The Last Blog Ever

(from my ongoing project to transfer all my old essays from The Dopple Gang and elsewhere to Tumblr)

How To Survive And Thrive In The Future

Many people assume that by the time the future arrives, they’ll be ready to deal with it. After all, time has sort of just slogged around for umpteen billion years, waiting until the last minute to even produce a sentient race. But the problem, as Ray Kurzweil pointed out in the thinking man’s Bible, The Singularity Is Near, is that the rate of progress keeps changing. It was 12 billion years until life evolved on Earth, another few hundred mil until having more than one cell became the cool thing to do, and then in that same amount of time it went to dinosaurs (with lasers and a space-faring empire? We’ll never know, but that would fuck up my theory a lot. But I wouldn’t care at all). It was then a mere 65 mil to humanity, a few dozen thousand to civilization, and then suddenly we’re all playing Tamagotchi in middle school. According to that scale, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that the jump from Tamagotchi to Skynet should be happening any day now. Although God knows Bush will leave it for the next President to deal with! Hahaha. Seriously though, this isn’t a political column.

The moral is that by the time next year rolls around, it’s gonna be 2169, we’re all probably gonna be Asian, and you’re gonna be fucked unless you can flip on your simstim and ride that deck straight into the Metaverse to, uh…blade…run.

4.) Be Addicted To Drugs
The alienation of modernity was a constant theme for 20th century philosophers, and a constant feature of their visions of the future. That shit ain’t got nothin’ on the future. Sharing wallet photos of your (probably Asian) kids will be replaced by scamming strangers for some cold Chinese cash, a warm bed, or just some uppers to keep you going. Rather than Fritz Lang’s seas of mindless workers and vapid dilettantes in Metropolis, the populace of the future will consist of eleven billion unemployed computer hackers with nothing in common except a seething emptiness for the love that left them, a seething need to make one last run in cyberspace, and a seething hunger for one more fix of those sweet, sweet amphetamines. Oh, god, to just slap on one more dermpack, to have your central nervous system light up like an old pinball machine, until finally your senses ratchet up into a high-pitched whine like the turbine on a PanAm moon-jet as the atmosphere gives out and the blades are spinning at frictionless speed. That kind of high. FUCK! Basically, this will be the basis of all your short-lived but extremely intense friendships in the future, until you discover digital drugs. Those are going to be awesome.

3.) Be Insanely Good At A Skill No One’s Had To Be Good At For 200 Years
Sometime this spring, everyone will be able to replace all their muscles and read Wikipedia on a display fed straight to their retinas. Being smart will not help you, due to a combination of everyone being smart and you being really high on amphetamines all the time. So, for some reason, it will suddenly become insanely useful to be an excellent clockwork tinkerer (immune to viruses), martial artist (ok, always cool and useful), and world-class piano player (yes, a computer/Asian can play the piano…but not with soul). All of these, precisely because they are so fucking cool and out of date, will be both exactly the method to defeat the ultra-intelligent AI’s taking over the planet and the one thing those ultra-intelligent AI’s failed to take into account. Because it was so human. And because robots are allergic to the piano.  But mostly because it was so human.

2.) Be Ready To Go Back To 10,000 B.C. At Any Moment
Yes, cars will fly, the human brain will be downloaded onto computers, and women will run around in latex kicking ass. Also, an unstoppable computer virus will wipe out every digital entity on the planet, someone will fuck up and pour too much fish food into the ocean, and the invention of something way bigger than the hydrogen bomb will be pondered for about five minutes before it goes off by accident. If anything is certain about the future, it is that it will be the last thing 99.9% of humanity sees before a big flash. Don’t be caught on the ass-end of global extinction. Either get the fuck away from the planet or have a backup club and loincloth at the ready, because whatever else survives with you will probably take the form of being huge and angry (and still probably Asian). On the plus side, your girlfriend will have to reluctantly thank you for locking her in your underground cavern.

1.) Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Work For A Giant Corporation
If there’s one other thing any good survey of the future reveals, it’s that in the future big business is way, way bigger. There may be eleven billion unemployed computer hackers, but there will also be about 50-70 billion employees of humongous, probably Asian, mega-transnational-corporations. And they all have plans to destroy the world. Plans to destroy/take over/enslave the world are very popular in the future, not only among robots and AI programs, but among normal evil businessmen as well. We’ve all heard the reasons for working for one of these huge corporations: good pay, health benefits, and top-of-the-line brain implants that contain devices which will turn you into a zombie as soon as your company enters Phase Omega. Granted, a nice person like you will work in the part of the company that manufactures cute pink toys for all the (probably Asian) children of the world. Aside from the fact that those cute pink toys will also have a bloodcurdling role to play in Phase Omega, the central narrative in each of those eleven billion computer hackers’ lives will be their epic battle with your corporation. And when the internal security system of Awesome Toys, Inc. is compromised, it will be you and your family (probably Asian, and also employed by Awesome Toys, Inc.) who are turned into quivering jelly by the nerve gas burped up by those pink bears. The line between henchman and bystander is too fine for a death toy to distinguish.