collected writings

THE FUture Is Now

When I was a little kid, I thought that I had a pretty decent grasp of what technological and social advances I could look forward to in the future.

After all, I had seen enough science fiction to know that in the future everyone would have a flying car, interstellar travel would be commonplace, and while people would still eat and drink fairly traditionally, food and drink would be served out of flashy translucent plastic cups and plates.

Culturally, we would evolve into a peaceful, super-intelligent race that frequently communicates with beings from other planets (which all, amazingly enough, look fairly human.)

Here, on a side note, I paraphrase Carl Sagan, who use to lament that while the praying mantis, the manatee, and the human, dissimilar as they all are, come from the same planet, most author's ideas of an extra terrestrial was a human with a wrinkled brow or pointy ears.

Naturally, humans become the intergalactic peacekeepers, succeeding in a much less controversial role than what the United States currently plays in Earthly politics.

I had the future all figured out. And it was a very long way off. I mean, it was The Future. It didn't really exist, at least not in a history textbook framework, on a timeline. The Future was more like an idea, it was something that we all were looking forward to experiencing, but no one was really sure it would ever come.

As I grew older and matured, I learned about different and darker visions of the future, but regardless of whether the future was perceived as a happy, Jetsons era or as its antithesis in Orwell's 1984 , it was a long way off and existed in the same way that the Great Pyramids of Giza exist: I have seen pictures and read about them, but the very idea is often so foreign that I would have to see them in person to believe they actually exist.

Though I speak of The Future as a nonspecific idea rather than an exact date, any concept of the future could best be summed up by 2001, not only the film and the novel before it, but the date in general. The year 2001 was The Future. It is The Future.

You know how they always say that tomorrow is the first day in the rest of your life? Well, when talking about the future, that was not always true. Sure, in 1984, 1994 was technically the future, but it did not feel like it to the same extent that 2001 was though of as the future. 2001 was the beginning of the future. Anything before it might have been the future, but it sure wasn't The Future.

As a child, it was difficult to imagine flying cars in 1996, but after 2001, anything was possible.

And now, here we are. The year 2001. No flying cars but a heck of a lot of translucent plastic (in eight designer colors.) Where do we go from here? After all, this is The Future.

What comes after the future?

Culturally, I think that we are not particularly prepared for what comes next. All our energy was spent on predicting what would happen in the future, and how we could get to that point, but little thought was put into what to do once we got there.

Knowing my target audience, a close analogy would be the high school student who puts all his or her attention and efforts into getting accepted to the right college, but once there loses direction because they simply did not plan anything out after that point. Their life was focused around one single long-term goal, and once that was achieved, there was nowhere else to go.

I think that a very similar thing will happen to our civilization as a whole, and we can expect to start seeing this state crop up various places fairly soon.

We spent so much time trying to get to The Future, trying to make sure that there was a 2001, and not nearly enough time figuring out what will happen once we get there. I expect that this will produce a certain amount of disillusionment and lack of focus in society, just as our proverbial college student mentioned above felt.

This could easily be viewed as both very serious and negative consequences, but we should be reminded that the majority of great artistic movements were born out of similar feelings of displacement and through attempts to sort through the confusion of preexisting ideas.

I do expect that a new artistic movement will grow out of these ideas, perhaps something that will come to replace everything that is grouped under the outdated umbrella term of post-modernism. Call it post-futurism, if you will.

Once you have built the flying car, and every family owns one, where do you go from there? Do we turn to technology to tell us what to expect, or do we hope for something else, like the further biological evolution of our species, à la 2001: A Space Odyssey ?