Che Sera Sera

Being blind to the future can have an interesting effect: The generation gap. By being unaware of the possible extent of changes over the passage of time, people have come to habituate themselves to what was normal at a certain period of time. This is typically when they were younger.

Now let’s zip to the Cyberpunk era. While it may seem to be a long time back, it is probably something a number in this current generation of youths would hold dear. That is, the long ranger hacker or underground hacker associations resisting the cruel Orwellian techno-governments. Already some of this has come true, with increased surveillance and branding information sharers as criminals and communists.

How about the future? We could perhaps have a future somewhat more similar to that of the Japanese, with widespread embracing of high technology and rather more general apathy. In that future, current hacker heroes would be seen as an anachronism and irrationally resistant to change. They would probably be stodgy old fogies than the dynamic messiah figure of today. Of course, this is all assuming that the world as we know it doesn’t end by 2013…