16 newyork| november11–24, 2019
HE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE.
It’s just not evenly distributed.” ¶ When the novelist
William Gibson said this—probably in the late ’80s, though,
like a lot of prophetic aphorisms, when he first said it is
not exactly clear—he was describing distribution by place:
iPhones arriving en masse in Steve Jobs’s United States,
all-inclusive social-credit scores blanketing Xi Jinping’s
China, antibiotic-resistant superbugs cropping up in India
before spreading as far as the Arctic, climate change
flooding the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh long before it
conquers New York or Tokyo. ¶ But the distribution is
uneven in time, too, because the future never arrives all at
once with the thunderclap of a brave new world suddenly
supplanting the comfortable old one. Which is why future-
gazerslikeGibsonare always talking about how their works aren’t about the future—and pointing
outhowterribletheirrecords would be in predicting it—but about the world in which they were
written.¶ Theyare right.Today the world has the uncanny shimmer of future weirdness, its every
weekstuffedwithnew events that seem to open up strange new realities only to be forgotten as
thenextwaveofstrangeness hits. But as the decade pulls to a close, we’re unpacking the last year of
it ina timelineofcrucial2019 dates that played like premonitions of where we’ll be ten years from
now.Thefuture is present in these moments—epic, like the battle for Hong Kong; eerie, like virtual
makeup;andpersonal,like contemplating gender-confirmation surgery. ¶ What kind of present
is it? Incertain ways, it’s an in-between one: We’ve spent 2019 waiting for Brexit and for 2020,
for the next round of climate talks and the next recession. But taking a tour through the calendar of
news events with an eye toward the future is actually pretty dizzying. Somehow, our present is
both Neuromancer and The Handmaid’s Tale, both Waterworld and Mad Max, Idiocracy and
1984 (an updated version of 1984, anyway, in which the nations of Oceania pride themselves on the
freedom exhibited by handing over surveillance powers to corporations that work with police
states, rather than to the police states themselves). ¶ Those worlds of novels and movies might
seem contradictory, but it’s not as though we have to choose only one when imagining the future.
Reality is much messier than that, much weirder. It’s not one history book following one arc,
whose shape you can judge from the cover that encloses it. It’s full of not just revolutions but
counterrevolutions, dead ends and false starts and false predictions. Over the next decade, at least
a few of these will probably come to seem naïve or Pollyannaish or prematurely apocalyptic.
But we’ll also, presumably, come to find a lot more of them obvious and old news. By then, the
weirdness of the future might not even feel so weird.