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cory doctorow
ture faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous
RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by
bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies
dwarf the physical economy.
There’s a lovely neologism to describe these visions: “futuris-
mic.” Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the
future. It is often self-serving — think of the antigrav Nikes in
Back to the Future III
— and it generally doesn’t hold up well to
scrutiny.
Sf films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2-D2 is
a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is
equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antiperson-
nel devices — but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some
text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo
Marx. Or take the Starship
Enterprise,
with a transporter capable
of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that
can breach the speed of light.
The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size
of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive,
transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around
the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached
an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing
party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would
beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves
until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the
landing party was eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or
giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recov-
ered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire land-
ing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective
crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances
of Kirk operating in clonal harmony.
Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in
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