Where’s my god-damned hover-board?

“They lied to us,” a t-shirt I’ve never gotten around to buying once pronounced. “This was supposed to be the future. Where is my jetpack? Where is my robotic companion? Where is my dinner in pill form? Where is hydrogen fuelled automobile? Where is my nuclear powered levitating house? Where is my cure for this disease?”

It’s a good question.

(Although personally I’d drop the last part, which takes it from silly to having some kind of point. On a t-shirt.)

I must confess to a slight affection for the retro-future. Once upon a time we charmingly dreamed of a world that would be dominated by perfect gleaming spires of architecture, giant saucers and globes atop spindly spikes where everyone lived in a perfectly dimensioned, equally sized apartments serviced by robotic staff. Enough space. Not too much. Our needs met, but necessarily over-indulged.

Our food came as pills ingested direct into our blood streams, there was smell-o-vision to keep our senses alert. Disease was almost eradicated. Old was but an inconvenience. We travelled around in steam powered, sleekly glazed monorail systems which went up and down, cheekily defying gravity, as much as across.
Families rocketed off to the charms of Venus for their summer holidays, Father with a ray gun holstered onto the side of his jump suit to keep any possible off-worlders in order.

We were no longer British or French or Iraqi or German, but Earthlings.

There was a naive elegance to tomorrow.

But now we’re here.

The majority of those dreamers saw the early twenty-first century as the destination time. A new world for the new millennium.

But, where those in the past looking to yesterday saw a utopia of mutual convenience and support we have, instead, developed concepts so far away from them for it to be inconceivable. There are giant flat screen high definition television screens that overwhelm the senses. Telephones that bounce a reception off satellites and can carry billions of items of digitalised data enabling us to app pretty much anything. A universal translator not to help us explore brave new worlds, but to help us order dinner in Ethiopia. The very concept of being able to convert audio-visual into binary and then reforming it perfectly represented on a device that will soon be small enough to slot under our finger nails.

Medical devices and drugs that, in certain countries such as this one, save the lives of millions. We might not be able to cure everything just yet, but think for a moment about what we can do. Our DNA has been mapped; stem cell research; cloning; heart transplants (swapping one person’s heart for another – how incredible is that?); inoculations – it’s almost bonkers to think that we protect ourselves by injecting ourselves with lethal diseases.

Second life representation of alternative existences where we can pretend to be that which we most desire. The sum total of human knowledge available to everyone, provided you know what question to ask it. The fact that I can put a London street name into google and not only pull up a map, but drop down into a photographed view of it, inch by inch, zooming in onto the signs to see whether there’s any non-resident permit parking available.

That someone, somewhere for a respectable company is developing a piece of software that gets around Chinese gambling laws preventing the placing of bets on racing involving live animals and running virtual horse/dog/monkey races played out in real time with form guides and “real”-life variables thrown in.*

These are all wonderfully strange and amazing things, but is it not a sad indictment of ourselves that the utopian element that was hoped for has still yet to materialise? Is it our fault that the fastest advances in with the internet (truly the most mind boggling innovation of them all) tend to be made by those seeking to identify our interests in order to sell advertising opportunities and the porn industry? The jet-pack generation thought about societies, increasingly we appear to only think about society in terms of what we’re expected to do, what it will give to us.

This may sound slightly hypocritical coming from someone who was recently compared to a drunken version of the tiger who came to tea (beware, I will materialise at your flat/house/dwelling drink all your wine, eat all your food and be disparaging about all your records before disappearing in the morning leaving nothing but empty cupboards, a mess on the floor and a pounding head) but I’m sure I have a point. Somewhere. (In a blog.)

The future can still be unwritten. It is, surprisingly, easy to postpone. We can still change things for the better. Let’s make next week, if not tomorrow, beautiful for everyone.

So, everyone, pull on your spangly jumpsuit, affix your x-ray goggles to the rim of your slightly imperialistic Germanic helmet, pick your portable matter makers and I’ll see you on the launch pads.





*: This may be woefully inaccurate. I was not entirely sober when it was being explained to me.





Damn it, I’ve also just discovered (whilst doing some half-baked looking around for links to improve my indexing) that someone’s written a book called Where’s My Jet-Pack? I’m sure Daniel H Wilson’s book is far superior to my above mumble (I’ve a sore throat and feel a bit shit and am over-tired and have too much other writing to do to give this my full attention this week and my head’s full of other things that I shouldn’t write about and any other excuse I can conceivably come up in the next ten seconds) and should you wish to purchase a copy please follow the link to Amazon. Hopefully that’ll appease the lawyers else I’ll have see you in the debtors’ prison instead…