patrick.net

If you're a GenX like me, then you have seen your fair share of visions of the future in pop culture, movies, television and books.
The fictional views of the future always seemed so far advance and ahead than we were at any point. We were bombarded with visions of the future in Art, that we never took pause to really comprehend, all of the technological advances just since the end of WWII. I personally saw the invention of the hand held calculator, the push button phone, Televisions beyond our wildest dreams, beepers, then cell phones, personal computers(which just seemed to happen so fast in tandem with the internet, that within just a few years. I was hard to fathom life with out it, let alone remember life without them. The future was and always has been leading a full frontal charge toward humanity. Though no matter how far it advanced, it never seemed to anyone that the Future is now.

Our views of the Future were tainted by our expectations of what pop culture and art said the future would be, and the one thing we didn't have in America, that damn near every Artistic account of the Future always had as a common theme. Was the sheer oppression and tyranny of the governments and corporations had over the citizens. But for some explicit reason, we championed and longed for what Art called the Future. We were never satisfied with the brilliant achievements we already had. So much so, that we consumed and threw them away often still in perfectly working order. Just so we could keep up with the latest technological break through. And it has been one hell of a ride.

Now technology has gotten so advanced, that it trumps practicality, quality, and ruggedness. Every electronic device and appliance that we have bought and thrown away chasing the latest and greatest update. In all practical purposes, were superior to the latest releases. So much so, that I often reflect back on Computers, Laptops, and other electronic devices that I miss because the quality of them was leaps and bounds beyond the latest offering. We got sucked in because of some new feature, just ignoring the fact that the newest offering was not as quality of a product as the previous. Even Operating Systems in my opinion were far superior to what we have now. We were conned out of them. Even Windows 95 was ten times better than any new operating system, from my point of view. They argued that previous OS were not secure, "Secure from whom?!" So today we supposedly have secured computers and I never once had any comprised Windows 95- Windows XP computers like we have now. Government, Corporations, and other nefarious actors did not have the unbridled access to my computers behind the scenes like we have now. I would much rather go back to the good ole days of the worst that could happen is some malware hijacked my computer and bombarded it with so many Adware software that it eventually ran out of memory. Than to not know if Christopher Wray is watching everything I type on my computer in real time, regardless if I hit submit or not.

So as we approach this dystopian future, all of the cool doodads and devices, the medical advances, high tech cars that serve the owners, it's all taking a backseat and is being set back by decades while the Dystopian Feudalism of the 20th centuries depiction of the Future comes into focus. The transhumanism, the unconstitutional treatment of law abiding citizens charging them with thought crimes. We reserved those cautions for George Orwell books, we did not see that correlation that the Sci-Fi Art of the 20th century was depicting the same hopelessness, but only they glorified it. Dare I say they weren't writing Science Fiction at all, but the George Orwell anecdote?

The Utopian façade of Dystopia all of it.