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01/15/2005: "What Century Did You Say it Was?"

“I am not amused by this 21st Century. I want to take it back for a full refund, and can I have a real one, please?” Charles Stross, Science Fiction Author. Not too long ago I picked up a cool book in a used bookstore. Published in the Sixties, and clearly inspired by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, it was an anthology of stories about life at the turn of the Millennium. It was pretty much what you’d expect as an extrapolation of the Sixties, heavy on rocket travel just as that decade’s inspiration to teens like me was the Dawn of the Space Age. I was even lined up to go to the Georgia Tech School of Aerospace Engineering, but took the Academy appointment instead (good thing or I’d probably be sleeping on park benches). Let’s not give up on citizen space flight, though – maybe Space Ship One will come through. In any case – even if the rocketry part of the Year 2000 didn’t happen, lots of really cool devices have popped up in its place. Back in the Sixties, would I ever imagine that I’d one day be working up musings on a slim laptop holding billions of characters of data that I would then post in a form instantly available to millions around the globe who could find these musings simply by coming up a few words expressing their general interest in the topics of my musings? I don’t remember that thought ever occurring. Or that I’d be wearing headphones that act like a mute button for the outside world, or I’d be able to listen to every album I owned from a device the size of a seashell? (I’m thinking of the time, as the original space cadet, I lugged my LP record collection around Europe). Or that I’d carry a phone around on my belt that allows me to dial ten years worth of contacts with just a few keystrokes, and even check out how popular my latest musings have been? So if all these cool toys, why do I feel exactly like Stross, that we need to return our substandard real-life 21st Century to sender? It’s simple. In decades of imagining life in the new century, we all assumed that there would be advancements in society beyond cool new toys. Instead, society has been moving backwards since George W. Bush was sworn in! Let’s pick just one example, the personal hot button that recurring readers of these musings doubtless cringe at when it pops up yet again: fiscal policies. We’re in fact back to the 16th century, when governments did things that we now know to be foolish debasement of their currencies. The bottom line is that I thought that when we clicked over to a new century the number would be going up, not down! In fact, maybe I should start running the dates on the site backwards!