#13: How to Predict the Past
William Gibson once made the useful observation that "the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed." Another way of putting it is that the past is still here, also unevenly distributed. Or, the world is a patchwork of individuals and cultures existing in different eras, some modernizing more quickly than others. If Gibson's statement is true, then the only difference between the future and the past is what's growing—what there's going to be more of eventually. This gets confusing when trends we've all agreed are part of the future turn out not to be anywhere when the future actually comes.
Then there's Varian's Law—what the rich are doing today is what we'll all be doing someday—which has a corollary of its own, suggested in a letter to the Financial Times a few years ago:
"The future may also be forecast by increasing middle class exposure to what the poor experience today. Like the Varian Rule, this would have predicted paternalistic bureaucracy, pervasive mass surveillance, the rude and antagonistic security apparatus, and debt traps. It may still predict a middle class epidemic of fatherless families, higher incarceration rates, skills obsolescence, usurious interest rates, substitution from healthy staples, and unstable employment."
Right now, that rings as true as Gibson's quote. The optimistic euphoria of the Obama era—which itself was not evenly distributed—has probably faded fastest for those living closest to what Gibson called the future, at least in the United States. The idea that venture-backed, wifi-connected $400 juicers (to choose an easy target) represent a still-nascent future is itself a belief that can still only survive in certain fortunate pockets of the world.
Reads:
Sam Kriss on the Aztec apocalypse and how we're experiencing it now
The LA Times in 1988 predicting what LA would be like in 2013, with mixed results of course (thanks John)
That feeling when you repeatedly apply the FaceApp smile filter until your face melts.
Until next time,
Drew