If you’ve been around on the Internet much in the last decade you’ve probably come across this t-shirt. The sentiment it expresses isn’t new, in fact it started to manifest itself in music and literature about 30 years ago. An entire generation has grown up with this now, a feeling that somehow we’ve been cheated out of a world that could have been.
I know I’ve felt it, for years that was one of my favorite t-shirts. I bought mine when it first came out a decade ago and wore it thin. I was still wearing it out just a few years back, but now hardly at all anymore. Why? I’m still kinda pissed at the world for its inequitable distribution of the future, but I realized my idea of what the future should entail has evolved considerably over time and all of this shirts questions have been answered. So here we go, let me ruin that for you:
Where is my jetpack?
New Zealand. Ok, so that’s technically not a jetpack. How about the Jetlev? C’mon it only costs like 6 grand and there’s even groupons for it. Not good enough? Well I guess you could go ahead and kill yourself trying to pilot the fastest jetpack on the planet. The point is, the jetpack has been around already. Hell they’ve been flying the things around for the entire history of the Superbowl, jetpacks these days are about as futuristic as computers. They just turned out to be a hell of a lot less portable, practical or useful.
Where is my robotic companion?
I don’t know, do you mean Asimo, Roomba, Pleo, Cogniron, Huggable, Robosapien, Wrex, Roxxxy, Karotz, Tri-Bot, Big dog, Little dog, Paro, Travis, Kota, Sphero, Aibo, Nao, Mahru, Wakamaru, Joebot, Cocorobo, Smartpet, or (Gods help you) Furby?
I can’t keep track of your stuff for you, it’s probably been left where you interacted with it last. What, you didn’t let it out unsupervised did you? You know those things aren’t 3 laws compliant yet…
Where is my dinner in pill form?
Look, not even Ray Kurzweil can live on pills alone and he sure as hell is doing his damndest. We’ve known this for a long time too, as this excellent article on meal pills by Lord Prime Paleofuturist Matt Novak points out, you can get your minerals & vitamins in pill form, but as long as you’re just a puny human you can only get your calories from eating food, so that Jetsons shit won’t fly.
Where is my hydrogen fueled automobile?
Now that’s a good question. It’s not like we don’t have the technology right? We’re told by industry that hydrogen vehicles should become cost effective for mass production around 2015, IF there’s a fuel infrastructure to support them. Seeing as the backbone of that infrastructure, the ‘Hydrogen Highway‘ was promised for 2010, odds are we’re not going to hit that marker. For the time being you’ll have to settle for electric or hybrid.
Where is my nuclear powered levitating house?
Japan. Or at least it will be if you can convince the Japanese that ditching all their nuclear power generation is an incredibly stupid idea and they should be investing in developing more and safer capacity instead. Not interested in living as a Gaijin? I’m sure the tech will make it to your own earthquake prone region soon enough. If your municipal net runs on nuclear, you’re in luck!
Where is my cure for this disease?
Sorry, but it’s terminal. The good news is you can manage the symptoms and still live a long, fulfilled & maybe only mildly disgruntled life. Can’t really complain much about not having a flying car when your pocket contains a magic light square that can access the entire sum of human knowledge. We are living in the future, it’s just not your dead Grandfathers’ future.
If you’ve been annoyed recently by the fact that cool kids are running around dressed like your grandmother you may want to look into the concept of Atemporality. If you’ve been moaning that nothing new happens in art anymore perhaps The New Aesthetic is something you should be looking into.
With more people running into this meme all the time it’s going to be around for a while yet. But for your own sanity, consider letting dead futures lie. Or if you think sanity is overrated, you might want to start asking yourself some new questions…
Where is my global energy-backed p2p currency?
Where is my space habitat vacation & cheap sub-orbital flights?
Where is my post-agile intelligent democracy?
Where is my equitable distribution of the future?
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free. An essay on why Donald Fagen’s I.G.Y is the single best science fiction song. Ever.
Full disclosure/disclaimer. The Nightfly album has been played to me since before I was able to make memories. It was grafted into my mind during the period in which I began to experience conscious thought, which may have resulted in a mild bias and the smoking of Chesterfield cigarettes.
Despite my bias and the opinions of a bunch of people who are wrong on the internet, I maintain that this song stands alone as the best sci-fi song ever, standing above others in several respects. First let’s take the lyrics, this song features the following:
Not to mention “more leisure time for artists everywhere” and Spandex jackets for everyone. That’s a rich world to build in just six minutes.
The Wikipedia entry for I.G.Y. states that “The song is sung from an optimistic viewpoint during the IGY”. (International Geophysical Year, a period of international cooperation in Earth Sciences, during which Russia launched Sputnik and the Space Race kicked off.) On the surface the lyrics indeed shine with the graphite and glitter of the golden age, but the fact that this song was written in the early 80′s betrays a very different sentiment.
As a childhood member of the Science Fiction Book Club, Mr. Fagen cites several sci-fi authors as having influenced his lyrics, and admits to stealing most from the dark humor and satire of Alfred Bester (also William Gibson’s favorite). Instead of Space Age optimism this song oozes with cynicism for futures that never came to pass. The very same cultural zeitgeist that fueled what would then be the next major movement in sci-fi literature, ‘the cyberpunkers’ as Fagen calls them.
This record stands lyrically in perfect balance between the two major movements in (american) 20th century science fiction, using the imagery of the golden age in sarcasm to express the sentiment that fueled cyberpunk. A feeling my generation has grown up with, and which now haunts us through the new art brought forth from our relationship with the machines.
Then the music itself. Tastes differ obviously, and we can probably agree that chart positions don’t mean much in determining how good a song really is, but there is something to be said for distribution and staying power. This song is ubiquitous at a level probably only paralleled by other Steely Dan records. It gets airtime on every inoffensive easy cool smooth mellow jazz rock station and supermarket the world over. Whether you like it or not, you know this song.
Music can, to some extent, be judged on its technical merits, the quality of its sound. In this case I.G.Y. stands entirely in a class of its own. This track is so impeccably produced that professional audio engineers use it to calibrate their systems. It’s been called ‘the Freebird of Pro Audio‘ but it’s more like the International Prototype Meter. It’s a benchmark. Hifi geeks know this song so well that when listening to it they no longer necessarily hear the song, they hear the quality of the system it’s playing on. No other record even comes close to being used as widespread in this way.
In conclusion, as Science Fiction is a literary genre we return to the lyrics. Note that nothing in the text is entirely unfeasible, or even improbable. There are no aliens, no transporters, no FTL drives, no dragons, no other dimensions and no magic wand bullshit. Politics aside humans could build everything in this song in a matter of decades. It’s an aspirational world Fagen has built, and it’s an achievable one. That is straight up hard science fiction. I don’t care how many synths you built or how spaced out your video is, this is the best science fiction song. I rest my case, thank you for your time.
Get it on iTunes or Amazon
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Bonus reading: The Cortico-Thalamic Pause: Growing Up Sci-Fi
An essay by Donald Fagen himself on his Science Fiction influences.