Why modern life is rubbish and the future was going to be better.

[hirez]

The military drives our notion of 'the future' in much the same way that pr0n drives progress in media distribution and consumption.

Things done for profit have to be boring.

(There's another piece about system administration still being stuck in the 18th century and people being bizarrely proud of that. Do I want to be a lamp-lighter? I think

Comments

[jarkman]

So, if we need a more exciting future, what we need are more exciting Soviets. Plainly.

[reddragdiva]

You don't get decent punk rock without the threat of nuclear death at any second either.

The bizarre pride is having wanted to be a wizard as a kid, growing up to be one and discovering they don't get no respect. Pride in nevertheless being able to turn people to a newt is all that remains. And, of course, the dumptrucks full of cash.

[hirez]

Well, see, if I really was any good at this computer malarkey, I'd bosh out some crapplication for ios/android and be rich as creosote by Christmas.

[reddragdiva]

We all say that. It's not true for the same reason none of us cashed in on a dot-com startup and have to MAKE MONEY SLOW like our forefathers before us.

[reddragdiva]

I'm not sure you're right, because porn works as a superstimulus and war doesn't. I think.

[hirez]

The example we were kicking around yesterday is Concorde. At some point in the late sixties/early seventies, The Future was going to be supersonic travel, podular televisions and driving around in Bertone-designed cars like Ed Straker.

Legend has it that Concorde was designed with hardpoints such that it could beetle off eastwards and deliver some instant sunshine before you could say 'Glorious five-year plan'

Similarly, if you look back a bit further, it was all space-age and a lunar Hilton. Which was mostly driven by plans for orbital weapons platforms and less-rubbish spy satellites.

These are superstimuli for a subset of people (almost an inverse-square Rule 34 - anything can be filthy when looked at with the right mind) and that'll be the tail end of the High Frontier mob that rattle around Charlie's weblog every two months. That's why they go non-linear when told it'll never happen - they're surfing the Id-vortex.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, that particular annoying hard-SF delusionism is now the province of transhumanists, and particularly the ones who refuse to believe actual physicists and chemists pointing out to them that Drexlerian nanobots defy physics, chemistry and thermodynamics. Why yes, I have recently.