Toward the quotidian
Saturday 5 June 2010, 10:18 am
The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
…This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.
William Gibson discusses how the future tends toward the quotidien at his posthumanity is always just over the horizon and related to Sjors’ idea that we are always and forever waiting for a better future.
I find the notion that we slip so easily into the future somehow comforting. It’s less passive than the notion of a disruptive future. The future isn’t something that we sit around and wait for, it’s something we’re responsible for creating and actively choosing on a daily basis. You can complain about not having that jetpack you were promised, but chances are it’s already here.
Saturday 5 June 2010, 12:00 pm
I was quite fascinated with the future back in the days when i was still a student :) I actually wrote a bit of a longer paper on it: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgd467dm_27gn49dcfr as you can see in the bibliography there are some wonderful books written on this subject. A light weight reading is “The victorian internet” One of the nice things of the future is that it’s always available to put more stuff in :) to quote on of those books “Whenever the future failed, as it often did during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, appeal was made to yet another new future patching up the miscarriage of previous predictions”
Saturday 5 June 2010, 9:16 pm
Hey Sjors,
I’m trying to figure out what it is about the future that fascinates me, and I think it’s something to do with the collective idea of the future. I’m not entirely sure that it’s the same thing as the future.
Thanks for the link to the paper, by the way. The Victorian Internet has been on my reading list for a while now. Maybe it’s time to finally read it. I’m also very interested in tracking down Allan Nevins work, which you mentioned in your original post.