The Future Looks Good

Woah… Was just reading on monster dot com about “happiness in the Internet workforce”

and the author is blathering on about how: “sure, Thai food and videos still need to get moved around, but in our increasingly postindustrial world we know the real action is in the keyboard and the cathode ray tube.”

“blah, blah,” I’m thinking; how would he know that the real authentic life is not lived by the native peoples of wherever, who cut wheat by hand with a sickle, and have no electric light… the dot com job market will level out, we’re all doomed… but WAIT A MINUTE…

When we get nanotechnology, we will be able to pipe raw material around just like we do electricity. No trucks needed. And we will be able to construct anything from that raw material, on the spot, on demand. No factories needed. Fashions will move across the material world like weather fronts do now. Change will achieve ludicrous speeds. Clothing, automobile styling, food, PC case design: like cloud shadows moving over the city.

And it will all be driven by computer networks tossing back and forth advertising, opinions, dialogue, money, blueprints, music, image… The Net will be even more important.

But how far can it go? Eventually you’ll have clothing that changes its color and texture at the touch of a (soft, flexible) keypad. (or voice recognition, or neural interface, whatever, I don’t care…) You’ll walk through a crowd and color will bloom on people as they react to what the more fashionable people next to them are wearing… There will be epic struggles at high school dances, to control the dominant color scheme. Blue and green and black and red will flash across the room like flame across a pool of gasoline; clothes will sprout and shed fur, scales, thorns, gossamer wings… All the girls will have reactive makeup with more computational power than the fucking phone company… There’ll be a retro video-gaming craze, and people will come to school blinking like Invincible Mario…

But, eventually, manual control will be deemed passé. Environment-aware clothing will, chameleon-like, change its form automatically to blend with or complement its environment. A crowded downtown street will look like an early-nineties Mandelbrot animation, a vomitous roiling sea of pulsating color, terrifying, utterly epilepsy-inducing. Building-side advertisements will shift hues, twist, melt, and balloon outwards over the street like obscene blind tentacles of commerce. There will be no difference between a high-dose acid trip and snow-pure sobriety.

Indeed… the future looks good for us dot-com workers.