I have seen the Future: and it stops. Now.
When I was a kid, living in England, I was transfixed by a series of occasional television programs presented by Northern Irish historian and “TV personality” James Burke. A man possessed of immense charm and authority, he nevertheless resembled - with his outsize spectacles and semi-afro – the quintessential idea of a slightly sexed-up egghead: a balding owl in a safari suit whose remaining follicles had been animated via massive doses of raw electricity. Burke’s mission in the mid-‘70s - back when there were three whole channels of “content” available to the public - was to illustrate basic scientific principles to the masses, in a series of illustrative demonstrations, via the communal wonder of the boob tube.
This was “educational programming” back when the British Broadcasting Corporation justified the importing of television sets into the family home because it was possible to still use this amazing new invention to hopefully enlighten and improve the increasingly threadbare weave of British society; rather than just surrender to a proletarian fascination with fat white men telling “paki” and “chink” jokes, or seeing women with rocket tits speak in exquisite double entendres on sit coms (“Well, Bob, I did let the milkman leave some cream in my back passage, but I’ll be buggered if that’s anything to do with the neighbors!”).
The James Burke Special was a large wooden beam pushed into the gate lock that kept out the Vandals, an exquisite escape into a cerebral world. With his magnets and his bakelite dials, and the way he pulled eager volunteers – the women all hoop earrings, burgundy mini-skirts and white knee-stockings, the men all beards and corduroy pants - out from a TV audience to take part in psych tests to demonstrate how bovine they still were, despite their middle-class aspirations, and how clever he was, he made science almost sexy even to a teenager like me; who consistently failed in Math and was disqualified from the Chem exam for snoring…
Burke’s opus was Connections in 1978: a 10-part series that explored the interconnectedness of inventions in a non-linear manner, across time and oceans, which substituted the dry linear empiricism of British, self-contained, historical rote with imaginative leaps that linked isolated events across countries and cultures to drive technological innovation (containing such brilliant phrases as: “A few words on the subject of ripples.”). It produced in me (and for once I mean this sincerely) that first burgeoning sense that the world was global, rather than just Great Britain’s greatest bloody hits: inculcating in me the premonition that the world didn’t end, pointing outwards, at the ancient cannons that lined the military seaport town of Portsmouth that I lived in; but that what happened in Europe and Asia was also part of a much larger tapestry that affected us all. As a philosophy, it atomized the idea of received knowledge: be it in colonialism, or religion, or anything in a text book, at a time when I was distinctly open to new stuff; especially when Malcolm and Viv had already started their own cultural experiment 80 miles north up on the King’s Road in London.
The first episode opened when Burke pointed to the camera - literally to “me” – and asked what would happen if everything suddenly stopped working? He asked me this when he was stood in an elevator that had ground to a halt in darkness, and the joy on his face, lit eerily by a lighter, was evident as he gently led me to the conclusion that - other than hitting the emergency button repeatedly and working out by deduction that I should only use one of the four corners to shit in - there was little “I” would be able to do to save myself. The rest of the program extrapolated out from this fundamental point; with various miracles saving me (”So you get out the city and find a farm.”) only for my chances to be cruelly dashed again (”Do you know how to sow food?).
At that second the idea of my 16 year-old dependency on others became utterly apparent. Even if some noble elevator worker turned up to free me, before expiring like a bit-part actor in a M.Night Shyamalan movie, my obvious lack of world skills (other than knowing that the Hulk was Stronger than the Thing, that the sci-fi monthly Heavy Metal magazine had paintings of tits and bush in it, and that 12-inch record vinyl wipe cloths actually felt pretty good cupped around one’s balls… especially when reading an issue of Heavy Metal) would soon doom me to about three days of snack munching before I expired, trying to catch drinkable piss in a kinetic sculpture swinging disconsolately as a grim wind blew through the deserted town square.
James Burke was the man. He told me, in essence, that the elevator was my mindset; and that if I continued to live in it and didn’t throw off its hydraulic shackles I was doomed; that if I didn’t immediately set out for some small island off the west coast of Scotland and build my own wind-powered yurt from scratch, sow my own beans in the rich fertile loam, learn about how levers really truly worked without Cliff Notes, that I was destined for a life of reliance on scientists, corporations, governments and whomever else stood in the path of my own self-determinism.
Which… seemed like too much work, truth to tell, at the time. So I promptly forgot about James Burke and his TV programs. If he was right - and rapid accumulations of scientific progress further isolated, like a blinking strobe light, the largest percentages of society from how they could control or understand one goddamned simple device in front of them, - better to surrender and glide back into the monkey mass and at least have sex for the first time before the Burke Apocalypse. Better to become a narcotized drone gagger for all the confections and distractions that mass culture could throw down my virgin little esophagus. If I was going to die of ignorance, then maybe I should just be really really… ignorant.
So poor old James went the way of The Wombles, Sir Kenneth Clarke’s Civilization and six-pleat Birmingham Bag trousers.
Until today; when I activated my latest iTunes update and my wheel of death twirled in a mandala of frustration, for over three hours, as my software duplicated and rebuilt itself and imported, from some unknown source, an extra three gigabytes of songs that were not only not mine, but crashed my hard drive as they colonized my remaining computer memory.
Where were these phantom tracks coming from? A rogue wi-fi that had developed artifical intelligence? Space? Some zipless fuck Bluetooth thang, long forgotten once the sun had wheeled over the coffee shop and life had moved on? Were these bands who had died, somehow, on Buddy Holly Airlines, maybe, or Hendrix Canapes Inc., and some roadie with a penchant for mescal tea and ouija boards had summoned them back from the afterlife to haunt the corners of the iTunes store? I hadn’t the slightest clue, as I watched, helpless, as my hard drive was gang-banged like a C-actress in a Death Wish film.
As I hit COMMAND ALT ESC repeatedly in variations, like a freeform Jazz pianist on a Quaalude rush, it occurred to me that - as unknown recording artists such as Cake, At The Drive In and Sunny Day Real Estate downloaded themselves without even a by-my-leave, mashing it up with my beloved Thomas Dolby, Tarkan and Bernard Herrmann’s Mysterious Island soundtrack - my callow rejection of James Burke’s prophecy had simply proved his thesis: that - thirty years later, with all the new developments since then - not only hadn’t I found a car with gas and got out of the city, not only hadn’t I found a farm and learned how to milk a bull, or the fundamental differences between AC and DC electrical currents; now I also don’t know what a router actually does. Why a USB transfer isn’t as efficient as one of those other ones with the weird rectangular socket with the little triangle bit. Why UNIX is also a European yogurt.
I was back in the elevator. With James Burke.
He was really big about it, though. “Don’t worry, mate,” he said, asking me to hold his bic lighter so he could scramble away up the escape shaft and found a new empire on Jura island, “it’s not just you. It’s everyone. Nobody can do a thing without calling an 1-800 number any more. Listen: what’s the one thing you know will always happen at a technology conference?”
My hand shook - casting a pale light around the metal tomb - and I struggled for an answer. “That… the projector won’t work? And that the guest speaker crouches under the media console fiddling with cable junctions like he’s a Republican told to find a lady’s G-spot, desperate for the technician to come save him?”
James Burke smiled, nodded, and then he was gone; the suggestion of his smirk hovering for a second in the air before the lighter ran out and darkness reigned.
I accessed Cake on my iPod, and prowled the elevator; trying to decide which corner I was going to have to defecate in.