Your World Is Going to Shatter
A letter from the future
Dear Reader,
If I tell you that I’m writing this letter from 2069, what do you imagine? Am I curled over a gleaming white desk in a hypermodern cube that’s lofted some impressive stack of stories into a sky filled with floating cars? Am I painted like a rainbow by a tapestry of neon lights, the electric dreams of future men still in the form of those noble gasses of the past? Am I scrubbed clean by a fleet of microscopic robots, brothers and sisters of the machines that rip pollutants out of the air and suck heavy metals out of the soil?
Perhaps your image is bleaker. I might be scribbling this dispatch in a barren desert, wearing rags or skins or paints, hiding and hunting. Everything awful has culminated in exactly the kind of heroic dystopia you were promised. Nature and human violence have conspired to create a neat dramaturgy of epic struggle and survival.
Maybe you place me in a future that doesn’t look much different than your present, your faith in the unbroken continuity of human reason more powerful than your imagination. The phones are nicer — they bend now! — and the delivery of commercial goods is faster, but I’m otherwise still in the same mid-century walkup that you’re in, sitting in the same fake Eames chair that you one-clicked from the internet, and still…
