Posthuman Blues

Notes from the future

I've become transfixed by images from an imagined future forty or fifty years from now -- maybe less. Most of the "creative process" has been purely subliminal; I'm piecing it together from images harvested from dreams. Only occasionally do I indulge in wide-awake extrapolation.

I'm surprised how old the future looks, but perhaps I shouldn't be. Right now we're in the midst of a continent-wide suburban boom. New stripmalls, entertainment complexes and stand-alone stores crop up in endless profusion, sterile and oddly welcoming, only to be razed and supplanted by their Darwinian successors. Consequently, everything looks new, with an almost CGI luster.

This phase won't last. The present riot of consumer sprawl will wind down as resources become scarcer. Very soon, the available real-estate will be consumed and the fervor that fueled expansion will be forced to find new channels; the present obsession with prefab architecture will become a near-maniacal need to retrofit -- fulfilling William Gibson's sly prophecy that "the street finds its own use for things." The commercial sheen of today's store and restaurant interiors will become dingy by comparison with our own -- age-scuffed and time-battered utilitarianism seeking to subvert its millennial origins.

This reinvented world is hushed, stagnant; the excesses of today's fast-forward commercial ecology keep the population in virtual submission. It's not necessarily that there are fewer people; it's simply that humans will find themselves dwarfed by structures whose function seems to balance on the razor's edge of obsolescence. Ever seen a deserted shopping mall slated for demolition? Imagine a whole country with that same sad, desiccated atmosphere; a world thrown rudely upon the concrete shores of its own past.

A man sits on the jetee, bracketed by clammy concrete walls, and sips rice tea. He watches the tide -- warm and strangely odorless -- rush in, crashing against the fortified seawall with a peculiarly electric sound. Lukewarm spray beads the asphalt between his feet.

I am watching.