The future ain’t what it used to be

We (the nuclear family unit, although the little one is pretty oblivious to the finer points) are currently very deep into the process of translating our desire and intention to own a new house into a legal and financial reality. Once again, this is largely accomplished via paperwork, which is a frustrating exercise under normal circumstances. During (self-proclaimed, I know) Science Fiction Week, however, it seems downright barbaric.

Today I have made multiple trips back and forth from my cubicle to the lone fax machine in the office, in some cases picking up paper copies of forms signed by my wife so that I too can sign them and then re-fax them to our mortgage broker so that he can have permission on file to check our credit, our tax returns, and whatever else it takes to justify loaning us a really mind-boggling amount of money. Doing things on paper as opposed to electronically strikes me as quaintly old-fashioned; for some reason, fax machines occupy space in my mind devoted to the hopelessly archaic, fallback technology that should have been completely phased out by now but somehow hangs around because everyone needs it every once in a great while.

Sci-fi often gets a bad rap for its failures in predicting the future. Where’s my flying car, my two-way television-phone, and my robot butler, all things which were supposed to be commonplace by 1999? This of course misses the point, because sci-fi has really always been more about processing society’s fears than its aspirations, because sci-fi is a genre of stories involving conflict, as opposed to pure philosophical futurism. The point is, no one ever complains that we don’t yet have re-animated patchwork corpses as in Frankenstein, or hi-tech cryo-prisons like in Demolition Man. (Or maybe some people do – humankind’s capacity for grousing is limitless.) But the fact is that both the shiny chrome-plated utopias and grimy irradiated dystopias are probably equally unlikely, putting equal amounts of the fiction in sci-fi.

Still, it’s pretty amazing to observe how far we have come in making what once was futuristic look like cheesy relics, just in terms of the real everyday objects we take for granted.


My cellphone beats the hell out of Dick Tracy’s wrist-radio. The internet feels more indispensible than any worldwide computer system crippling humanity and/or its alien analogues. Direct deposit and a debit card let me roam around with as much autonomy as any of the credit-stick carrying characters in Asimov’s Foundation, and that prophetic society blew my MIND as a kid. Of course, just acknowledging that brings up two realizations:

1. When I was a kid my own personal economy was 100% cash-driven, more or less in five dollar increments. The idea of large sums of credits being transferred by computers from one account to another was pure fantasy from my perspective. But obviously it was already happening on no small scale in the 1980’s.
2. Today is one of those days where direct deposit is kind of biting me in the ass, as the mortgage company wants to see some paper paystubs which do not, as such, exist. Ah, progress.

I know this post is kind of meandering and pointless (arguably more pointless than usual, even) and I suppose I’ll blame that on being distracted by the mortgage shenanigans. I think it’s important to remind myself, when I feel burdened by doing low-tech things, that progress really is all around and happening constantly, and the next great leap forward could come at any time, and the world twenty-five years from now may bear as little resemblance to today as 2009 does to 1984, which means I’ll be able to lean back in my hover-Rascal and laugh about fads like looking at screens instead of using cortex-uplinks. Then I’ll yell at the damn human-bug hybrid kids to get off my opium-grass hybrid lawn.