I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't be bothered doing that.

The future wasn't supposed to be like this.

Warren Ellis made the point once that the future was never meant to be this boring - godammit, by now we were meant to have flying cars and robot servants.

Some ways that we have been lied to by popular culture re: the future:

Space 1999 - I look up and still see the moon, Christ damn it!

1984 - All of the people I spend 90% of my time with in any given week were not born in 1984. Bollocks to the future, it's so far in the past to most of my kids that it is an abstraction.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Shut the fuck up. Right now.

But you know, the future is pretty interesting.

When was the last time you yelled at your computer for not being quick enough in the downloading of Christina Aguilera meat porn? Well, think about this; We can talk to people we've never fucking met, across the other. Side. Of. The. Planet. as easily as pressing a button.

Jesus fuck, how cool is that?

I teach my kids how to do research projects - I can't even remember how, as a high school student myself, I found anything out with out the internet....

Naomi Klein was right onto it when she pointed out that Amazon, one of the largest and most well known internet companies, exists not really as a thing, but as a mass hallucination.

Think about that. A large capitalist empire, making money hand over fist, that only exists because people keep saying it does.

If you asked a person from the sixties what the dawn of the twenty first century would be like, they'd guess space stations and such. Now, sure, things have happened, but listen;

Cloning would be guessed, but who would have guessed that the big controversy would come from the supposed cloners being a strange religious cult hanging on the words of a French racecar driver turned prophet? Or that the controversy would go away when we got something more interesting to talk about than the cloning of a human being?

America ruling the world would have been predicted, but who would have guessed that the cold war would be ended by stagnation and bankruptcy - capitalism ruling the world because the communist countries simply ran out of money financing the arms race.

We left a cosmonaut floating in space because we couldn't afford to get him back.

We can't have gay priests or teachers, because they might teach immorality to children who see a thousand deaths on television before they hit their teens, who buy clothes designed to turn them into sexual objects before they have reached reproductive capability, who buy magazines and see billboards and watch music videos which tell them to look pretty and dress skanky to find fulfillment.

One world government might have been guessed, but who would have thought that it was an unofficial one of corporations creating a branded monoculture that feeds of the apathy and shallowness of a public suffering from a defanged education system and lack of attention span?

We have the totalitarian ruler, the distopian despoilation of the environment, all of that. But the apathy and inertia that led to it just makes it so... boring.

No one cares.

We're living in the future, and no one has noticed.

-- Apathy Jack

07/05/2003