So both futurism and science fiction are trapped in an always-unreal strange land that must always exist at a certain remove from the manufactured-to-be-familiar present. Much of present-moment science fiction and fantasy is in fact forced into parallel universe territory not because there are deep philosophical counterfactuals involved (a lot of Harry Potter magic is very functionally replicable by us Muggles) but because it would lose its capacity to stimulate. (p. 198)
The result will be a world population with a large majority of people on the edge of madness, somehow functioning in a haze where past, present and future form a chaotic soup (have you checked out your Facebook feed lately) of drunken perspective shifts.
This is already starting to happen. Instead of a newspaper feeding us daily doses of a shared Field, we get a nauseating mix of news from forgotten classmates, slogan-placards about issues trivial and grave, revisionist histories coming at us via a million political voices, the future as a patchwork quilt of incoherent glimpses, all mixed in with pictures of cats doing improbable things. (p. 205)
The most high-impact technologies of the day are almost never whatever the wisdom of the day identifies as the most potentially useful ones. (p. 232)
Venkatesh Rao, Towards an Appreciative View of Technology.
