Connecting with the future
In Kevin Kelly’s piece The Missing Near Future I was struck by this passage:
As an audience we can believe an alien present. It’s like today, only more so. Maybe an alternative version of today. We can also easily be persuaded to believe in a far future. We feel sure that someday, somehow they’ll have massive floating cities, or highways in the sky, instant food, and all the rest. We feel certain about this despite the fact that we can’t fund fast trains between our cities today, or permit genetically modified insect-resistant corn, or take any unified step toward large-scale 21-century developments. Even returning to the moon next decade seems far-fetched.
The near future – let’s peg it 2020 and beyond — is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible.
There are, in fact, many visions of the period Kelly describes that are both desirable and plausible to some people, but what really intrigued me was this idea of an “alien present”. One of the things I’ve been saying to audiences over the last year or so has been “the difficult present is not the likely future”, meaning that it’s often easier to pick something confusing or challenging about the present to think about than it is to consider things that are genuinely sited in the future.
If the “future” is far enough away in time, it becomes an alternative or parallel world, chronologically separate from our own. “2186″ becomes, not a date, but as much of a location as “Fairyland” or “Toontown”. What Kelly calls the “near future” is somewhere that’s far enough distant from the present to appear different, without being so far away in time that it becomes easy for us to treat it as an alternative world rather than this world. The challenge is to articulate a future in a way that makes the causal and temporal connections to our own clear, and forces us to imagine reality, not fantasy.
