche does not want to pay or only wants to pay partially, according to the report.

While Valmet Automotive was slated to build the battery packs, the cells themselves were expected to come from Swedish supplier Northvolt. In March of 2025, Northvolt filed for bankruptcy in Sweden. The supposed key player behind the 718 EV’s battery cells was having to restructure, and while overall delays can’t concretely be pinned on that alone, it likely didn’t help.

In September, Porsche seemed like it was altering plans. During an investor call, former Porsche CEO Oliver Blume announced that top versions of the next-generation 718 would feature internal combustion. Considering the model was initially designed to be all-electric, this sort of switch-up would require some substantial re-engineering. As Autocar reported in December:

The PPE Sport platform uses a stressed, load-bearing battery pack and a flat floor, so removing the battery would significantly weaken the entire bodyshell.

As a result, the proposal from Porsche engineers centres on developing a new structural floor section that bolts into the platform’s existing hard points, effectively adding the rigidity back in. A redesigned rear bulkhead and subframe will then support the engine and transmission, Autocar has been told.

Major packaging constraints remain, not least because the electric structure provides no central tunnel, nor provision for a fuel tank, fuel lines or exhaust system. Engineers suggest these measures require the development of a completely new rear section because the architecture was never designed for a petrol engine.

If we take a step back and look at basically every prior generation of Boxster and Cayman, the fuel tank has historically resided up against the front bulkhead, fuel lines ran along a fairly flat floor, shifter cables snaked through the rear firewall, and coolant lines often got tucked up alongside the outer sill. That’s already a lot to package, and that’s before we even start to think about a capable heat exchanger stack or the internal combustion powertrain itself. Considering the MMB platform underneath the outgoing 718 is technically shared with the current 911, and that Porsche has previously spun mid-engined and rear-engined cars from similar cloth, reworking the PPE Sport platform for internal combustion doesn’t seem like the easiest path forward.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that electric versions of the next 718 Cayman and Boxster make it to production. Porsche is deep in the running prototype phase, and cancelling a project this late is often an expensive proposition. Even if this rumoured shelving doesn’t happen, the general demand for electric sports cars might not be strong enough for success.

Unless engineered completely from the ground up with a huge focus on weight savings, electric sports cars often don’t have all the same advantages over contemporary sedans that combustion-powered sports cars do. While the energy density of battery cells has improved, even assuming 200 watt-hours-per-kilogram, a decent-sized battery pack is going to be fairly heavy compared to an internal combustion powertrain. Add in the low center of gravity that most modern skateboard platforms feature, and it shouldn’t be surprising that top-flight electric sedans can now go toe-to-toe with serious machinery. The Xiaomi SU7 Ultra beat the Rimac Nevera around the Nürburgring, and the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT is only a bit over two seconds behind the Croatian electric hypercar.

At the same time, sports car culture is currently celebrating everything mechanical. From naturally aspirated engines to manual transmissions, the EV democratization of straight-line speed has shifted focus towards engagement. While Taycan electric sedan sales in America were down 12.7 percent last year, sales of the 718 were up 12.3 percent in its final year of production, outselling the Taycan by 54.5 percent. For the next model cycle or so, it seems that a combustion-powered mid-engined sports car is what the people want, rather than something electric. There’s also the possibility that the technology underpinning the electric 718 might be outdated by the time it’s expected to launch. The EV sports car world was thin in 2025, now models like the MG Cyberster and JMEV SC01 are either on sale in Europe or headed there.

If the electric Porsche 718 ends up becoming lost media like the Hyundai Portico, it would be both a shame and one of the greatest automotive stories of all time. Even if an electric sports car might not be the same as a combustion-powered one, it’s still something I’d like to experience. For now, we’ll just have to wait for Porsche to make a decision.

Top graphic images: Porsche; DepositPhotos.com

The post After Spending Seven Years Developing The Electric Boxster And Cayman, Porsche May Just Axe Them: Report appeared first on The Autopian.