Future

Superconversation 26: Keith Tilford responds to DIS Magazine, “Styles and Customs in the 2020s”

It is not so much the future that is forecast by DIS editors, but a hyperbole of the present. Forever now for more of the same, only more so: “The future is a season.”, “The future does not exist but in snapshots.”, “The future is layered and inconsistent.”, “The future is widely reproduced and distributed.” As a series of speculative musings, “Styles and Customs of the 2020’s” is as incoherent as HUO’s curated collection of statements about the future in The Future Will Be…, from which the contributors have stridently lifted a generous helping of their sentences (11 to be exact). The case of these “predictions” have only succeeded in creating a dry script art world version of Coffee and Cigarettes. “All we can really hope for is some good designer drugs that actually wake us up from the matrix” is not precisely what Foucault may have had in mind when he wrote that ‘[p]erhaps someday we will no longer know what madness was.’