The Imagined Future
January 4, 2010By Herve’ Jean-Baptiste
A few months back I decided to rename this blog to better describe the nature of my interests and writings as well as to reclaim the French-Canadian half of my heritage.
L’avenir (or more precisely, dans l’avenir) is French for “In the future”.
That’s really been the spirit of my writing. That which speaks to what the future might look like, including the ideas and innovations which define it.
With that in mind I would like to share one of my favorite quotes which is also featured on the home page of my blog.
“Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it.
Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list—interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)—have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.”
-Details Magazine, May 2008, on The Long Now foundation
Welcome to the future.
