3am Today

If you had ask me 50 years ago what I thought the future of electronics would look like, I would have told you marvelous visions that would have been incomprehensible to most. Instead, in my opinion, is way more bleak than I would have imagined.

I would have to imagine that a baby boomers basement are like little shrines to obsolete one-time cutting-edge VCR’s, corded telephones, beige PC monitors and the likes of everything in between. Way fewer Millennial’s will have basements to store one mans treasure, another mans trash as even home ownership has quickly on the verge of being obsolete. But presumably, once climate change really hits and they’re all renting cots in corporatized storm shelters, they’ll have little lockers to put stuff in. And it’s worth wondering: what worthless old technology will they be inexplicably hoarding?

When we think about technology – a weird and wonderful shape-shifting concept – we are quick to invoke ideas of time as a determinant. We expect some to become obsolete at some point, to come to an end, as they are replaced by new ones. This way of thinking is deeply ingrained as the norm. We think of particular historical times being characterized by particular machines or processes, and we imagine the future will be made anew by a few such machines and processes. The current favorite is something called AI. In this way of thinking some people are ‘ahead of their times’ while most of us, not having grasped the significance of what a few gurus claim to be the future, are of course ‘behind the times’.