The Future of Books

Originally run on 23 February 2009.

The Future of Books
Is All a Bunch of Cockamamie Bullshit

On the way back from a drunken rampage, NPR made me aware of this thing called a "Cell Phone Novel." The idea offended me on a personal level, so it only makes sense that it came from Japan—traditional home of the banzai charge, methamphetamines, and girls shitting sea life out of their asses for the sexual pleasure of people with no souls. Other than the silliness of reading a literary work on a device you typically use to find out “What’s up?” or “Where’s the party again?” there really isn’t anything inherently terrible about it, that is until the journalist started speculating about how the Cell Phone Novel might replace the book.

This, as you know is bullshit. Remember when HD-DVD and BluRay were duking it out over who would reign supreme in the high-defintion wars? (You probably don’t because you didn’t have a thousand dollars to throw at away at a new TV, a player and a new movie collection, you’re also probably not an unrepentant dork like myself). At the time there was a cadre of idiots who got together and sided with HD-DVD, because like VHS before it, it would include pornography in its library unlike BluRay (and the deceased Beta Max). These people turned out to be wrong for a number of reasons, but they represent a need in people predict the future despite basic logic disagreeing with them. NPR did this with their prediction Cell Phone Novel story—and, I imagine so did the inventors of smell-o-vision (which was discussed in another NPR story I overheard).

The shortfalls of prophesying can be expressed through one idea better than any other: Blue jeans. No matter how elaborate or well thought out a vision of the future is, everyone seems to leave out blue jeans. It’s all silver track-suits and clear, plastic rain coats. As though people would suddenly stop wearing one of the most popular and iconic pieces of clothing of all time and decide to look like robotic sex criminals. And what’s with the flying cars? Sure, they look way cooler than normal cars, but I don’t think, as a race, that we’re ever going to top the wheel any time soon. In the same way we’re not ever going to top the paper-back.

This glittering future we’re being sold is the result of some very skilled hucksters. Your post-humanism, your post-literary society, your singularity, and everything else can go suck on an egg. Jesus ain’t never coming and neither is that USB port in your head. Banking on either of those things happening in your life-time is just going to make you one disappointed SOB on his death bed.

I’m going to predict that there is never going to be that point in time where we get rid of all of our old crap and replace it with something new and shiny, either. Take Europe for example. There is still people living in three-hundred year old houses because the old buildings work just as well as the new ones. They didn’t tear everything down when we discovered plastic or the date had a few more zero’s than usual. A future without novels is a future without blue jeans.