Now Wait for Last Year
Sean Moore
Live in the future, and build what’s missing.
Does this feel like the future?
Perhaps I should clarify. Allow me to explain. We are living in the future. Not our future of course – don’t be silly. In fact, we aren’t even living in our present, stuck in an imperceptible time lag of our sensation and perception that allows us to experience reality.
Thanks for nothing, Mother Nature.
But we are living in the future – the future of our past selves. This time, right now, is the future we daydreamed about, we hoped for, we anticipated. And it’s the future we built.
So let me ask again: does this feel like the future?
I remember when I first got an iPod touch, all the way back in 2007. My computing experience before that had been almost exclusively tied to a desk. And there I was, walking around during winter break, with a fucking handheld computer, that could do anything that a teenaged boy could ever want to do.
Holy shit! I can write a note in Marker Felt!
Look, look, look! My email! In my hand!
But what was most amazing, and what still is most amazing, five years later and even with a million apps a tap away, was having the entire Internet at my fingertips.
That was the future. That is the future.
Does this feel like the future?
Because for all their holy-fucking-shit-ness, that touchscreen handheld communicator, computer and personal assistant is old hat to us present-day time travelers. And what’s come up in the place? What is everyone clamoring for? It’s the social experience, and you, me, and everybody can live in the future we’re building, the future we’re careening toward, in reverse.
The great promise of the social future! Share every aspect of your life, with your closest thousand friends! Display what inspires you, with your closest thousand friends! Instantly communicate your innermost thoughts, with your closest thousand friends!
What temptation, what allure – the social revolution is full of promise. Recreating and archiving every aspect of your digital self. Collect every thought, every inspiration so you never lose it. Instantaneous communication across the world with millions of people. The future is already here, and all we have to do is live in it.
And we do live in it. And it leaves much to be desired.
Does a phone book feel like the future? What about a high school yearbook?
Or a scrapbook? Or more accurately, a city dump?
What about a sleazy advertiser with a megaphone? Or a thousand solicitors on the corner, pestering you with their flyers?
Facebook. Pinterest. Twitter. This is what the darlings of the social revolution have to offer.
Does this feel like the future?
Because it looks like the past. Such a shame; the future didn’t have to end this way.