Review of 2040

This is a bright, cheerful film about a sustainable future, but with an odd hole at the centre. It's nice to see a positive vision of 20 years hence, especially when most visions of the future, and certainly the compelling and intelligent ones, seem to be dystopian rather than utopian. Really, though, this is a look a few specific technologies - local energy microgrids, regenerative pastoral agriculture, self-driving cars as a service, and marine permaculture - and how they might contribute to that more sustainable future. It's sometimes thoughtful and reflective...for example, it's aware of the irony of making a film about sustainability by flying the narrator around the world.

But it doesn't do much reflection on social or economic structures, even though it does feature Kate Raworth and her donut economics; it mainly imagines a world substantially like that of our own day, but with the super new technologies in place - a real narrative of technological fix, in which the technologies seem to fix the donut. So the local energy microgrids are based on decentralised energy trading between local producers and consumers - it's easy to imagine distributed ledger geeks drooling over this opportunity, but there's no account of who is going to be operating and profiting from the marketplaces.

It's the same with the marine permaculture. This does look like an exciting technology, but who is going to be operating these ocean farms, and under what kinds of ownership and rights? Presumably right now someone is drawing up frameworks for the commodification of the oceanic commons, but you wouldn't know it - or even think about it - from this film.

And self-driving cars - no recognition that the driving force (oops!) behind the efforts to develop these are Google and its Big Tech competitors, or that existing ride-sharing businesses (especially Uber) work so hard to obtain and then expolit market dominance.

So two cheers - or one and a half cheers - for the film. It is great to find some reasons to be cheerful, but it would be more great of have a positive vision that included some changes to social and economic structures.

Watched via informal distribution and laptop connected to the TV via VGA cable.