March of 2005
Written in March of 2005
SMS chirps across the pub. 2005 in Britain and it sounds like 1998 in Iceland. The cars creeping past the window have barely changed shape in ten years. White boy in a flop hat and a hideous backpack that looks like repurposed Seventies furniture strides past: drainpipe jeans and shiny new Adidas. Indian kids on the corner in blue baseball caps and nylon hoodies. Tiny little blonde toddler in Nike knockoffs and a yellow fleece poncho. A pale lime new-style Beetle that hasn't been washed since the day she bought it, looking like it's been shoved up a chimney as it parks by the Chinese medicine place. She comes out wearing an 80s A-line skirt and old man's knitted fingerless gloves.
The local junkies hover by the payphone: the early Nineties kind, that just takes coins and has no internet access. Ten minutes' walk from here to the nearest public internet booth.
A resigned-looking middle-aged woman in three-quarter length blue jeans with turned-up cuffs walks slowly next to an old man in a green jogging suit, aviator shades and grotesquely swollen feet, buzzing along in an electric mobility scooter.
There's not a sign here, not one, of being in the 21st Century.
The old guy makes a face at me as he trundles past the pub window.
I give him the finger, and wonder if those electric vegetable cart things can be made to explode.
Ah, such quaint ferocity. So 90s/80s/70s/60s/50s. We don't have time for that sort of thing, here in the sparkly 21 C. Our rock stars are crackheads who sing songs about being Peter fucking No-Mates and not being loved enough and sorry I broke into your gaff and stole all your shit and sold it for rocks but I'm really fucking sensitive and the world is very hard. 21 C is far too sedate for that noise. The sound of the new year: Amy Winehouse, for people who found Sade too threatening. The Bravery: Steve Strange's Visage without the make-up or fucking, with that standard-issue Julian Casablancas vocal filter that every NYC rock band has to use by law now. It's all recordcollection shuffling by the nutless and the hopeless. Recapitulation time, still. We've spent the last few years using the new perspective we've gained over the whole of the last mad century. I have a huge case of beentheredonethat about the whole enterprise now. It was both fun and important, at one time. But, my god, five years of being hunched over the 20th century now?
Y'know, babies aren't afraid of leaving their cribs. They clamber over the fuckers like hump-maddened gibbons detecting a scent of estrus-swollen arse on the breeze. So why the hell are we so afraid of leaving the 20th century?
The Situationist writer and translator Christopher Gray once said, "Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit."
Bruce Sterling's gig as house visionary to design students in California is about imagining, preparing for and selling the future. Note how quickly and insidiously his students have learned the game. Tasked to reinvent something as simple as apple juice for five years up the line, they produce:
"ORGANICANA 100% Naturally Enhanced Apple Drink.
A Pepsico organic foods category killer."
If the Situationists had been this good at the Game... well, they were always a bit shit, to be honest. But look at this. You can't sue someone for false advertising over a name that simply contains the word "organic" as an element. Doesn't it just evoke purity, abundance and health? "100% naturally enhanced." Sterling is growing a clutch of New Automatic Satans over in Pasadena. He doesn't care. We're acquainted enough that he can mock me for always looking shattered and deadline-blasted in website photos. When he got a digital camera, he told me that he would only ever appear in fighting trim, radiating health and "accompanied by fine consumer products."
Bruce has a higher ethical purpose: he's hugely involved in the new green movement, trying to make people understand that controlling carbon and fighting climate change isn't about eating granola and hugging trees. But there's a demonic little bastard inside him: he wants you to buy nicer, kinder, cooler garbage disposal units. He will implant the Viridian, Worldchanging purpose into his plainly extremely gifted students. But, ultimately, he will send them out into the world of work with that particularly Nippo-American viewpoint that informed the cyberpunk Movement he was a central part of: people want to buy the future and have it on their table at home. Make it a good future, sure. But make it something that the drones will yank off the hypermarket shelves in their slavering fucking droves.
J. G.Ballard,2002:
"Thirty years on, the future will still be boring. I see an endless suburbanization, interrupted by notes of totally unpredictable violence: the sniper outside the supermarket, the bomb outside the suburban hypermarket, the madman with the Kalashnikov in McDonalds. But this random violence is totally without connection to peoples everyday lives. This will lead to a feeling that the world is arbitrary and illogical, insane even. That's a frightening kind of landscape."
Thirty years on, or three?
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April 28, 2008
The last half of this month has felt completely out of sync. Like the planet jumped tracks. Everything's a bit 1986.
Gather, children, and I will tell you of 1986. It rained all the time, no-one could smile without bleeding, and Boy George was on The A-Team. 1986 was one of those years where we were waiting for the spaceship to land... Things were so bad we were actually having to talk about Paul Simon's "Graceland" like it mattered. now, 1987, that was an interesting year... (descends lnto senescent unconsciousness) Where's my fucking coffee Buried under messages reading: "i was a discoloured zygote floating in the pool of beer and sperm that was my mothers womb in 1987."
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