Friday Cheese: Yesterday's Future December 16, 2011

One of the really fun things about indulging this particular sense of nostalgia is that for many people, and very very very much for me, this music seemed like the blade-runner-esque future. Sure, it wasn't necessarily evocative of dark and dreary cityscapes choked with smog and rain and damp and pollution, but it was the background to so many ruminations about a cyberspace future... where even if our front door was knocked down by Decker seeking the replicant du jour, we could hide from the gritty filthy horror of it all by goggling into cyberspace. This music was the background to me voraciously re-reading whatever William Gibson had put out, or Rudy Rucker.

Like a lot of speculative future fiction, it... didn't age well. Yesterday's tomorrow turned out to be just like the day before. Our transformative technologies are pretty awesome - being able to on-demand watch anything we want on the television, and making reservations for hotels, flights, and restaurants while stuck on a bus are pretty amazing. But we're still us - we're not the transformed and enlightened creatures that Rodenberry and so many others thought the future might hold. But still, it's fun to go back, to look at old Star Trek episodes and not even question the mini-skirted uniforms of all the yeomans, or old Lost In Space episodes and marvel at the casual use of rayguns. 

Think of this the same way you'd look at the replicator food from the original Enterprise - it's kind of adorable how we all thought colored putty would be the edible snack of the future.