The Future We Were Promised?

I have been doing some freelancing for a non-profit.  The job is to make a one to three minute video each week using a prompt, and the goal is to flood the Internet with something other than poison politics.

A couple of weeks ago, the prompt I chose asked me to respond to the question:  Where is the future we were promised?  The question has to do with the Jetson-style future many of us grew up believing we would inherit, and the intent of the prompt seemed to be asking us to lament the fact that we don't have flying cars and robot maids.  Where is that amazing high tech future we were promised?  It implied.

Me, being me, I put a twist on it.  I actually explored the notion that we ARE living in the future we were promised.

I mean, compared to MY youth, the youth today have things pretty high tech.  Little computers in their pockets, for one.  I didn't have all of the knowledge of the world available to me with the swipe of a screen small enough to fit into my hand.  I couldn't connect in real-time with my friend, Donna, when I moved to Kentucky and she still lived in Alabama, or my friend, Gregor, when he moved back to Germany.  I couldn't place an order at 8:00AM on Monday morning, get a confirmation of that order by 8:10AM on Monday morning, and be opening the package and enjoying my stuff by Wednesday.  Back in those days, we were conditioned to expect a four to six week wait for anything we ordered.  

We didn't have voice activated computers that could tell us the weather or play our favorite song, or even help us figure out the artist and title of a song of which we could only remember a snippet of a line. 

We couldn't watch movies on demand.

Our cars didn't talk to us, and if we needed "route guidance", it meant we either stopped and asked directions, or we learned how to read a map.

In my opinion, we are living in a pretty high-tech future, even if we don't have flying cars.

We do have self-driving cars, though - like Johnny Cab from Total Recall.  

And we have talking houses - like in Blade Runner.  

As for the real future we're living versus the one movies and books told us we'd get, in my opinion, we're also living out the warnings we failed to heed.  

We have dying oceans, over population, a huge wealth divide (the rich keep getting richer), and genetically engineered foods, like in Soylent Green.  

We have resource scarcity resulting in "water wars" like in Mad Max.

And, like Stephen King's The Stand, we have our own pandemic that has ushered in TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it).  I mean, the world as I knew it this time last year did not include shortages of toilet paper, pasta, and tomato sauce; stay-at-home orders; a shuttering of Broadway and most live theater across the world; and government mandated face masks.

I guess the real question is, which future do we think we were promised, and how is that vastly different than what we are living?

As I say in my video, I think we are living the future we were promised, and the more we lean on technology to make our lives better, the more dystopian our future will become.  

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This is an ad-free blog.  I have looked at different ways to monetize this blog, because (obviously) as a writer, I would prefer to get paid for my craft, but I dislike advertising, as I feel it is invasive, and frankly, I gave up my television, because I was tired of feeling like there was something wrong with my life because I lacked A, B, or C product.  I also dislike thinking of my readers as the "product" rather than the "customer" in the way that Facebook users are the product for the paid advertisers.  It changes how we relate to one another.

As such, I have decided against paid links, pop-up ads, and services like Ad Sense.   

That said, if you like what you see, please feel free to donate.  

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Any products mentioned on my blog are things I actually use and find useful.  They are not paid advertisements.  If I'm mentioning it, it's because I want you, my reader, to know about it.