The Future

What is the future like? How will we know when we get there?

In the future, the digital becomes so ubiquitous that it points back to the real world—the real world encompassing the virtual and the material, the spiritual and the corporeal, the rational and the emotional, the human and the rest of us. 

Let’s call the real world utopia.

In the future, the thing and its representation trade places, and trade places again. The animated river is coded to imitate the incarnate river; the incarnate river, looked at through polarizing sunglasses, perhaps, reminds us of an animated river.

Digital choirs echo the human choirs singing in amphitheatres, cathedrals, and school gyms for millennia.

In some ways, the future is very much like the past. Sometimes the love song doesn’t represent the beloved; the beloved represents the love song. Digital orchestras wash under clicks from a digital mouth.

As tempo, timbre, and key changes evoke movement across a 2D landscape that changes abruptly, like levels in a Mario Bros game, it might seem like we have abandoned the round, planetary structure of traditional songs, in which the chorus comes around reliably like the equinoxes, and the verses supply seasonal changes. 

But have you ever looked at a picture of a Klein bottle? Or maybe Saint Idiot can animate one for you. The limitations and contradictions of the 2D (3D, 4D) only force us to think about the relationships that must exist when a nD perspective is taken.

Masculinity has, at different times, claimed to be an nD map of the real world; masculinity has postulated many different utopias. Masculinity has claimed to offer a complete picture, not only for men, but for all of us: humans, animals, plants, dead dinosaurs in the ground. 

But in the future we notice that the maps of masculinity can be faulty maps, war maps, maps that show mountains where there are valleys, prospective resource development where there are forests and oceans.

For a creature living in such a country, the maps of masculinity must be redrawn, or they threaten to become the territory; they threaten to replace the real world. 

And they threaten to replace the self, which becomes unknowable to itself. In the past, masculinity has encouraged us—wounded, bitter, confused—to use our own unknowable selves as maps of others. Their real world has been difficult to find, much less exalt, much less live in.

In the future, whole new vistas open up. 

Interdependence replaces exploitation and sacred economics replace the game of Monopoly all of us in the shadowland of capitalism are currently playing at gunpoint, in the past. 

In the future, friendship is one of our most advanced technologies. Friendship highlights once and for all the mutual dependence of subject and object, content and context, figure and background, warp and weft. Friendship is like tending a garden in a geodome greenhouse, but also like building a geodome greenhouse within the garden of Eden.

In the future, use is important; terracotta is durable only when wet; bubblewrap is only pleasurable while you’re popping it. Giving something away is a way of using it.

Meanwhile, taking something from someone else is just mutilating your own body.

Perhaps the future is oddly familiar. Digital winds and horns recall the alien jazz band playing at the club in every space opera ever.

But the future is not a space opera; the future is not a mirror. The instruments the aliens play do not hearken back to some golden age of human civilization, but toward utopia, where we discover the original technologies of interdependence hardwired into Earth’s largest-scale systems, where the gift economy is not something we engage in only with other humans. 

In the future, humans and their avatars become intimate with animals, tides, trees, planets, robots, aliens, the disembodied brain that is the internet, history, and even the aborted experiments of industrial capitalism.

Digital gongs wake us up and call us to prayer. Trickling water calls us to prayer. Siri calls us to prayer. Insects and wind chimes call us to prayer. The Star Trek theme calls us to prayer.

In the future, as in the past, God exists in the practice of prayer.

Is the future corporeal or virtual? Individual or collective? Holy or profane? The real world, or just a new map? In the future, we practice holding opposing ideas. We balance ourselves like a child striving to make more mistakes and fewer wrong choices, walking with a cup of juice in each hand.

The map we consult doesn’t describe every mushroom, flower, bit, and pixel. But it shows the sound paths to travel as we explore the new old real world.

“The Future” is a meditation on Saint Idiot’s 2021 album Alternate Utopias from a Nostalgic Future, and was commissioned by Saint Idiot (Tomáš Andel) for the album’s liner notes