The Future ... looms

An excellent  NTTimes OPEd piece talks about the future and how today's toxic political and social atmosphere, driven mostly by Agent Orange, has impacted this country in ways both astounding and disquieting at the same time. Loss of civility, lack of critical thinking and incoherent anger tops the list along with a distrust of the future where tech is not what it seems to be while the environment unravels at speeds thought impossible until now. 

William Gibson, the writer who coined the term “cyberspace” and whose novel “Neuromancer” heavily influenced the film “The Matrix,” has spent a lifetime imagining surreal and noirish possibilities for human development. But Donald Trump’s victory threw him off balance. “I think it took me about three months to come out of the shock of his actually having been elected,” Gibson told me. And when he finally did come out of it, Gibson still wasn’t quite sure what to do with the manuscript he’d been working on, about a young woman in modern-day San Francisco, since the world he’d situated her in seemed to have suddenly disappeared.

“If I had somehow been able to finish it, by the time it was published, it would have just been this lost thing,” he said, “completely out of time and unconcerned with what I immediately saw as being the beginning of something extraordinary, and almost certainly something extraordinarily bad.”

Seque ...

Much of the new book, “Agency,” takes place in a stub where Hillary Clinton won the election and Brexit never happened. Characters from the future — from Gibson’s extrapolated version of our own dark timeline — try to help people in the alternate past avoid a similarly cataclysmic fate. The question looming over the book is not whether the future will be horrifying but whether there’s even the possibility of a future that isn’t.

BRT has tallied about this dire situation at length as my loyal readers know. Can we survive? To yours truly, the answer is a qualified yes but it will be difficult to say the least. This is why 2020 looms as the most important election this country has ever faced without issue.