OK, now my mental timeline is really tangled.
First, I own a copy of this book Yesterday's Houses of Tomorrow : H. Ward Jandl : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
which was apparently published over 20 years ago. I recommend it.
Second, derioderio quotes James Lileks (“Nothing says yesterday like yesterday’s vision of tomorrow”), who I used to read when he was a columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the late 80s.
It can get confusing to get old.
I remember a similarly shaped house in West Vancouver that seemed to delight kids more than adults. It was torn down to make way for a highway expansion.
A commenter said he lives in same type of house in the USA:
Ironically… Monsanto is part of building that dystopia as we speak.
Well, see that’s kind of my point… assuming that the dystopia is inevitable, even if companies like Monsanto have products which could bring it about. It doesn’t have to be so, which is why positive visions matter. 
Our present (and its trajectories) are so fucked, it’s become really hard to imagine a better (or even any) future. People generally aren’t talking about the future the way they used to (i.e. in the 20th century, people talked about the 21st in ways they simply aren’t now about the 22nd). There’s a cultural implication that there won’t be a 22nd century (and good reason to think so). After a century of improving conditions in the West (increases in life expectancy, standard of living, leisure time, economic expansion, technological marvels) and expectations - nay, explicit promises - that all trends would continue into the future, instead we’ve gotten the opposite. On top of which we have multiple global ecological apocalypses that are not only going unaddressed, but conservatives doing the bidding of corporations are actively trying to make them worse, so the comforting fantasy that they’ll be solved is pretty radical (and unrealistic). We have end-stage capitalism, tech that’s being enshitified, our medical marvels (e.g. covid vaccine) are for conditions that didn’t exist a decade ago and which don’t entirely solve the problem… on top of which, that traditional signifier of the future, the crewed space program, has been moribund for the last 50 years.
On top of that, we’re acknowledging the limits of our technologies and economic systems, the negative consequences of our past inventions (both technological and social), our failure to address past problems, and increased knowledge on subjects has revealed previous unknown complexity. A lot of tasks aren’t as easy as we imagined in the 20th century (e.g. Mars colonies are currently impossible, Elno’s fantasies aside).
I’ve thought it would be interesting to compare the sci-fi coming out of developing nations where quality of life has been increasing to that of the US, to see if it’s generally more optimistic, but the US has created global ecological problems being felt first in the global South, so it’s probably not so different…
Though the dark heart of colonialism always existed in Star Trek, with its “wagon train to the stars” premise and a bunch of “explorers” flying around in what are clearly military craft, imposing their values on the universe… Every subsequent Trek show has had to contend with that in different ways.
The more I think about it, the more I realize the Monsanto-style futurists are still out there doing their thing.
There are still people and organizations who would like to sell us on a utopian vision of futuristic living just like Monsanto did back in the 60s, such as the royals pushing vanity projects in Dubai or those tech billionaires who want to build their fancy new community in Solano county. Most of us are just less likely to uncritically accept the visions they’re selling these days because we’ve had a few peeks behind the curtain over the last half century or so.
That doesn’t mean that ALL positive visions of the future are inherently capitalist lies. There are plenty of the wealthy pushing a dystopian vision as inevitable, too… 
Sure, I’m just saying there are modern-day counterparts to Monsanto’s capitalist vision of futuristic living.
You should see it through the eyes of Mickey Mouse and his friends.
Oh yeah that’s fair. I can see “the future is probably terrible based on extrapolating x…” as being as harmful as “the past was always a golden wonderful place…” if it’s the only narrative out there. I’m good with a healthy balance of both visions of the future existing.
Oh man, same. If you follow Zillow Gone Wild you will occasionally see the vintage pre-fab homes the ruined house in Fallout games are based on. I adore them, but I would never want to live in one. I built some pretty wild stuff in Fallout 4, myself.
Star Trek was always kinda dark because it assumed that in between the 1960s and the utopian future earth would go through catastrophic Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, then nuclear combat in WWIII, as well as some other terrible times before humanity finally learned to chill out.
Yes, I know about Star Trek, thanks… It’s STILL a utopian future, as that’s what Roddenberry intended to show - a post-racial, post-Cold War, harmonious future.
Very few Utopias have no warts, hidden or otherwise. Given the choice, however, between the Star Trek future and something like the Terminator future, I know which one I prefer.
Some of my favorite Star Trek episodes were the ones that let just enough of the warts show through to emphasize that the struggle for justice and egalitarianism isn’t something that ever really ends. Hope balanced with vigilance.
So you liked DS9 the best?
TNG was always my fave, but part of that is probably just because DS9 aired during a period in my life when I wasn’t able to watch TV regularly and its writing format leaned into longer multi-season story arcs over one-off episodes.
That’s the norm for most contemporary TV shows nowadays (especially when they’re written with streaming in mind) but at the time it just meant it was harder for me to keep up with what was going on.
If any Trek series is worth a rewatch, it’s that one. I mean, what other Trek series quotes Marx, for one…
And arguable, it has some of the best written episodes of any Trek series (Past Tense, In the Pale Moonlight, Far Beyond the Stars, Duet, etc)…
Lots of great moments to be sure. I still think they kind of ruined Dr. Bashir’s character by belatedly shoehorning in a new origin story to make him a genetically engineered superman though. It was so poorly executed that it retroactively ruined the writing in a lot of the earlier episodes. I’m supposed to believe he took a whole mind-trip into his own subconscious and insecurities on his 30th birthday and somehow his deepest, darkest secret never even came up?
