The Future Starts Here - John Higgs

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Introduction: The comedy of eras

At some point in the 1980s we gave up on the future. Before then, we imagined wonderful days to come, free from disease, work and want. Thanks to television series like Star Trek or events like the 1939 Futurama World Fair, this shining vision became so ingrained in our culture that it could be spoofed by children’s cartoons such as The Jetsons or Futurama.

Since then, our vision of the future has changed. When we look ahead now, we tell dystopian stories of environmental collapse, zombie plagues and the end of civilization. Hollywood, TV and Young Adult novels all sing the same tune: it is downhill from here. If it is true that we must imagine the future before we can build it, then this is deeply worrying.

As far as I can tell, the last attempt at a utopian future in a mainstream Hollywood film was the 1989 comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

In our current functioning society, an ATM will give me bank-notes that I can then use in the local supermarket, which has shelves piled high with whatever I need. As long as this situation continues, I know that civilisation is still working

We had a narrow escape during the financial crisis of 2008 (credit crisis 2008), when Britain was only two hours away from the ATMs being turned off. The switching-off of ATMs is, I suspect, a more likely scenario for the end than alien spaceships filling the sky or mushroom clouds over London

Visa card chip-and-pin payments failed across Europe for a few hours in June 2018, and over 5 million attempts to pay for everyday necessities such as petrol and groceries failed. Although this outage only affected Visa, it still demonstrated how reliant we have become on an electronic financial system, and how much we have moved away from physical money.

Perhaps a level in a videogame is a more apt metaphor for our current world than the end of a book. When something comes to an end in a story, it does so in a way that is meaningful in terms of the larger narrative. In a videogame, you keep going for as long as you can, but eventually you make one slip and then it’s all over. There’s no purpose or logic to such an end.