Pamela McLean and David Pinto: An Exploration of the future through a mixture of fact and fiction.
Hi David,
I can understand your impatience to be started on our journey. I'm bad at packing. I spread out everything that I might need, and struggle to decide what to leave behind. I've seen advice that you should pack half of the stuff you think you'll need and take double the money. I'm sure it's good advice - assuming you can afford to double the money, and that there will be shops…
I'm never really ready to travel. It just becomes nearly time to go - I have to zip up my bags, check that I have the essential paperwork, and hope I've got it more or less right.
Maybe we should have fixed a time to leave. Maybe you won't wait much longer, so maybe I'd better just zip up my bags and trust I've got what I really need. After all, this is a trip into the future. We aren't going to be there alone. Other people will be there too. Maybe they'll help me to get hold of anything I forgot to bring.
In the future maybe some of the constraints we face now won't be constraints any more. Already we see things that seemed fixed tumbling around us. Much that our parents and grandparents accepted and took as unchangeable is long gone.
Many of our tumbling constraints relate to the death of distance, and time-shifting, and what I think of as “fluid walls”. I mean events where “being there” merges with “being involved at a distance” or through something recorded previously - events that are streamed and recorded, where some people contribute via Skype or other video links, where "being there" can sometimes feel like being a studio audience.
In the course of a day I slip between virtual and face-to-face worlds. I do the virtual equivalent of “bumping into people at the water cooler” and as we exchange greetings I don't think twice about the fact that I'm in the UK and they are thousands of miles away. People I value enormously, who are part of my high-trust network, who have taught me so much in past months and years, are scattered over the globe, and yet drop by casually to greet me at my screen and have a “catch up”. To my grandparents, my present normality would have seemed an unbelievable future.
Everyone we know now will be there, somewhere in the future, except those who perish on the way. They have no choice. We have no choice. We are all going on this journey. The present is crumbling rapidly, and becoming the past. There's nowhere to run, except into the future, so let's go. If I forget something no matter, maybe the time and space constraints will change even further and I'll be able to reach back for it.
Okay David. I'm zipping my bags, and wondering about the paperwork - tickets, passport, visas, currency - so many unknowns. I guess as long as I can go online, and i don't forget my passwords, I'm as ready as I'll ever be.
Are you going to collect me? Do we have any idea where we'll be heading? What next?