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THE_FUTURE_IS_NOW

                                             October 16, 2016

Recently I was at a (remarkably silly) event where
a round-robin discussion led off on the topic of            UNCONFERENCED
"What was your first experience of the future?".

Just to pick something talk about, I said something
like:

  Back in the mid-1980s, when I got to Stanford as a graduate
  student, I found that they had scattered around campus a number
  of VT-100 terminals-- 80-column, character-based terminals--
  that anyone at Stanford was allowed to use.  What I found there
  was an underground world of random discussions conducted over
  what we'd later call the Internet.  The people involved in these
  discussions were actually very intelligent, certainly they were
  highly-educated-- they tended to be computer science students,
  or people working at elite technical companies.  Myself, I
  wanted to get a more diverse range of people involved in the
  discussion, and for a while there I was trying to recruit
  people, I printed up flyers to hand-out and so on.
                                                                  
  So the world we're living in is pretty much the world I wanted       
  to see back then-- I don't always like the modern day        
  world, but that's the way it goes--                                   
                                                                        
                                                                        
We talked about that a little bit, and I mentioned                     
the old William Gibson quote: "The future is already       Someone out there
here, it's just unevenly distributed."                     is no doubt already        going to see as
                                                           living in what we're
     HISTORY                                                       years later.
                                                           "the future" some
               A_DAY_WILL_COME

      The 20-something kids organizing the
      discussion seemed impressed with that
      quote-- they'd never heard it before.

      The future is already understood, but
      the understanding is unevenly distributed...


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