The future's so bright, I gotta wear a jumpsuit. Which, according to this book published in 1972, will allow me to match everyone else in the year 2011 perfectly.
So what did Geoffrey Hoyle's vision of the world of 2011 look like?
Well, it's kind of a mish-mash of the practical and the wildly imaginative and slightly less practical.
For example, Hoyle's proposition that switching to a 3-day work week will solve many of our traffic and pollution problems is actually one of the more realistic that I've heard. Not to get too earth-y here, but if people lived in homes appropriate to their family size, the country figured out a food system, and most entertainment was free, I think we could mostly live on a 3/5 salary, and I can't imagine that making me less happy.
However, he also has some less-plausible things going on, such as all foods being prepared by what appears to be the breakfast machine from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. The time the man spends on food preparation is a little out of hand, especially considering that he's also solved, you know, the little bullshit stuff like pollution. An entire page is devoted to the machine that makes toast, which also has my favorite future-y/as seen on TV sentence: "The toast starts life as ordinary sliced bread." Yeah, no shit. What a mind-blowing future you've constructed for us here. From there, it's exactly like an ordinary toaster except that a mechanical arm picks up the bread and then puts the toast on your plate. So I guess this solves that growing concern in the 70's about picking up toast.
Another weird one is the video phone. He's actually kind of dead on with computers and whatnot, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that. But what's strange to me is how every futuristic show is all about the goddamn video phone, but in real life we have somewhat abandoned the audio component of phones in favor of texting, which is really a dumbing down, technologically. We had texting technology in the day of pagers.
Although I have to say, video phone calls don't sound appealing to me personally. Plus, if you're a busy person, aren't you generally doing other things while talking as opposed to sitting and talking and doing nothing else? Then again, flip side, if all calls were video calls maybe it would cut down on people SITTING ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER AT A RESTAURANT AND FUCKING WITH THEIR PHONES WHILE THEY'RE EATING WITH A LIVE HUMAN SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE. Sorry for all the caps, but stop doing that. No matter who you are, texting at a table when there's only one other person there makes you look like a teen girl, one of the bad ones who picks on the shy but wonderfully spirited protagonists in teen girl movies.
The book also spends a great deal of time talking about school, and it sounds like people will be doing what homeschool kids are doing now. It's so funny to me that homeschool kids are on the cutting edge in terms of linking up to a satellite to go to class, but then they wear exclusively denim skirts and I imagine they churn their own butter for some reason.
Restaurants are not that much different other than the fact that the waiters and waitresses have been cut out of the equation, which is fine by me. I've never met a waiter who said he loved his job, and even though I like to think I'm a pretty easy customer and tip nicely, I never hear anything about it from a waiter, so I'm starting to feel like they don't want anyone to be at the restaurant, themselves included.
Public transportation is clean, free, reliable, and works 24/7. It's safe enough for kids to travel alone. So I guess the future also involved liquifying the homeless somehow. He didn't really go over that so much.
Overall, the future sounds pretty awesome, and it's kind of disappointing that the closest, most accurate page is the one that shows how horrible things were twenty years previous. Oh, wait a second, that was the SECOND-most disappointing thing. The MOST disappointing thing was the picture of a teenage boy playing an acoustic guitar. I hope that in 2050 we will have found better ways to pick up girls than playing a goddamn acoustic guitar. Maybe some kind of ray...
No comments:
Post a Comment