ABSTRACT
If you cast your mind back to my discussion of Manuel Castells, you may remember his allergy to futurology. I share at least some of his symptoms, yet at the same time I must confess to finding something thrilling in speculations about the future, especially those concerning technology (on the troubled history and tricky business of futurology, see Margolis 2000). A few months ago, one of the UK’s Sunday newspapers launched a new technology supplement, full of sumptuous photos of shiny new gadgets, and commenting on new trends in use (women as the new geeks, the rise of cameraphones making all of us potential paparazzi), including a feature on people employed to conjure the future, prophets who eye current trends and dream their extrapolation. I feel like I am being asked to join their ranks here – and I feel a mix of excitement and dread: writing a book about cyberculture means writing about a present that will already be the past by the time you’re reading this, or writing a future that may not happen. Or, As William Gibson put it, in a quote from the Sunday supplement, ‘The future has already happened, it just isn’t very well distributed’ (quoted in Anderson 2005: 49).The trickiness of prediction and the embarrassments of hindsight mean that this part of the book should be read as a time-capsule.
