Remember when Y2K marked the end of the world, because computers couldn’t handle 12:01 January 1, 2000? And very serious people predicted very serious trouble as computers froze or dumped their data, or refused to access it, or otherwise just ended the world as we knew it?
Good times.
I visited the Disneyland “House of the Future” (or was it the “Home “?) in 1968 (or ‘67. Nobody in the family is still around to correct me, and I’m notoriously poor on such things). It was pretty much the 1954 view of the future of daily life in America. I don’t remember much about it, but I think they finally tore it down, because the future doesn’t look anything like that anymore.
Remember when the real “house of the future “ was going to be a “smart house,” with lights that went on when you entered a room, and voice commands to operate your appliances? Bill Gates reportedly built one; but he tore it down after the divorce, I understand. I don’t know anyone with a “smart home” as we were told we’d have. I have smart plugs on some lamps, smart switches in some rooms, but the availability is limited by wiring (for the switches), and what works with which controlling programs (you don’t want a different app for every light). I don’t know anybody who talks to Alexa the way they do in movies/TV shows. And mostly that kind of thing just dates the movies and TV shows. Or makes the character look sad and lonely, because Alexa is all they have to talk to.
And seriously, I was promised flying cars by…well, a long time ago, now.
I remember the first time I saw a home PC, and I wondered what the hell you did with one at home. Then I found you could use it as a fancy typewriter, something that proved handy in seminary. But without the internet, that’s pretty much what it would still be. (In fact, pretty much what it is again, for me. Now that I’m not teaching online, I hardly use my desktop at all.)
The one constant of the universe, I remember some science professor telling us, is change. That includes the future; and the past. Both are just stories we tell each other; one about what happened, one about what’s going to happen. Trump tells us the country is going to hell without him, and that it magically improved as of noon on Inauguration Day, 2025. (He also claims to have settled six wars, mostly because he was POTUS when ceasefires were agreed to. But he settled them without ceasefires, he claims. Everything is a story we tell ourselves, and which story we settle on. I was taught the Civil War was a noble “Lost Cause.” A more accurate history (story) is now decried from the White House as “woke,” which isn’t allowed to mean “good.” Stories and definitions are all that matter sometimes. Or so it seems.). Trump now says the American future is so bright we gotta wear shades, and that the past six months have been a paradiasical prelude of what’s to come. But the reality of what he’s done preludes a paradise for billionaires and cronies. The future that’s coming looks more like a bulldozer, ripping up everything root and branch. Think Saruman laying waste to Fangorn for his factories.🏭
In the present, stories will only get you so far.
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