Douglas Coupland has been writing and drawing us into the future for some time.  He has a particular knack for “getting things right” years before they happen.  While I don’t always enjoy his short essays for the Financial Times, I did particularly enjoy his most recent entry, “Escaping the Superfuture.”  His experience:

Lately I’ve been experiencing a new temporal sensation that’s odd to articulate, but I do think is shared by most people. It’s this: until recently, the future was always something out there up ahead of us, something to anticipate or dread, but it was always away from the present.

But not any more. Somewhere in the past few years the present melted into the future. We’re now living inside the future 24/7 and this (weirdly electric and buzzy) sensation shows no sign of stopping — if anything, it grows ever more intense. Elsewhere I’ve labelled this experience “the extreme present” — or another label for this new realm might be “the superfuture”. In this superfuture I feel like I’m clamped into a temporal roller coaster and, at the crest of the first hill, I can see that my roller coaster actually runs off far into the horizon. Wait! How is this thing supposed to end?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t.  Not really.  Not ever.  The most we can do, perhaps, is occasionally remind us of our “pre-internet brains,” which is itself a tricky thing.  Technology plays a key role (perhaps the key role) in our ever-present future, and we probably aren’t going to back down on our handheld devices anytime soon.

Except for that other handheld device that can do something about time (and we’re not talking about a sonic screwdriver or time-turner here).  The book, it seems, is at least a temporary antidote to our current situation.  Coupland continues:

A few paragraphs back I asked what sort of technology it would be that would help rescue us from this nonstop trapped-inside-the-future nagging buzz we all share living in the 21st century. This was a trick question because we already have this technology: it’s called books. But there’s another twist here and it’s this: it’s harder to read books these days. We all know it. It is a very rare and very honest person who’ll cop to the truth that they don’t read half as much fiction as they did 10 years ago. People seem to be buying novels but they just join the pile beside the bed that topples over when you go to plug in the laptop’s power cord.

The twist, of course, is that it’s harder for us to read these days, now that our brains have been rewired to all of our digital stimuli.  But as long as there are books, there is hope.

I’ve got my own stack of books for my spring break.  I’ve committed to reading a chapter a day of Faith Speaking Understanding (by VanHoozer).  I’m also halfway through Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.  At some point this week, I’ll dive back into Kinneman and Lyon’s Good Faith.  All of these books are helping me bring the present and future (and even the past) together.  Plus I enjoy the read.  Give me a novel, though, and you’re giving me a hard time.

You can read the rest of Coupland’s essay here.

(image from communitysolution.org)