Noah may be overthinking "We'll do the Flintstones but in the future, with robots instead of dinosaurs."

I wrote this about a year ago but it somehow disappeared into the draft folder shortly after Noah Smith wrote this post. Fortunately, though, critiques of techno-optimism have remained as relevant as ever (and dovetails nicely with last Friday's post).

This is why The Jetsons focused on robots doing housework; they knew that this would be one of the technological innovations that would have the most immediate and unambiguously positive impact on Americans’ quality of life — especially women, who at that time were even more disproportionately burdened with housework than they are now. Housework is a job we want the robots to take.

 

In the fifties and sixties, ABC was a perennial third out of three, so it was open to ideas like primetime cartoons. This paid off with the Flintstones, a big hit by the network's standards, so an internal rip-off was inevitable. 

Here's what we said about it in a previous post:

When people talk about the Jetsons having one season, they are talking about its original prime time run. ABC in the 50s and 60s was more or less in the same position as Fox in the '90s, a perennial last place and a bit of a joke. This was partially due to the network's origin. It was carved off from NBC as the result of an antitrust action from the government against NBC. Like Fox, ABC tried a lot of out of the box programming including prime time animation. They had a moderate hit with The Flintstones which ran for a number of years. The Jetsons was an attempt to cash in on what they hoped would be a trend. (Jonny Quest also had its initial run in prime time on the network.) By the late Sixties, no one in the target audience had any idea that any of these shows had ever been anything but Saturday morning cartoons.

In addition to being inspired by The Flintstones which was itself a rip-off of The Honeymooners, The Jetsons lifted most of their premise and many of their gags from the still well remembered at the time movie series Blondie, even going so far as to cast the same lead actress.

Lifting characters and premises from other people's intellectual property was a bit of a Hanna-Barbera specialty. While it was common practice for the all cartoon studios to toss in celebrity caricatures and other references/homages, (see Andrew Gelman's class Foghorn Leghorn), HB took things to an extreme, seldom producing anything that wasn't at least partially lifted from familiar pop culture. For example, Scooby-Doo was a mashup of Dobie Gillis (particularly Bob Denver's character Maynard G, Krebs) and the fake haunted house genre. (Shaggy is also class Foghorn Leghorn).

If you're looking for where a Hanna-Barbera concept came from, you should always start (and probably stop) with the familiar pop culture of the time. In addition to the Flintstones, that included wise-cracking housekeepers. Hazel, which had debuted the year before, was the fourth highest rated show in the country. The studio's decision to include a robot maid is not really a head-scratcher.

 I know this all seems rather trivial given the news recently, particularly since Noah Smith is a sharp guy, and we're going to be picking on him quite a bit over more substantial issues in the coming weeks, but the techno-optimist crowd, led by people like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk, has amassed considerable economic and political power and exerts a wildly disproportionate influence on the discourse, and for those reasons alone, it is essential that we understand this movement and where it's coming from. 

When you take a deep dive into this, you soon arrive at the frightening realization that our supposedly serious discussions of the future are mainly based on adolescent post-war science fiction. (I should probably try to work the vanity aerospace industry in here somewhere.) Arguments about the coming wave of technology based on Saturday morning memories of a 65-year-old cartoon show are absolutely on-brand.