Sunday 27 November 2011

The Past, The Future, and nothing in between

I'm watching a sharply dressed man holding a stick telling me it's going to get cold in the next few days.

There's more sharply dressed people telling me there are strikes which will definitely spell the end of society, and yet more sharply dressed people explaining how some famous folk have died, how the economy is screwed, and how cancer is causing global warming.

It seems that the negative-news contagion (thus far confined mainly to the Daily Mail) is spreading across journalism. At least the TV-licensing lady seems upbeat about us handing over money to twelve thousand BBC managers (and some important staff too).

After a study involving myself and my brain, I've come to the conclusion that what we need is more Tomorrow's World. Or New Scientist. Or something. You ever watch Tomorrow's World? Bet you can't remember a single moment where Peter Snow seemed unhappy about some amazing new potential invention that we could be seeing "within the next few years!".

Nuclear cars. Someone, somewhere, decided this was a good idea.
Sure, it's really easy to spend hours bitching about how it used to be better in some fictional, idealised 'good old days' when people actually met in person instead of expanding their social interaction via social media. These were the times when kids weren't distracted by their iKindles and their FacePods and people had pleasant family time and board games and played catch in the garden and bicycle rides and trees and flowers and happy storyfuntimestuff.

Rather than working yourself into a frothing rage over the (entirely fictional) saccharin past; why not read a bit about how we'll have cured the world of every possible physical and social ill in the next ten years? Let's look forward to the (still) imminent development of personal jet packs, flying cars, fruit loops that can fill out or tax forms, little fairies that eat greenhouses gases, and glasses that make ugly people look like Pippa Middleton.

HELL YEAH JETPACKS
Who knows? The time may even come when electronics are glued directly into our brains? That way we could engage in meaningless virtual time-wasting and procrastination (such as blogging) without ever getting out of our sweat encrusted beds? We won't even be aware that we're all fat, flabby blobs of wastage which could just as soon be minced up to feed livestock.

Yay future.

-Neop

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