Guide to Future-Present Archetypes Read online

narratives of Gibson, Sterling, Heinlein, Bester, et al conditioned me to look for these signals on the horizon. In many senses of the word, I am invoking their becoming through my own internalization of those compelling stories about possible futures. This, of course, is the power of so-called design fictions.

  Is fascination a specific quality of these technologies? Yes, inasmuch as all technology is a product of imagination and vision, and all technologies are birthed in the light of novelty. We are programmed to detect novelty as a prime directive of biosurvival. Likewise, the technological unfolding is a slow and often telegraphed process, a striptease of sorts that inspires cultural fascination as each new bit is revealed until the pattern emerges and we suddenly see the future before us. This is the marvel of our times: that our imaginations are unfolding before us so quickly and drawing our fictions out into reality.

  Chris Arkenberg

  Authors of speculative fiction rank high among those who direct the attention of our Future-Present fascination. Even when their speculations fail to become accurate predictions, the way our imaginations have accordingly come to expect the distribution to appear has had its effect. The physics of the crystalline structure of Nd2Fe14B directly affect how we understand electromagnetism. But even before that compound existed, the shape of the impossible to come was preceding it in our combined imagination. The Future-Present receives these inventions gleefully, whether they become plateaus or chasms, and compiles them into a landscape. Whether it is new magnets, tiny robots, or flying cars, our culture of fascination has been doing the groundwork for years. For better or worse, this desiring gaze into the jaws of the impossible is not only a dream, but a formative element of the cultural terrain into which technology must be born.

  The cart is coming before the horse in terms of explanation--the reason that it’s everywhere is that it has something that engages people. And then we start seeing it everywhere. Like this current zombie stuff--it’s highly unlikely that people are eating people more often, it’s just that we’re sharing it more. Just like the bird die offs we saw in the news a while back... they die all the time, we just haven’t noticed it. So “why the uptick?” isn’t the right question--there probably aren’t more events, it is just that we are finding it and sharing. So why are people finding it and sharing it?

  - Deb Chachra

  The Future-Present’s fascination with the newly possible is many things: an internal human drive, a conscious dream, and a cultural construct. Deb reminds us that the substantial record of this fascination is only possible because of our technological advances. Fascination is a feedback loop, causing the pattern to congregate, duplicate, and infiltrate.

  The Future isn’t something people specifically set out to do. Futurists don’t create these concepts, but recognize the patterns in what is already happening in the Future-Present. Only with the technologies of cultural observation that we currently employ--the aid of feeds at which we stare and Tumblrs on which we aggregate it--do these things appear. Therefore, the necessarily appear in that form. How important was the precise moment at which neodymium magnets suddenly became possible? Thirty years later, it probably doesn’t even occur to most people. Ampere, Fareday, Pixxi, Sumitomo--none of these are brand names, and so their capacity for fascination is low, while viral videos of drones employing tiny servos abound. We could give this fascination a name, or not--but we still know exactly how to search it out and Tweet about it.

  It's like asking why there's a spirit in the spirit of the times. Studies of technological development seem to suggest that there's something like a "steam engine time," when interests and energies mysteriously cluster, but it's not a weird fluke, it's just how things work out. Maybe it's a fluke of our own social studies. When the Renaissance was happening nobody said that it was a "Renaissance." The Renaissance is only visible to us as a historical back-projection, and we have historians to argue about who made it happen where and why.

  - Bruce Sterling

  Fascination in the Future-Present finds its form in the residue of the past. The how and why of the impossible-becoming-possible is shaped by how capable we are of recording it, which is a skill that only evolves over time. We can’t conceptualize the future unless we are able to notice the change occurring, and we can’t notice it unless we are part of the subjective feedback loop of time--an odd “Certainty via Uncertainty Principle” that we call temporality, or historicity.

  Our drives, our dreams, our cultural productions, our technological milieu, and our perception of history guide our exploration of the impossible. But nothing is scripted. That history, in all of its mediated constructs, appears to write itself is no proof that there is only one way to write it. Clarke and Fort perceptively observed that the impossible would become possible--but they never could have said which impossibilities were the ones to watch. We have no guide other than fascination. For all its subjectivity, it is guided by powerful forces.

  There is a science to this. There is a technique to moving across the plane of impossibility, by finding the right cultural and technological conditions, and using our ability to work through our dreams and nightmares. We aren’t at the mercy of our history, and we can hack the Future-Present. We are already, and we’re getting better at describing and teaching the skills of doing so. Clarke and Fort might be the Faraday and Ampere of our Future-Present fascination. They pioneered the concepts--but the future applications of our current technological fascination are becoming more diverse than anything within their realm of possibility.

  Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #3: The Cyborg-Historical

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  The Future-Present is something that once one has begun to notice it, it becomes very difficult to not see. This visual pattern of our conception of the future has the occult symbolism of apophenia, an illusion of perception generated as glitching artifact by the same non-illusory means by which we perceive reality. The shape of history projected forward in time looms out in the shape of a monster from patterns of moss on our architecture, and as a prophet from coffee stains on news magazines. Our imagination builds reality both forward and backward in time, as our vision builds reality on both isomorphic sides of the mirror. Our speculative thought catalogs these alternate realities, and we attach them to ourselves like equipment strapped to the stomach of a soldier, and we drag them along with us as we crawl across the surface of the earth, dodging death. Or so we dream, as we let our eyes slowly unfocus, gazing at our liquid crystal screens.

  The Future-Present hangs heavy with acquired schematization, grows thickly in the rhizomatics of our mental constructs, and with this decaying biomass, lubricates the sliding transmission of our worldviews. But while the implications of the Future-Present for philosophical theories that deploy such semiotic hardware are important, there is a complex material realm of the Future-Present that should not be ignored. Regardless of what sort of opaque, nebulous terms we develop for the clouds in our temporal vision, they have material form with which we will collide with if we don’t watch where we are going. The gears of the mechanisms are sharp, and the metabolized exertions to avoid injury on the cutting edge are chemically taxing.

  This is not simply a matter of seeing correctly and avoiding illusion. The illusions have important meanings. Patterns are the visual boundaries of underlying systems. When a slime mold grows into nearly the exact same shape as the Tokyo rail system, this is not a random coincidence. These systems are analogous, because they both function on the basis of economizing transportation of resources through space for maximum efficiency. The similarity in shape is what we see, but the choice of one particular pathway over another by the system itself is the functional pattern.

  Visually apprehending the pattern is often more difficult than simply traversing it intact. Especially when two complex systems are interacting, it is difficult to map a representational pattern of differing dimensions so that we can see what’s going on. We can’t always build a stronger microscope, or find a n
ew aspect to tag with a radioisotope so we can see the glowing diffusion of the systems we control flowing before us on a monitor. This is an inherent difficulty with the Future-Present--it attempts to create a somewhat unified picture of many systems, each developing their pattern and interacting. And, it must do so with the knowledge that this is a flattened projection, as a simplification of the evolving temporal axis. The unfolding of history is a system interacting with our virtualization of it. Think of it this way: we are playing a video game, the goal of which is to program the video game, at the same time as it is designing and building the hardware of the game system using only that hardware. We are breaking and changing the system from the inside, but if too many wires are cut, we will lose the means by which we are working. “Meta” scarcely begins to grasp the problem. We need better verbal tools to even begin talking about what we are trying to interact with the world via virtual projection.

  Thankfully, futuristic speculative-fiction-like technology has just such a verbal tool waiting for us. That is to say, the history of futuristic speculative-fiction technology, because this archetype of