The Future Sucks, Just Like the Moon
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| The Jetsons with Orbit City in the back. |
When I was little, whenever I thought of the future, I would
picture the Orbit City from The Jetsons.
From their flying cars, to their Skypad Apartment. And I think I can say that
I’m pretty disappointed to not have anything near that in 2017. Yeah, I know,
not that many years have even passed since then, and The Jetsons did take place in 2062, but I would of thought by now I
would be able to just get into my car and head to the Dominican Republic
whenever I wanted to, you know? Even though my childhood dreams have not yet been
fulfilled, once I heard what Feed was
about, I was pretty excited to read it and get even more theories as to what
the future could be like.
Feed is novel written
by M. T. Anderson, published in 2002, that takes place 100 years or so after
our “feed”
installed into their brains which is basically a database like our modern-day
internet. So, imagine having your smartphone just a bit closer, like, inside
your head. And, like in The Jetsons,
they have cities in the sky!
Apparently though, the future that M. T. Anderson imagined,
is filled with obnoxious, illiterate, and not to mention ungrateful, teens.
They get the chance to travel to the moon but it apparently sucks?
“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to
completely suck.” (p. 3).
Thanks for making me cross that off my bucket list.
Oh wait, the way I described the teens from the future
doesn’t sound that different from the majority of teens now? Yeah, I thought
that too. Come to think of it, although I feel like the way Titus, the narrator
of the novel, speaks is slowly eating away at my brain cells, I still think
that M. T. Anderson did have some pretty good predictions of our future. I
mean, maybe we don’t have flying cars that give us the chance to get our brains
hacked on the moon, but there are a lot of things from this book that I feel
many of the teens from our generation, and younger, relate to.
One of the first things from the book that I feel is similar
to that of our time, as I referenced above, is the way Titus talks. It’s kind
of cringe worthy. Not only does he curse a ton, but he speaks in run-on
sentences that seem to never end. “Marty, his thing is that he’s good at like
anything, any game, and I just stand there silent and act cool, and we’re this
trio, the three of us guys, being like, total guys, which makes people let us
in and give us beer.” (p. 10). Quite the intellectual observation, right? Don’t
get me wrong, I’m not saying we’re just as uneducated and illiterate as he
seems to be, but there are a lot of us who’s forms of expression and vocabulary
are very limited or at least seem to be. I feel that this limitation is caused
by texting and how much we rely on it to communicate. Our vocabulary has
basically been deconstructed, with the use of acronyms and the struggle of
having to cut our thoughts short to fit into 160 word messages- or even worse a
140 tweet. I personally have heard countless people say “lol” out loud. Which
is ridiculous cause if you really were laughing out loud I don’t think you have
to say that. I’ve also heard people who have high school diplomas just sound so
unintelligent and struggle with having simple sentence structure. But really
when you think about the way they sound, it sounds just like the way people
communicate on social platforms.
Let’s talk about technological advances for a second. Yes, I
keep mentioning my disappointment on not having flying cars, but there are
other things that we have that are super advanced. I mean just look at our
smartphones and all we can do with them! I remember thinking the Motorola RAZR
was cool, and just look at how far we’ve come from that. Although these
technological advancements are great, I feel as though they are kind of dehumanizing
us slowly. We depend way too much on them and some people are even addicted to using
them.
The majority of us use the text predictor on our phones, and
even though it can really come in handy, if we were to be without it, a lot of
us would be stuck on how to express our thoughts. Similarly, in Feed¸ when the characters got their
feeds hacked and removed for rebooting, Titus found himself at a loss for words
at one point. And don’t even get me started on the weird things the feed suggests (like our smartphones).
“Her spine was, I didn’t know the word. Her spine was…? The feed suggested “supple.”
(p. 14).
And even though we do depend on our smartphones so much on
them, we still don’t even use it to our full advantage most of the time. We
have the ability to access almost all the information we could possibly want
and yet we take it for granted. Before, people had to go libraries, sit down
and read for hours until they found the answers to their homework. Yet, we can
just type our question into google and get an answer in seconds. And yet
a bunch of us don’t even do our
homework. This is another thing that was shown in Feed. Marty and Link, two of Titus’ friends, were arguing if the
face was an organ.
“Those aren’t organs.” “What do you mean?” “Your face isn’t
an organ.” (p. 7)
They could have just asked the feed and they would have
instantly had an end to their argument, but they didn’t even bother, probably because
they didn’t even care. Just like many of us. Sure, your economics homework
about how the inflation rate has changed through the pass decade, may seem
boring or useless, but its extra knowledge that could benefit you in the
future. But no, we just prefer to ignore it and not learn something new,
because we’re lazy.
These are only a few of the similarities I observed from the
first part of the novel. And I can’t wait to read the others that he has gotten
right. Maybe some of the ideas and predictions people have had of the future in
the past haven’t been up to par with the present time we live in, but M. T.
Anderson sure got some of our generations characteristics right. And we can
only wait and see if some of his other predictions come true.
Kelsey C. Words: 1124
Work Cited:
Anderson, M. T. Feed. Candlewick Press 2002.
