Some thoughts from James Lileks:
“Perhaps…the present makes those old visions of the future look infantile and silly. We’re not wearing
one-piece jumpsuits and taking meals from apill-dispensing machines, or flying off to work on jetpacks. We have the stuff that counts. We have computers and communicators; we have a global information network, a space station, robot war machines, cybernetic implants. And we still wear jeans and eat hamburgers, and Elvis had a number one song in Airstrip One last year.“The very idea of the future is undergoing a renovation — it’s not a city on the other side of a wall. The best lesson may be this: there is no wall. In the end the very idea of “The Future” may turn out to be a 20th century conceit, the reason the globe churned itself up fighting one rancid conception of utopia after the other. The future is back to being what it always was: an accumulation of tomorrows, not a wholesale refutation of today.”
— James Lileks, January 31, 2003
And I’m suddenly struck by the fact that we’re living in the year 2003. I half expected the human race wouldn’t live that long.