Der Blog

In the rant attached to the last QC, in which the mysophobic Hannelore buys a Roomba, the cartoonist says "Truly we are living in the future."

I know it's becoming something of a cliché these days to say that (not to mention being semantically dubious), but it did make me realise: not only do we now have things comparable to PADDs, tricorders and communicators from Star Trek (PDAs and mobile phones), all of which seemed terribly futuristic at the time, we are improving on them by merging their functions (smart phones). But the robotic hoover seems the clincher to me, considering it's one of the many tiny details in Deus Ex which gives the game a "futuristic" atmosphere.

Ironically, the one technology that is arguably most characteristic of the "futuristic" era, the most socially and politically disruptive technology ever, is the one thing the sci-fi authors never predicted, at least in the form it now takes.

(Footnote: Of course, if anyone can point me towards an SF author predicting the international, egalitarian, democratic Web in a similar form to what we have now — not to mention the FLOSS movement, which I consider an integral part of the whole thing — I'll happily retract that statement. Note to self: read some William Gibson.)