The Future

Cory Doctrow talks clever at Locus Online.

There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: “futurismic.” Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving—think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III—and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.

SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices—but no one has installed a ^$15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx.

It is lovely that we even need a neologism like “futurismic.”