So I'm sitting, typing away on my little electronic notebook, looking out the window of my basement at the flying cars, robot donkeys and Teflon airships in the sky. There's a beeping behind me as my Autogutenlarger 4000 prepares the tablet sized, nutritionally balanced, 8,000,000 calorie meal of chicken flavored Angel Delight micro-pill, that will be my supper. Susan (the dead hooker who I 'found') isn't having any. She's right off her food today, which is a shame. She's been so listless lately I'm starting to worry she's going off me. She could sort out her appearance a bit too.
In reality, of course, there are no flying airships, no robots and absolutely no way she's going off me. At some point in the last 20 years, the future really downsized it's expectations. Perhaps it was the decade of decadence that preceded the credit crunch, but, what happened? Did we all get so bloated and satisfied with our enlarging credit card bills and shrinking mobiles and blueteeth that we stopped caring? There was a time, when predicting the future meant imagining the scale of our success - the more sophisticated a computer got, the bigger it would have to be, until the most powerful computer ever (the one Richard Pryor builds in Superman 3) took up the entire floor space of the Grand Canyon. Once, the vision of the future was shimmering blue headlights in the sky, telescopes for eyes, platinum kneecaps, CDs - the future was so bright, it wasn't even sponsored.
We were sold on the promise that, just around the corner, the product to beat all products would soon arrive, like an event horizon of shiny bits and dodgy wiring. We were seduced by the eighties, of the premise technology replacing taste. There would be no need to worry about class, no need to keep up with the Joneses, because Mr and Mrs. Jones would have the same amazing flying train as you. Frankly, when you've got a flying train, you couldn't give a flying truck what anyone else has got.
It all changed though, and rather than wonder and awe, we have been left with the era of technology as commodity. It seems, whatever we have, we will have to buy again and again and again as one by one each older version is superseded. No innovation is decisive or definitive, because the companies cottoned on that the fallibility of their product means a lifetime of zombies enslaved to upgrading precisely twenty seconds after they figure out how to get it out of the box. The second your brand new, life affirming, electronic wonder box arrives, it fades into obscurity as Version 2.0 immediately supersedes it. By comparison your own tawdry purchase looks more outdated than a Rick Astley 'Hits' video found in a bin in a Cancer Research shop.
It's not restricted to mobiles and music boxes. The Internet age means that every time I turn on my computer to check the news, catch up on celebrity gossip or get directions to the nearest Council Dump with a 'no questions asked' policy on incinerator use, I find myself having to go through a twenty minute ritual of 'locating updates'. After the seventh merry go round of uploading and restarting, the rage bubbles up behind my eyeballs until they pop like slugs under a bicycle wheel and I reprogramme it with a hammer.
I've got an iPod. So do you (I know you do). But there's a shelf life to it - one second you're looking super cool, like a gadgety Pharaoh, until you stop to tie your shoes and by the time you lift your head, everyone's got a better one; one that plays movies, or can contact the dead, or holds your hair back when you're throwing up into a bin. It's not just that it's outdated either. It feels like there is a shelf life to them. Call me paranoid (you are already, aren't you... aren't you???) but I have a suspicion that there's a built in auto destruct, perhaps in the form of a little internal clock, ticking down to the time when the thumbwheel stops thumbing and it gets stuck on 'random'.
We need to take a stand people, or this will go on indefinitely, or at least until Steve Jobs finally breaks Apple by risking the company's entire profit margin on development of the iPoop self cleaning toilet bowl that texts free music into your skull whenever you drop your guts; after selling three of them (all to the Beckhams) he will be last seen trying to flog second hand Nintendos to Gerald Ratner. Until that glorious day, are we doomed to a life watching over our shoulders for our hard bought commodities to become worthless as the spectre of the upgrade lurks?
There is another way, of course. We can scrimp. We can save. We can aspire. Then we can gather up all that cash, the sum of the greatest of our endeavours, and rather than upgrading to a slightly less terrible level of existence, buy ourselves a holiday and bloody well stop worrying. Wont be able to listen to music on the beach though - might have to read a book. Or upgrade to a Kindle at least... they're cool...
Ilikeyourtrouserssexyxxxx
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