Ignore The Jetsons, Dream Impossible Things

Let's get this out of the way: I doubt anyone reading this at the moment of writing will live to see jetpacks, the way our parents' imagination designed them. Aside from the whole jetpacks shoot flame that will char and destroy your legs bit, the vision of the future is largely understood to be the Jetsons. It doesn't matter that the Jetsons was always highly improbable, it imprinted on the (white) cultural imagination. I must pass over afrofuturism for this whole thing to work.

You have seen this on Facebook. "MAN WHERE'S MY FLYING CAR" and so on into infinity.

But as of October 28, 2014, it doesn't really feel like the future. Unless things get worse, my generation's Selma happened this year, Ebola is back, Russia is posturing on the world stage again and Christ only knows what else will come down the pike with the year 2014 appended to it.

Except, of course, for all the things that watch us from the sky, from the cell phones recording our major moves in our pockets and our social networks recording our minor foibles presumably to be hurled at us when we are cornered or weak. Women get bomb threats for having opinions about videogames.

The future, of course, is always gunning for us. It feels that way in my head.

Except for the margins.

I write this on a laptop computer with 500 gigs of memory, not all of it filled by pornography. I write this listening to a mashup of Aphex Twin and Taylor Swift. It's the mashup that feels like the future. Not in either of the parts, but what that last sentence means.

That last sentence is actually crazy, if given time to unpack it.

1) One no longer needs the imprimatur and recording budget of a big label to make music.
2) Recording technology (and what we define as possibilities for music) has advanced to the point where physical instruments are not always required.
3) The availability of music has gone from requiring a physical copy of the release to a free for all, with almost anything instantly available the day of release, if not before.
4) The ability to manipulate audio that already exists is so unremarkable that it comes standard on a Mac, and similar technology can be found for a steal or a lark on the internet.
5) The ability to record music is so pervasive that it comes standard on a Mac and free versions that do mostly the same thing can be found for a steal or a lark on the internet.
6) The ability to isolate and acquire vocals from a particular recording is available to us.
7) One can distribute what they create for a nominal fee or free, via the internet.
8) The end result is inside a genre that already exists and has a name that fits in our cultural imaginary.

Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to hear music from anywhere else, you had to import a copy of a physical release, which assumes, of course, anywhere else could afford to press it and promote it Today? Troll Soundcloud or Bandcamp for twenty minutes. No promises it'll be any good, but you can hear it.

It may be a shitty punk band you'll be listening to (and I say shitty punk band with solidarity and a smile here) but the option is now available. Something incredible will come. The universe will provide it. Which really means some person will have an obsession and get excited and the technology to create it will exist within their grasp, and the ability to distribute it easily will also exist within their grasp.

As for the content of the music, it's whatever. I never listened to Aphex Twin before, but I thought it was supposed to be weirder and more abrasive than what backs Ms. Swift here. Admittedly, I'm charmed by Ms. Swift's lyrics, even if I hurriedly maintain a jaundiced distance.

It doesn't matter what this mashup is comprised of, what matters is that it can be created, distributed and absorbed.

The takeaway: Music in my lifetime has gone from a thing that I must hunt to find and then purchase to a thing that I can find in a minute and a half if it's particularly obscure and be listening to in 45 seconds after that. Understand that and then multiply it for every other physical medium that yet exists on the planet.

Ten years ago, text messages were becoming interesting. Today? Your phone can record video. Ferguson is Selma, on some levels, but we're different people and we do not require a television channel to broadcast what we see. Now you, dear reader, can find a live feed that's more useful and accurate than CNN. How will that change the way we absorb and weigh information in the future?

Shit, Eleven Names founder Zach plays D&D over the internet with porn actresses. Regularly!

For imperial statements about the future, look to New Scientist or the New England Journal Of Medicine or any military weapons publication. Continuing down this path is a terrible idea, and I did that for an hour until I wisely deleted it.

(The thrust of it: I only have maybe twice my years left again if I'm lucky and the rate of technology currently means that what will be available to consumers the year I die will have existed in a nascent form used by military or random science place for 10 years. Or, put dramatically, the future will end for me in my 60s and it'll take until my 70s for it to reach me.)

And, at least outside of HEY WE CAN CURE [DISEASE HERE] NOW it's hardly ever the technology that is the future, it's what we do with it. The future means women can document the men that harass them using technology available in their pockets. The future means I will still die in fifty years, but I can know and process much more information in those fifty years than my parents and their grandparents were able to.

The future means science fiction is being made obsolete faster than it can be written. The future means everything gets more crowded. Everything gets messier, or we're now aware of how messy everything always was. We are granted more options (if from a fire hose) and more ways of seeing the world. Our ability to make a living on weird or non-traditional jobs has increased exponentially, even if the value of "make a living" is still fairly small. You can express yourself in wild, savage colors.

That last sentence feels too easy. Let me rough that up a little. The future means trans persons may be publicly recognized by my country's administrators while I am alive. When I was a teenager, that wasn't even on my radar, and if it was, I don't think I could imagine their suffrage moving forward at this rate now. Moving beyond the provincialism of my own lifespan, I think we'll be in a better place in terms of recognizing other people in a hundred or so years, even if I only get to contribute to and see the first fifty years of that. I can live with that.

Beyond the old Warren Ellis chestnut "the world's a strange place, let's keep it that way," I imagine, or believe exists a larger sprawl of possibilities at the margins. Look at Homestuck. That's a million dollar property, made entirely by a person from a generation that was native to the internet. Tell someone twenty years ago, you'll see a guy writing a dating sim based on his work on a webcomic, and he'll ask you "what's a dating sim, what's a webcomic and more importantly, no fucking way." We didn't get the future that was in our parents imagination, but what we have currently is something pretty exciting.

We won't get to the Jetsons within my lifetime, I think. But I don't really want the Jetsons now. Do you? How small of a future the Jetsons would be now! How limiting! If all we did was go to the same jobs, but the buildings were taller and the cars smaller!










As I was finishing the major strokes of this at 3 am, I typed in the tags Taylor Swift and it already exists here. I hope and imagine it was Emily or Katrina, from 2010-2011 or a lifetime ago, before the massive needle drop of Phonogram into my life. I don't listen to Taylor Swift or Aphex Twin, but this mashup makes me want to start.
This feels a little too hopeful for me, or I imagine a rebuttal of the terrible things I listed at the top of the article are all still true. It is hard to put a cost on inspiration. It can be done, I am sure, but not by me and not now. I'll say two things. ONE: Access was a major factor in what kept the powerful comfortable and that no longer is true. TWO: Empathy changes lives. What grants more empathy is many different firsthand experiences and failing that, art. I'm a better person for having read Phonogram, but I had to pick my jaw up off the floor after I completed a reading of the Nikopol Trilogy. Borges made me kinder. And if we are not the generation to grapple successfully with the military industry complex, then that makes us like every other generation. But we might gain an inch on it, if we push.

Casanova: Not A Comic Book Reference This Time

I start an weekend adventure tonight (Walk through a European city at midnight I've never seen before to get to a hotel I've never heard of? It saves me $20!) , so I lined up a guest post. Say hello to my good friend, Emmy Dee.


I was in love once. His name was Tyler Lawson and he had blue eyes and dirty blond hair that he gelled in the front a la N’SYNC. Unfortunately for me, he was spit-your-slushie-out-on-the-playground cool, and there were plenty girls far more eligible then I was. Tyler was a certified seventh grade bad boy, dating first one uber-popular girl then another. Finally, he dumped them all so that he could shamelessly hook up with anyone he wanted (To this day, I wonder if the rumors of sex on the soccer field were true.) For me though, Tyler was just the start of my Casanova crushes.

In high school there was Ethan, who broke my heart and acquiesced to be my prom anyway. Then, when I was a senior, there was the one good guy that came into my life for years. He was perfect, captain of the football team and ranked in the top ten of the class; we went for endless walks and he talked about how he wanted to save Ecuadorian orphans (no really, I can’t make this shit up.) I had practically planned out the wedding in my daydreams, until one of my best friends broke up with her boyfriend and pounced. I’ve never been much of a pouncer myself, so I went off to college glumly resolved to live out my own version of “Never Been Kissed.”

When I arrived at college something extraordinary happened. Guys started noticing me. More then that, guys started HITTING on me. Woah. Heartbroken as I was over The Last Good Guy, I decided that I had what it took to play the field. I was a fucking idiot. It’s not that I don’t have game, I can flip my hair and stick my boobs out as good as the next girl, It’s that I way underestimated what guys will do to get what they want. In short, I met the Ultimate Bad Boy, and stupidly I fell for him. He was charming and suave and I have to say, an amazing kisser (Sorry, Drew Barrymore.) He talked about kids and dogs and Obama and I fell further and further into infatuation. But he, like Tyler Lawson, wasn’t happy with just one girl’s attention; and he knew how to keep all of us coming back for more. Inevitably the truth of the situation was revealed; In the end I was the other woman, the legitimate girl had spent the year broadening her cultural horizons in France.

I spent the ensuing months listening to hours upon hours of Taylor Swift and A Fine Frenzy; watching with savage pleasure as blond haired blue-eyed boys died in various crime shows. Even though I had known for almost the entire affair that he was bad for me, I had still let myself slip into infatuation. There was something inexplicably exhilarating about caring for someone who was a little dangerous and who treated me with flippant disregard. I wanted him more because he didn’t need me; I was sure that I could prove to him that I was the one girl who was worth it.

It would be easy to blame my delusions on pop culture and the media, I suppose. Too many romantic comedies end with the asshole-jerk realizing that he had it all wrong and presenting the heroine with dozens of roses and a ring. I could blame these movies, except that I know that I’m smarter then that. I knew what I was getting myself into, I’m not (generally) an airheaded ditz who really believes in this stuff (somewhere, my friends are scoffing in disagreement.)

So why is it that intelligent girls like myself perpetually fall for the “bad boy,” the one person who is sure to hurt them? I suppose it all comes down to this: Every girl wants to be THE ONE. We all need someone to confirm that we’re worth it, even while we’re being taken advantage of, hurt, and insulted. A good friend of mine put it like this: “The bad boys are like the perfect storms of genetics sent from wherever to make good girls turn into raving lunatics.” The more abusive the guy, the more I want to prove that I am the girl that he will change for.

Beyond wanting to feel the self-validation of being wanted, there is just something about edgy guys that is downright sexy. Confidence. In order to be a “bad boy,” you need to believe that you have power. By dominating the situation these men create an aura of success, even if inwardly they’re insecure (and believe me, in my experience they mostly are.) Personally, I like to feel protected, men who display confidence and power appeal to that part of me. I know-it’s 2010 and I shouldn’t WANT to be protected by a man. Blame my tween years spent reading Jane Austen and other period romantic novels. It doesn’t matter how much I strive to be the modern independent woman, in the end I want someone who could save me if I needed saving. Nice guys just don’t seem like they’re up for the job.

I saw the Ultimate Bad Boy out a few weekends back. I was at a bar and it was homecoming so it was packed. He was there. We walked within two feet of each other. We pretended not to know each other. Two years ago this would have killed me, now things have changed. I have someone new in my life, someone who loves me and treats me with care and respect. And I love him too. So, instead of spending the rest of that night crying or texting or slinking back with him to his apartment, I stayed out with my friends and danced. When I finally went home I slid into bed with the person I love and I feel asleep. Finally, it seems I have found someone who makes all the bad experiences and spiteful people fade away...

And yes, he’s a little bit of a bad boy.

“Almost Lover” (A Fine Frenzy) became my anthem the spring that I had my heart broken by my college infatuation. Everything about her pleading, soulful voice defined how I felt. This is what I was silently screaming at him. To this day I can’t listen to this song without smelling the sweaty dust of the all-boys floor that he lived on. Someday, I have promised myself, I will ask him. Did I make it that easy/to walk right in and out of my life?