What’s our fax machine?
FEBRUARY 29TH, 2016 — POST 056
Last year finally gave us the opportunity to evaluate Back to the Future Part II as futurism. 2015, the year Marty McFly travels to, is filled with 80s retro diners, Matel hoverboards, and self-lacing Nikes. One of the biggest wrong guesses the movie makes as a work of predictive fiction (though I don’t think it much cared about predictions) is that fax machines are a dominant mode of communication in 2015. Whether accuracy really mattered to director Robert Zemekis or (more likely) writer Bob Gale isn’t the point. The point is that the fax machine error is a very natural one. Essentially, the fax machine error presumes that what is technologically innovative now, like fax machines were in the 1980s apparently, will only become more dominant in the years to come.
Last night I started listening to Flash Forward, a futurism podcast, after its host Rose Eveleth was featured on the most recent episode of Planet Money. As Eveleth explains in each intro, each episode starts with a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) dramatised picture of the future complete with faux news broadcasts and interviews. In the most recent episode The Ultimate Swatting, Eveleth looks at a future without mosquitos, a vector for some of the most deadly diseases. In her intro, set in 2021, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announce their implementation of some sophisticated computer system to best analyse a large-scale outbreak and respond. There’s one line in there that intrigued me:
The system also has scraped the web to consider social media, blog, and news content about the issue to weigh the arguments for an against each plan.
It might just be because 2020 is, in my mind, the threshold to “the future”, but the mention of “social media” clunked strangely for me. I’m not saying it’s inaccurate to suggest the continued dominance into the future of 2021 which isn’t that far away. But those words almost seem antiquated today. Like there is no longer a delineation made between computers and internet-connected computers, the socialness of cybersupported networks is increasingly an essential characteristic, and one that therefore might not needed to be made explicit. What “social media” might end up being is our fax machine.
There invariably must be some lauded piece of tech, one for which we all see a bright future, that is dominant now and which is destined for a nosedive. Perhaps it is, like I suggest, social media, or rather the use of the term as socialness is ubiquitous. If 3D TVs ever really saw market traction a few years ago, they would have been low-hanging fruit for future failure in the current climate of VR and 360˚ video. It’s next-to-impossible to be able to see these to-be-felled empires, part of the reason fax machines made it to 2015 in Back to the Future Part II. But the fact that they will fall is refreshing: we’re never done.
There is the flipside to all this: technologies that the world decrees will fall and yet maintain dominance. A classic, if slightly zany, example of this is the flying car. For decades, future-set fiction has been convinced that four wheels carrying its passengers in two dimensions would be replaced by three-dimensional travel through the skies on the thrust of jets or propellers. Short of some tech demos, this has largely remained a flight of fancy. A more grounded example of a product that just won’t die despite what everyone said is the laptop. With the mainstream release of multitouch tablets with the iPad in 2010, the notion of a post-PC era was floated endlessly. That our primary device would be a laptop beyond a few years seemed impossible. And yet it still is and the tablet is futher religated to a niche of the mythic “creative professional” or as a $99 piece of junk you throw at your kid for them to play with before they throw it at the floor. Sometimes people know what they want better than the market does.
For now I can only continue to use social media and my laptop. I have less insight than resources to predict the future technological landscape with any more acuity than gut feeling. But I know my lifetime will be witness to both monumental change and necessary stagnation.
I’ll just have to figure which is which when they happen.
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