The closest I have come to the future the future promised in 2001, A Space Odyssey
Seriously. Is this the ten, or the teens, or what? The last decade seems to have no name at all (the noughties? the nils?). We seem to be living in some epochal limbo, where things change but kinda stay the same. Like we’re waiting for history to begin again, in the twenties perhaps.
Aside from faster Internet, I can’t say that my life is that much different from 1992. The blips of Steve Jobs aside, we haven’t seen that much revolutionary genius, and even then, I used a touchscreen Apple in the 1990s. It was called the Newton. It’s much the same in the arts. Things are updated, but not drastically different. Drive is essentially an updated Steve McQueen movie with updated 80s music. I just bought a plaid shirt cause apparently that’s back again.
An interesting article from Vanity Fair says much the same.
Try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012. (You Say You Want A Devolution?)
It’s tempting to say Facebook, or cell phones, but really? Most changes of the past 20 years have been within systems, not changes of systems. The internal combustion engine was a new paradigm, as was the nuclear bomb. In the recent past, we’ve just modified the car (hybrids, electrics) without challenging it fundamentally. We’ve made smaller nukes and different bombers but again, nothing game changing. It’s also worth remembering that in the not so recent past we also discovered electricity, penicillin and other wonders that seem like magic right now. Most changes in my lifetime have been within systems not changes of system per se, with the exception of the World Wide Web in 1990.
World History
I think that we are in a period of general stasis, until more people catch up. While the fortunes of the US or Europe have stayed the same or decline, the rest of the world has changed dramatically, China, India and now Sri Lanka in the lead. These countries are generally adopting western innovations (roads, communications, etc), but at some point they’ll have a head of steam going into 2020 and push beyond. William Gibson has said the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. I think, in these unnamed decades, it’s slowly distributing itself before it explodes into something new in the nameable 20s. If we don’t have flying cars by 2050 I’m going to be pissed.
I think this decade has changed our perception of what technological advancement should look like. Expecting the latest innovations to manifest themselves in the form of computers and mobile phones have enabled us to talk about the advancements of the decade past without sparing a thought about the human genome project – or bio-tech and pharmaceutical industries in general. One of my friends who is a Doctor says that most of what he learnt in Med School 5 years ago has already been outdated as a result of decoding the human genome – much of what doctors thought they knew has been thrown out the window and it won’t be long before every child’s genome would be sequenced and perhaps even modified at birth or prior.
Yet bio-tech and pharmaceuticals have advanced much faster than any other technology in the past 20-30 years out of public sight and scrutiny. We can jail-break iPhones with our eyes closed and develop all kinds of apps for every conceivable task, but even doctors don’t know much about the drugs they prescribe – what they contain and how they work. We don’t know much about the side-effects or long-term impact of most drugs or genetically modified food. most countries do not mandate food labeling to enable consumers to identify GM/Non-GM food…
The world sure has changed a lot in the last 10 (let alone 20) years – what’s scary is that even the CEO of Monsanto may not be able to describe how much!
Aw come on! This blog itself is an example of the sort of changes we’ve had since the 90s. Back in 92 most of us couldn’t afford computers and the Internet wasn’t even accessible from Sri Lanka. And we definitely did not have the option of publishing content online like this. The biggest change though is that the Internet allows anyone to access the global market for services like never before. You no longer need to emigrate to the west in order to get access to their labour market. You can do so from the comfort of your own home in your own country via the Internet. This is a huge change because for most of human history people have physically travelled to where the jobs are. Now the jobs come to where you are!
From historical perspective this was the decade where america lost its hegemony.