I confess that, when I called this blog "FutureWorld," I did not think about it very much. I had been participating in a focus group on media and technology for a few months, and was having a lot of fun writing up the little odds and ends of thought roaming around inside my head. When I decided to create a proper blog, I came up with the title almost immediately. It's tongue in cheek, I assure you. I meant something like this:
Here we are, in this immensely rich world, surrounded by miraculous technology. This is, in so many respects, exactly the world we were promised by novels and movies.
How come it's not Utopia?
Partner and I were comparing notes not long ago about our own childhoods, and we found that we had both looked forward in awe to the Year Two Thousand, and had calculated how old we would be when the Millennium hit. I vividly remember it, for some reason: I was on the school bus, and I suddenly realized that I would be forty-two years old on January 1, 2000.
It seemed unimaginable to me.
It still seems unimaginable to me now.
I still think of The Future as a gleam on the horizon. When I look at the situation with cold logic, however, I realize that I am forever stumbling over the cliff's edge from present to future, every second. The Future isn't a distant prospect: it's now. And now. And now.
And yet, for some reason, although we've come so far, created so many valuable and precious things, learned so much about the world, the world is not perfect yet.
I don’t want to be a futurologist, believe me. I don’t think there’s any percentage in it. I was just looking at a BBC interview with the author William Gibson, who has written many hip little novels about people bopping around in cyberspace and having adventures with all kinds of bizarre technology. I respect him, I suppose – he’s a better writer than I am – but I’m not crazy about his “insights.”
For example: in his latest novel, he hypothesizes little flying information-gathering drones. He thinks these might become commonplace: "They are actually going to change the landscapes of cities," he said. "People in tall buildings, particularly in cities like New York or Chicago, have been living lives of utter privacy quite unconcerned that anyone might be looking in the window. That's just not going to be the case anymore."
So close the curtains already.
Here is another apercu, about the value of information: "One of the economic units of this society is being 'in the know' or being able to convince people that you are 'in the know'," said Mr Gibson.
Gibson is showing us a mysterious future world in which knowledge is actually valuable.
Golly!
One more: The rapid pace of change of the present day could also spell curtains for the central idea of [Gibson's] three cyberpunk books: the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace. "Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world," he said. "I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us."
This makes me wonder idly about the “consensual hallucinations” of past eras: Jane Austen’s era, in which people somehow believed that the London Season was extremely important; medieval France, in which people somehow believed that building a cathedral would make God’s mother happy; the Classic Maya era, in which people somehow believed that the gods positively hungered for blood extracted from your tongue with a stingray spine.
Every era feels this way. Every era looks pityingly at its forebears, who simply didn't realize the value of the London season, or cyberspace, or stingray spines.
Every era feels that it is the pinnacle of civilization to date.
That's because every era actually is the pinnacle of civilization to date.
People don't change. Stuff changes, cultural dreck changes, but people don't change. I know I don’t. I’m still five years old inside, and when I look in the mirror and see a shambling wreck, I think: What happened?
We’re still a bunch of children squatting around a campfire.
And the world, laboring under its burden of culture and history, gets slower and shabbier and fustier around us.
"The twentieth century," a character in "Angels in America" says sadly. "Oh, dear. The world has gotten so terribly, terribly old."
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