Welcome to the Year 2805?
What fictional dystopian vision is the internet accelerating us toward?
To put it lightly, I am addicted to the internet.
I know this because it started when I got an iPhone in early 2014. I held onto my beat up Blackberry Bold for as long as I could but like the other three Blackberry’s I had previously (RIP), it was time to move on.
Having immediate access to social media was a dream come true but it came at a cost (both literally and figuratively). Since that day, the first thing I do when I wake up each morning is check my phone. I’ll open Twitter to see what’s going on the world, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook to check what my friends are up too, and finally the weather. Unless I’m at work, on the subway, paying attention in class or doing my best to study I compulsively check social media, sometimes every 30 minutes and sometimes every 2–5 minutes. I will continue this pattern until the battery on my phone / laptop dies or until I go to sleep — whichever comes first.
When I was a kid, I thought the future would be something like an episode of “The Jetsons.” The 1960’s cartoon set in the year 2062, made flying cars and robots look so glamorous it didn’t seem like a bad way to picture life.
Needless to say my outlook on the future has dramatically shifted but still somehow resembles a fictional cartoon world. When PIXAR and Disney released WALL-E, we were introduced to the cutest trash collecting robot on a mission to clean up. Having premiered almost 10 years ago, the film was well ahead of its’ time covering topics such as mass consumption, obesity, environmental devastation and the danger of technology.
I remember watching the movie the summer before entering high school long before I had an iPhone or personal laptop and thinking how absurd the people in the year 2805 were. Stuck inside a spaceship, people became incredibly obese, relying on a floating lounge chair to move around as they drink their meals and stare at a screen all day.
Now I’m not obese and I have only ever had a liquid meal once (post wisdom teeth surgery) but like the fictional people in WALL-E, I spend way too much time online. I can honestly say that there have been a number of occasions I’ve spent so long on my computer I haven’t been able to remember the last time I had a conversation with a real person. Coming to the realization that I’m more similar to the people in WALL-E than I am to Judy Jetson was a hard pill to swallow.
I’m not saying the Internet is solely to blame but it was definitely easier to idealize the future before it came along. Somehow we’ve managed to incorporate aspects of these fictional worlds into our daily lives — both the good and the bad. When I look at where we are today in the year 2017 and think about what the future holds, it seems impossible that there can be more to come. The internet has done an amazing job connecting millions of people and advancing society but it has also propelled us into a dystopian world where it’s normal to live on the internet all day.
So while 2805 may seem like a long way away (788 years to be exact), at the rate the Internet is going I think we’re a lot closer to it than we’d like to admit.
