us to look at the means of the generation of history— the intersection point where the impossible is processed into the possible. The impossible is a large domain— containing impossibilities that may become possible in a week’s time, those that will only be possible in a thousand years, and those that for all intents and purposes within humans’ conception of time, will never be possible. Our knowledge of present technology is projected forward into the unknown, and the way forward is illuminated in heavy shadow, unfolding into what we conceive of as the future. To think about the future you must study history. But you also must be willing to perceive the currently impossible as already becoming historical. This temporally augmented reality is what we are calling it in this series of essays, the Future-Present.
In order for us to explore the Future-Present, we must delve into the murky substance of forward-projected historicity, from the shallows of the objectively plausible, to the depths of the most far fetched. While Clarke is heralded as a master of hard science fiction and potential patron saint of futurists, perhaps his advice takes us closer to the work of Charles Fort, whose name has been adopted into the adjective “Fortean”, conflating “bizarre” and “seemingly impossible”. Fort himself pronounced words to very similar effect as Clarke forty years earlier. His cataloged phenomena “of the damned”, were patterns so odd and mysterious that they were only conceivable when apprehended under the rubric of superstition: "...a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic." To look into the future we must be drawn, like Fort, to study the phenomena that exceed our understanding but nevertheless attract our attention. We must be willing to be fascinated by what we’d call impossible.
There is a technology that might serve as an archetype for this relationship of fascination with the strange and impossible that is lashed to reality in the headspace of the Future-Present. Electromagnetism is science resolutely within the realm of the possible, today. But it is emblematic of what we might deride as the supernatural and the magical. Any living thing on earth, by the time it is able to move under its own volition, has a learned relationship to the laws of gravity. And yet, with a small rock in the palm of the hand, that impartial force can be reversed. Such unexplained power is captivating.
In a particular kind of magnet— the neodymium magnet— we see an archetype of Future-Present fascination. It represents the Fortean unexpectedness of new things falling out of history, and the intellectual mechanisms of the human species that pursues them.
Magnets trace back to the Olmec, who may have used lodestones for navigation, architecture, or geomancy as early as in 1000 BC. Chinese literature mentions these naturally occurring magnetized rocks in 4th Cent. BC, and we know for sure that they were used in conjunction with the earth’s magnetic field for navigation by the 11th Century AD.
But while their most observable properties were recorded, the means by which magnets worked was obscured for another eight hundred years. Ampere’s theory of electrodynamics in 1821 first recorded the properties of electromagnetism: when current flows through two parallel conductors in the same direction, they magnetically attract each other. Faraday is credited with discovering electromagnetic induction in 1831, and he also noticed magnetic fields. It is these properties that make an electric motor or generator work, and allowed Hippolyte Pixxi to invent the first alternating current dynamo in 1832.
It might seem that from that time on it was business as usual, as minor technological and industrial improvements accumulated into better generators, power storage systems, and more efficient energy grids, bringing us up to the time of the present. But let us pause in a most auspicious and Fortean year of technological discovery: 1982.
It was this year that General Motors and Sumitomo Special Metals created the compound ND2Fe14B. This compound had never existed before, but today is found in countless devices, nearly as ubiquitous as the principle of induction itself. This compound is known commonly as the neodymium magnet, and today is found in appliances, hard drives, medical equipment, hybrid cards, fashion, and children’s toys. There is no other magnetic material currently known that has a stronger magnetic field or retains its magnetism more resiliently. We are surrounded by technologies that, without these magnets, would never have been possible. Our entire field of Future-Present perspective shifted in less than thirty years.
Our fascination with the seemingly impossible continues to evolve. Just like electromagnetism, we can never say that we are seeing the true limits of this effect. And yet, there is a science to it. There are means by which we wield our fascination, which control, to certain extents, how it works. I realized this in talking with my Future-Present informants, who discussed their experience with this attraction to the strange.
I think that the the pace of technological development is a reason that these conversations are happening. Things that we would have thought would be impossible five years ago are becoming reality. Things like solar-powered 3D printers in the desert, making things out of sand. There’s a drive to talk about these things that are being speculated, and furthermore, actually make them. You don’t need a DARPA scale budget to make these things. There a basic need to talk about what’s next, because it’s occurring.
- Geoff Manaugh
Technology is redistributed all the time, and it is fascinating to us how quickly this redistribution seems to take effect. We would be remiss to not follow down the paths of this fascination, and to explore how far we can go on one tank of Weird. Geoff notes that we experience this fascination as “drive”— an almost unconscious desire to follow these things and work with them. There is a vast amount of mystery condensing into reality— and the simultaneous utilization of the characterizations of Clarke and Fort seems less a style of thinking, than a need-driven adaptation.
The cultural origin of the internet is related to 60s counter-culture. The rediscovering of liminal experience is the appeal. For people who don’t have some sort of spiritual practice, technological change is the thing that comes closest to the experience of the unreal. It’s similar to the experience of getting a cell phone call for the first time. “This is weird, this is magic.” There are are all kinds of spooky experiences. It’s not just newness, either—it’s an experience where the previous understanding of the universe is broken. You don’t get many experiences like that if you don’t do drugs or have some sort of meditative practice. You don’t play with social rules or create new social spaces. Magic changes the rules of the world in a way we don’t expect.
Think of the clotting factor powder that medics now use. You dump it on an artery, and the artery just stops. There is a culture that plays with this idea, as a way of trying to understand it. If you have these highly technical systems, certain people understand the machine, and can make it work in ways that mere mortals can’t just understand. The rest of us tries to understand in other ways. There are different, weird ratios of productivity, that are hard to explain.
I think being excited by the future is a legacy of 20th Century industrial culture marking, in which the future is going to be “better”. People should be terrified about the future, because it will be terrifying. There’s definitely a “wow this is going to be awesome” that makes people willing to embrace certain things, like geolocative lifestyles. There is a certain sort of neophilia that is built into consumptive culture. I don’t know whether I think that’s a good thing or not. It’s probably necessary for our survival as a civilization to shift how we interact with the future. If we had the Amish attitude, we probably wouldn’t be in this area. But we can’t be. That requires an “outside” to reject, to be conservative against, which we do not have.
- Eleanor Saitta
The patterns that we catalog as a result of this desire to observe are a dreamscape, a symbolic cosmology, realizing our hopes for the Future-Present, but also, our fears. Magnets, for a long time, only benefited navigators—and by exte
nsion, kings, queens, merchants. It wasn’t until the discoveries of electromagnetism that this magic began to pay off for most people as it brought power into their homes, their kitchens, and their workplaces. In what ways could electromagnetism hurt us? The impossibility of such a dystopia erodes like the passage of time, and it is up to each of us to construct this dream ourselves. Fascination is often described as a pleasant experience— but dreams of the impossible are always accompanied by nightmares, whether we remember them or not.
There does appear to be a bleeding edge that captures some shimmering segment of the popular imagination, though my sense is, it's more captivating to a certain sub-culture of technophiles (and phobes) rather than being any sort of universal attractor. There is certainly a broad hunger for novelty within the masses. Realtors using drones to survey properties is indeed newsworthy and appeals to this hunger.
But to me what makes drones & augmented reality more fascinating than, for example, mining technology is both how they express the stories I've grown up with and how they impact my sense of self in relation to the world. So, the