By Brock Colyar
“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” When the novelist William Gibson said this — probably in the late ’80s, though, like a lot of prophetic aphorisms, when he first said it is not exactly clear — he was describing distribution by place: iPhones arriving en masse in Steve Jobs’s United States, all-inclusive social-credit scores blanketing Xi Jinping’s China, antibiotic-resistant superbugs cropping up in India before spreading as far as the Arctic, climate change flooding the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh long before it conquers New York or Tokyo.
But the distribution is uneven in time, too, because the future never arrives all at once with the thunderclap of a brave new world suddenly supplanting the comfortable old one. Which is why future-gazers like Gibson are always talking about how their works aren’t about the future — and pointing out how terrible their records would be in predicting it — but about the world in which they were written.
They are right. Today the world has the uncanny shimmer of future weirdness, its every week stuffed with new events that seem to open up strange new realities only to be forgotten as the next wave of strangeness hits. But as the decade pulls to a close, we’re unpacking the last year of it in a timeline of crucial 2019 dates that played like premonitions of where we’ll be ten years from now. The future is present in these moments — epic, like the battle for Hong Kong; eerie, like virtual makeup; and personal, like contemplating gender-confirmation surgery.
Photo-Illustration: Chris Labrooy
What kind of present is it? In certain ways, it’s an in-between one: We’ve spent 2019 waiting for Brexit and for 2020, for the next round of climate talks and the next recession. But taking a tour through the calendar of news events with an eye toward the future is actually pretty dizzying. Somehow, our present is both Neuromancer and The Handmaid’s Tale, both Waterworld and Mad Max, Idiocracy and 1984 (an updated version of 1984, anyway, in which the nations of Oceania pride themselves on the freedom exhibited by handing over surveillance powers to corporations that work with police states, rather than to the police states themselves)
Those worlds of novels and movies might seem contradictory, but it’s not as though we have to choose only one when imagining the future. Reality is much messier than that, much weirder. It’s not one history book following one arc, whose shape you can judge from the cover that encloses it. It’s full of not just revolutions but counterrevolutions, dead ends and false starts and false predictions. Over the next decade, at least a few of these will probably come to seem naïve or Pollyannaish or prematurely apocalyptic. But we’ll also, presumably, come to find a lot more of them obvious and old news. By then, the weirdness of the future might not even feel so weird.
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