The Memory Sticks
“There are no books written about the future. All books are written about the present, only some of them are set in the future.” – Dewi Heald
One of the curious privileges of reaching the middle of your life is that you have the chance to look back on what was predicted when you were younger and laugh at it. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to have some kind of detailed analysis of what was once predicted but I think that laughter is better. Our best polling companies find it hard to predict the outcome of elections at the moment, so anyone being able to predict what will happen in a far away year like 2017 is probably going to be wide of the mark.
What should we be laughing at then? The anniversary of the introduction of the Compact Disc brought with it a lot of replaying of the TV footage showing how CDs would be ‘indestructable’ and that you could eat your breakfast off them without affecting the sound quality. I remember when I first heard a CD skip and thought ‘hold on, that was supposed to be impossible’. Then again, I remember seeing TV programmes in the 1980s that made fun of 1960s TV programmes which speculated that technology would lead to an increase in our leisure time and that no-one would have to work more than twenty hours a week. Those juggling four or five zero hours contracts or working in forced self-employment in every hour available may find that a surprising prediction.
Perhaps that is one reason why depictions of the future or alternative societies have swayed more towards dystopia than utopia recently. ‘The Hunger Games’ is the obvious example, though perhaps that is layered with enough fantasy and romance that not everyone will wonder if Katniss’s home district is actually Wales (or an American equivalent). Perhaps it depends what you want to take from it - I would also note that the theme of technological advance bringing huge inequality is quite well described but do people watch it and see it as relevant to their world? (or do they just think that the same theme was beautifully captured in just a few seconds during the opening sequences of Joss Wheedon’s TV series ‘Firefly’ but, hey, who wants an opening sequence when you can have a four film franchise?). I would like to think that there is one person who watched through the recent adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale' and thought 'Hmm, that was entertaining, but was it trying to make a point about something ...?'.
My brother has recently started reading ‘The Tale of Charlotte the Liberator’ (as you can do if you visit this wonderful site – http://dewiheald.wixsite.com/rainbows/latest-release) and he asked me why it was set about twenty years into the future. This was actually the last dilemma before it was published and I did wait to see if my test readers would pick up on it or not. Put simply, I wanted to extend some of the ideas that exist in 2017 to their logical or illogical conclusion. Yet, my brother notes, everyone still uses memory sticks in the novella – what point is this making?
That whole set of scenes about education had their root in discussions by a friend about the kind of world that his children will inherit. He thinks that it will be a world where white collar jobs have been replaced by automation and education has become a product linked to a specific outcome rather than learning being a good thing in itself. You can see education already heading this way, be it in Michael Gove’s demand that schools teach ‘the right history’ or the interesting phenomenon where students regard their £9,000 fee as buying the ‘right answers’ to get them to pass the exams. The idea of education helping you to develop into an intelligent, thoughtful, resourceful, enquiring and sensible person seems rather old-fashioned suddenly.
You can see the effect of automation already. I have done twenty training courses in the last year and only three of them involved interacting with other people. When I talk to friends starting new jobs now, I often hear that their first two days are spent sitting in front of a computer screen ‘doing induction’. Training appears to be something delivered by a computer and not a human being now. By logical extension, why will schools not end up as places where you sit in front of a computer and are told what you need to know to pass the exam?
Before you decide that I am being outrageously unreasonable with that last question, consider that we first meet Charlotte on the day that she has been ‘talking to the Careers Computer’. This is deliberate. That was how I received my careers advice at school, so the idea that that principle will simply continue to be extended into other areas of teaching does not seem that fanciful for me. How helpful was it that a BBC Micro told me that I could be an Army Officer? Not so much. What is a ‘BBC Micro’? Search for it on your smartphone, that is what phones are for!
My own view of the future tends to be that it will be a lot like the present, only more so. Things change slowly and usually in ways that we are not expecting. Walking to the station this morning I saw evidence of a huge change that has happened during my adult life. Outside every house was a small mountain of different coloured boxes and bags. As recently as fifteen years ago, I remember conversations in a pub about how people could not be expected to use different bags for their rubbish. I cannot remember the figure for my county, but I have a feeling that we are now at a situation where over fifty percent of our waste is recycled. That has come from almost nowhere and certainly recycling was a fringe and much-derided interest when I was a child.
Even things that do change quite quickly can surprise people. I would love to find evidence that anyone predicted that the rise of smartphones would lead to the end of phone calls. Yet the number of people who make phone calls on their smartphone is now small. Do you remember when we were told that textspeak was ruining language? Textspeak has largely gone now, victim of the decline in texting and unlimited text deals which mean that you no longer have to shorten everything. Oddly enough it lives on it parts of the mainstream – I am sure that anyone who has been involved in any kind of ‘youth-focussed’ education programme will have come across schemes with names like Activ8, Innov8, Motiv8 as cool ways to educ8 or just Nausi8.
This is one reason why I tend to avoid TV, films and books set in the future. I think that there is a real danger that trying to make things look ‘futuristic’ leads people to try to make things look very different. In 2017 we do not have hoverboards or hovercars, though bizarrely we may have seen the beginning of the end of the petrol engine (again, electric cars have been talked about for years but who predicted that Volvo would stop making petrol cars from 2019 or that European countries would set the target of the end of petrol cars by 2040?).
Wendy Cope captured the dramatic vision of the future and the banality of the actual changes in two lines from one of her Shakespeare parodies. She describes a future where “Travel agents sell trips to outer space / And Tulse Hill’s a trendy place.” Space tourism seems forever just around the corner and I cannot comment on Tulse Hill’s current status but I do wonder which is the greater change or potential human achievement.
Of course, I am not the first person to note that writing about the future is really writing about the present. Things may happen a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, but sci-fi tales of love, betrayal, fighting for good and comedy droids are just stories about us and our lives set somewhere unfamiliar. It is also why stories set in the past work as well.
There is a reason for this that should stand out but, strangely to my mind, does not do so. I had to learn it on day one of my studies in university but it seems obvious now. Back on that first day, the newly-assembled bright and enthusiastic students were given Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War or rather the causes of it. It was all about two rival power blocks and how they amassed weapons in a competitive way which could only lead to conflict. We were then given an account of the Cold War and how two power blocks amassed weapons in a competitive way ...
In other words, the times, the devices, the smartphones, the circumstances and the situations all change but we human-beings pretty much stay the same. It is not that history repeats itself, it is that we are the same creatures that we always were and always will be. I actually find something rather comforting in this. Yes, our age is not outstandingly loving, generous or kind but it also not an age that is outstandingly cruel, narrow-minded or angry. We always have room for improvement but we could always be doing a lot worse.
It is no wonder that the stories that we tell each other about the past, the present and the future are essentially the same.
As for the memory sticks, I leave you to speculate as to whether their inclusion in a book set in the 2040s was a deliberate commentary on uneven technological advancement or whether it was just that I could not think of any other computer-friendly way to physically transfer a large amount of information. They might last. They are indestructible after all ... like CDs.
