Closing thoughts for the 00s

What a weird decade just happened. Seriously. I have a couple forward-looking notes.

IN

Curation. I know I’m one to talk, but I can’t handle any more accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Digital or analog, no difference. To return to an old refrain: quality, quality, quality.

OUT

I don’t know, everything. Brian Eno said recently that we’re living in a “stylistic tropics,” which is a sweet way to put it. But I think that means nothing’s cool, not everything. Look at poor chillwave, a not even year-old musical micro-genre (which I like, by the way) that has been hated on since demos of unreleased albums under its chilly umbrella appeared on Mediafire. It almost seems like once something flocks together enough to be named, it’s finished.

PREDICTIONS for the 10s

• It will be shocking how fast books and magazines leave their corporeal shells when it all goes down. At first, yes, it’ll be rich nerds with their iSlates and college freshmen saving money on textbooks but by 2020 Coby will be selling a $12 reader with a Google Books interface at the train station. And at some point you will gaze upon your hoard of A-C size paperbacks and think to yourself, I have read these, and weigh getting all that space back against the cost of repurchasing a digital copy of something when you need it. And you will divest.
• I think rapid prototyping is going to make it into the home. I do. Part of the allure will be the post-consumerism of it, making things when you need them and then throwing them back to be remade when they’ve served their purpose. Momus has more on the dream of a 1:1 production/consumption society, which is what I hope we’re headed towards.
• There’s going to have to be some kind of reckoning between people who are committed to social justice and those who aren’t. This is not a democrat/republican issue or a religion/doubt issue, it’s the future versus the past. Aaron Schwartz wrote recently on the shifting of the Overton window re: slavery and murder, both of which were perfectly acceptable in American history as long as you were targeting the right ethnic groups. Put in proper perspective, there’s a lot of insane shit going on right now domestically. 49 million of us were living in food-insecure households in 2008. In America. You can’t think clearly if you’re hungry; you can’t function. We have way too many people in prison, for the wrong reasons. One group of citizens has legal rights another group is denied. If you can reflect on these facts without being upset on some level, you have a chip missing. And yet many among us seem to be missing that crucial part. Something must go down between these two tribes. I realize I sound like a humorless socialist but I’m not against classes or capitalism, just for some FUCKING MINIMUM STANDARDS OF LIVING FOR EVERYONE. This is not an unachievable utopia, it’s Denmark with guns and Jersey Shore.

Also, robots are going to kill the shit out of us