The Spectacle of the Nearish Future

I have a headache.

I grew up reading science-fiction and fantasy, systematically hovering up every drop of the stuff I could find for twenty-five odd years, and trying to write my own. If I were pushed, my preference is to a certain kind of mythic fantasy--though the exact wheres and wherefores of that are outside the scope of this post--but I recognize that the boundary between fantasy and sci-fi is less of a Berlin Wall and more of a misty field where will o' the wisp lead you from one to the other (with the reverse trip led, naturally enough, by sensor ghosts) and once you start playing with the territory its hard to stay too firmly rooted in one or the other.

Science-fiction grows with the efforts of every generation to peel back the boundary of the future just one more step, one day further than we can yet see, and return to the world with a hint of what was glimpsed there. Exploring the old country is easy enough. Those giants of yesteryear--Norton, McCaffrey, Cherryh, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein (that cantankerous old bastard's ghost is lurking around here somewhere, mark my words)--they learned the trick and made the journey time and again, but that temporal wavefront is starting to ggetting persnickety about people poking about where they don't belong, and I'm convinced it's starting to fight back. Consider.

The 1989 edition of the Shadowrun cyberpunk role-playing game suggested players in 2074 could spring for outlandish quantities of hard drive space--as much as 10 gigs of the stuff! By the fourth edition, the writers gave up and assumed players had all the hard drive space they'd ever need.

William Gibson's early work--Neuromancer, Idoru, Mona Lisa Overdrive--was set in a vaguely defined future that was still a few decades off, and, while it's aged better than some works, the future has caught up to it fast enough that it's tinged by a kind of anachronistic futurism as of a Victorian imagining World War I without knowing about airplanes. His recent work tries to skirt the problem with a vision of the future set just a few minutes from tomorrow. It's a good schtick and he does a fine job of conjuring up a sense of future shock, but still that damn wavefront won't be appeased.

I'm poking about, getting the lay of the land, and eying my own trip across the boundary and what I might find there. The trick is that you can't stop right at the edge. Anybody can walk up to the edge and see what's already there; you have to go just far enough to see something new, but the problem is all the absolutely insane things you can already see from the edge.

Note: I refrain from listing every insane feature of the 2016 Election. My mind has spent most of the last year wallowing in that particular latrine.

• Opponents of fiat money have created cryptocurrencies as a safe(?) and secure method of storing economic value. Naturally, their primary uses at this time are money laundering, drug running, and extortion. This is already passé.
• The social construction of gender is being systematically deconstructed, the most vocal objecters to the process either don't understand what gender is or believe in a literalist interpretation of the St. James Bible, and 70% of the debate on the subject is conducted through screenshots of 140-character messages.
• A team in Japan just replaced 30 insurance adjusters with an AI. Japan is going to quickly transition from an overcrowded archipelago in a mauseoleum where a skeleton population quietly tend their shrines in the company of friendly caretaker bots.
• With the blinding (both literally and figuratively) realization that Truth is an artificial construct, the polity of the United States has become the world's first Postmodern nation-state. (If the rest of the world is listening, we could get some real mileage out of a Deconstructionist nation-state.)
• There has been a multi-year controversy over whether Santa Clause is white or not. Adults have taken time out of their lives to argue the point.
• And, to top it all off, the story that my mind just refuses to take lying down, for four years running, a famous internet cat has thrown parties and given interviews at a major technology conference.

If this is the world as it actually is, I'm having trouble imagining how to extrapolate and extend these patterns without resorting to ruinously slapstick parody. I don't know that satire, parody's staid brother with the full windsor, is even capable of registering against a baseline of insanity.

But fine, if that's the world of today then so be it. I'm going to finish this drink and then we'll go see what's on the other side of tomorrow.

I'll see you when I get back.