The Wave of the Present
by Annalee Newitz
We’re living in the future
I’ll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper fifteen years ago
– John Prine
1.
Billboards and billionaires solemnly inform us that we are “living in the future.” You can see the phrase in AI ads and business plans; you can read it in New York Times headlines. Gemini, the AI chatbot that slops out sentences where Google search results used to be, responded to a search for the phrase “we are living in the future” with this bizarre assertion: “We are living in the future for several undeniable reasons: Your pocket computer… everyday automation … [and] commercial spaceflight.”
This tips us off immediately to what is meant by the phrase “living in the future.” It almost always refers to the vertiginous feeling of adopting new technologies like smart phones. It does not however refer to other kinds of novel experiences, like the potential for curing cancer through mRNA vaccines, having access to better hormones for gender transition, the rise of American fascism on social media, or funding for universal childcare. Our future, in other words, is not social or political. It is a commodity, and you can buy it right now. Usually from a tech company.
2.
I first heard the phrase “we’re living in the future” sometime in the 1980s, roughly a decade after John Prine popularized the term in his satirical folk song. This was the era of the “home computer,” when modems screeched and disks were floppy. Supposedly we were living in the world of tomorrow because we could play videogames on our cathode ray televisions, and type our term papers into digital files before spitting them out onto the perforated pages of a dot matrix printer.
As the ’80s ground to a close and the Soviet Union crumbled, pundits declared that history itself had ended along with the Cold War. That is not how time works, either in physics or culture. But it is how ideology cooks our brains into believing that there is some kind of final endpoint to civilization, when information from our past is no longer useful to us.
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