In catching up with my RSS reader, I see that everyone and his brother is pointing me to that CNN “where’s my jetpack” article.
The article didn’t really interest me, but it does touch on some “man, the future of the past isn’t what it used to be thoughts” I’d been having at while at Disneyland–specifically, of course, while at Tomorrowland.
It’s bad enough to see how dated some of the designs are–and bear in mind that this area of the park gets redesigned all the time; these are designs from this decade capturing a nostalgic future, not designs from 1955–but it’s almost heartbreaking in some way to see the shiny, clean, sleek future slowly rotting before your eyes.
A quick example–this is the top of the current version of Autopia at Disneyland:
In case it’s not immediately clear to you what I mean about the heartbreaking touch of reality on Walt’s glorious future-of-the-past, allow me to present to you: the Rust Of The Future:
In case you haven’t noticed–and I suspect you all have–the actual future is a lot more cyberpunk than Star Trek. We’ll have our street-level tech, our virtual worlds, and our corporate distopias. The sleek types will get their elegant designs… but a year or three later, they’ll be scratched up, or covered over, or broken down. Entropy always wins, and rust never sleeps.
