Living in the future

I saw a meme on the internet the other day that I thought perfectly captured my attitude towards living in the modern world: “My friend asked if he could use my USB cord to charge his cigarette but I was using it to charge my book. The future is stupid.” I feel very much a child of the 20th century, invested in its story, its aspirations, I remember watching television shows on Disney depicting the future, flying cars, electric tablets, all these things that have shown up in their unimpressive materiality. Fighting bots, weaponized drones, electronic cigarettes and small computers which act like brain extensions. But it’s not in the environment of discovery and global cooperation, but cynical marketing schemes and cognitive dissonance towards the cliff upon which we stand perched. It’s all really stupid. I can gaze back into history, and feel more comfortable within a text from the 20’s, or the 60’s, even though I am sure they were looking to now, with this wacky looking date, the ability to talk instantly around the globe. But like Mahmoud said the other day, he would have never imagined in the 1970’s going to school in Beirut that in the 21th century we would have something as fucking stupid as ISIS. Shouldn’t we be fighting morally superior aliens by now?