2020 visions

Welcome to 2020.

Man, that's weird to say, isn't it? We are living in the year 2020. A brand new decade.

And yes, this is the new decade. If you want to be pendantic about something, you should also be right. 2021-2030 may be "a" decade, in that it is a period of ten years, but 2020-2029 is "the" decade. It's the 2020s. Maybe they'll be roaring. Maybe not. But they're here.

I've said it before, and it's still true. We are living in the future.

Not quite the future that sci-fi writers of years past thought it might be. We don't have the flying cars and hoverboards of "Back to the Future" nor do we have the autonomous androids and robots of "Blade Runner" or "I, Robot." We keep hitting these science fiction milestones and it's always interesting to see what we got right and what we got wrong.

On the upside, the governments of the world haven't openly been supplemented by mega-corporations. For the moment we are still at least allowed the façade of a government run by the people. And while a distressingly large amount of the planet seems to be bursting into flames, at least we aren't yet living in domed cities to protect us from a toxic atmosphere.

Futuristic slang rarely seems to hit the mark either. In 1984, Tom DeFalco's vision of 2020 in "Machine Man" had bainies scanning for curves from the safety of their floaters.

That sounds like a bunch of nonsense. Instead, in 2020, we have woke Star Wars stans getting salty over a certain kiss while others that are thirsty AF shout "yas!" Yeah, I can't blame sci-fi writers for failing to predict that.

Oddly enough, while common slang is an ever moving target, expletives seem to be much more resilient. Every vision of the future seems to have their own explicative of choice. "Skrag," "Slag," "Frak," "Drek," generally something with an S-sound or a hard K will do for futuristic curses. In the real world though, George Carlin's infamous seven words are just as commonly used today as they were 50 years ago.

Then there are futuristic things we actually have now that turned out to be not that great in practice.

Video phones, for instance, are a staple of science fiction. It seems like a natural progression to go from purely audio communication to audio and visual.

But while the tech is certainly there, it's rarely used. In practice, video calls are kind of a terrible way to communicate outside of very specific circumstances. Either you hold your phone, which is a constant struggle to hold the device at a specific distance to keep yourself in frame, or you can set it down, which may free up your hands but also locks you into place for the duration of the call. All the while you're staring into the camera lens to simulate eye-contact while also trying to see the face of the person you're talking to.

In most cases, video adds nothing to the experience anyway. I don't need to see the person on the other line to make an appointment or order a pizza.

Ironically, this video-call vision of the future has been supplanted by a reality that increasingly favors less sensory information instead of more. Where sci-fi visionaries dreamed of a day where people had face-to-face conversations across long distances, instead text messages are the new standard. In the year 2020 we don't use the next step in telephone calls. We use the next step in telegraphs.

Another futuristic marvel we have now is the voice activated computer. Again, science fiction is rife with computers built into houses that control your lights and television and are available at any time to answer whatever question you can think to ask. It's a great sci-fi idea brought to life, except nobody in those science fiction futures ever seems particularly concerned that a computer always listening to everything is the house is always listening to everything in the house.

On the other hand, Bluetooth is pretty great. It's hardly new technology anymore, but even the cheapest consumer level products have become reliable for day-to-day use. A $4 pair of Bluetooth earbuds has been a game changer for me at the gym.

Virtual reality is also making big strides these days. It's still a long way from being a consumer friendly standard, but by the end of the 20s, who knows? Interestingly, something that science fiction never seems to explore when envisioning the future is what gets revived from the past. The last decade saw the revival of vinyl records for reasons I still don't understand. For my entire life music has been getting increasingly compact, from cassette tapes to CDs to MP3 players. Nowadays you don't even need virtual space to store your music. You can stream it all on demand.

How fragile foot-wide disks regained popularity I'll never know.

Likewise, one of my younger sister's favorite birthday presents last year was a self-developing photo camera. The idea of taking a picture and waiting several minutes to see what it looks like is really exciting for her. So much so that she couldn't wait to share pictures of the photos on social media using her phone.

It makes you wonder what anachronisms the 20s will bring us.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing in the year 2020… yep. Still weird.