The Future: Big or Banal?

Nicolas Nova has a few thoughts at Pasta & Vinegar about innovation and the nature of change: Is The Future About Jetpacks Or Curious-But-Ordinary Things?

I agree that the future is really not all about massive shifts in technology, revolutionary ideas that reshape our environment. Even if we consider the ‘internet’ and the impact it has had on our lives, it’s taken forty years of – admittedly accelerating – research, development, creativity, use and adoption to get to where we are today. Email changed the way we work, almost without notice. It’s banal, but in retrospect is quite, well, ‘big’. Innovations tend not to stick unless they prove themselves to be attractive, and that usually means being ‘of utility’. And that usually entails becoming embedded in everyday life.

Nicolas quotes a recent Wired column by Warren Ellis, in which he wrote:

The future bubbles up under the floorboards.

We spend a lot of time looking for our spaceships and jet-packs, but – and consider this bit, it gets bigger and weirder the more you think about it – in a matter of days we can genetically sequence a mutant virus that’s jumped the species gap. People try to make an ordinary thing of that. There’s a strong tendency to cast the present day, whenever that may be, as essentially banal and not what was promised. Stop looking for the loud giant stuff. The small marvels surround us.

I think this is essentially correct. The future as ‘futurism’ tends to be enslaved to a form of technological determinism that ignores the role of people as vectors of innovation and uptake, not to mention loci of cognitive capacity and desire. I think is partly why technophobes tend to have a pretty dark and dystopian vision of the future. Non-self-reflexive technophiles are the flipside of the same coin. And to extend that monetary metaphor just one stage further, I’m not sure either is the ontological currency in which we need to trade.