Toward the quotidian

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 Book Expo American Luncheon Talk.

This is similar to Jamais Cascio's observation that 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.