tomorrow is yesterday

Once upon a time, the future was our friend. We didn't dread every new invention. I wasn't born when this changed, but I assume the nuclear bomb had a lot to do with it. But there's more. I can sort of remember when commerce was also our friend. Like now, guys could start companies in their garages. Unlike now, the point was usually to make better widgets, not to sell stock. Especially where technology was concerned, a couple of engineers would usually meet over lunch and come up with a friendly name like   Joe's Radio Company .   But telecom became way more serious business, and everyone was gobbled up or driven out by meganationals with names like   EATX ® .   Technogeeks didn't need to hire huge ad agencies and pay for 2000 focus groups, because for the most part we still had a shared semiotic code. The company logo was usually another lunch meeting. Stories abound of some engineer scribbling a thunderbolt inside an atom over a globe, sending it to a printer who'd pretty it up a bit, and for a couple hundred bucks instead of a couple hundred million, there was the company image. People seem to like this logo page a lot. Sometimes it's camp, the irony of looking back at a Eurocentric faith in science we'll never have again. There's more, though. There's a real sense that, somehow, all this weirdness belonged to us. After all, it did. It was folklore, not statistical marketing analysis by people shut off in a building somewhere. We need folklore. We need our shared symbols, our mythos, our language, and our future back. They belong to the people. Meanwhile, enjoy yesterday's tomorrow.