Anachro-Nostalgia
Pining for Soon to be Relics
‘Tis the Season
It’s that time of year. When the seasons change and nostalgia floods the crisp fall air. For me, at least, this period of transition instinctually brings up memories, many of which were long forgotten. Rose-colored scenes from a holiday gathering or fond memories from a prior trip, nostalgia can warm the heart and jolt you back to a distant, almost foreign past.
These figments are often banal — a glance at a loved one, an ordinary conversation — but sometimes, it’s the major milestones in life that re-appear to wreak havoc in your hippocampus. Passing your driver’s test at age sixteen, testing out your first (flip) phone, a university graduation ceremony. It got me thinking about what existed in my past that doesn’t exist now. And perhaps more curious: what exists now that is unlikely to exist when my future children start banking memories to supply nostalgia in an even further future?
It happens slowly… then all at once. When’s the last time you called a friend? Not texted, not Zoomed, not a predetermined check-in — a spontaneous phone call. Almost never. When I receive an unexpected phone call and it turns out to be a scammer, I’m almost relieved, because from if it were from a known contact I automatically assume it’s some sort of emergency situation. Technology changes our behavior, our habits, the way we experience the physical world. The rate of change is increasing, so much so that the quintessential moments will be anachronisms before we know it.
Things My Kids Probably Won’t Do
Drive a Car — On a semi-regular basis, I’ll get an early morning FaceTime from my sister (who lives in LA, -9 hours from Paris). She’ll be returning from an evening out and I’ll be starting my day. The first time she flipped the camera to reveal an empty driver’s seat I audibly gasped. Autonomous vehicles will be ubiquitous, it’s not a matter of if but when. In fact, I venture to guess one day human driving will be outlawed — too dangerous! — and you’ll have to go to some driver’s club to get your pedal to the metal fix.
If I were to have a child today, by the time they were sixteen a majority of vehicles will be somewhat to fully autonomous. According to Goldman Sachs, my (fictional) daughter’s Sweet Sixteen present will be a bit different than my own (unless, presumably, she is born in India).
Pay with Cash
Cash is still king, but hardly anyone carries it around anymore. I’m probably biased towards the techno-elites in major metropolitan areas but even the data suggests that:
Compared to 10 years ago, 73% of American consumers are using cash less often [Source: Shift Processing]
All consumer cash payments declined 41.9% from 2016 to 2022 [Source: Capital One Shopping]
In fact, I now feel like an old geezer using a physical credit card. Gen-Z kids barely know what it’s like to carry around plastic, they’ve used Apple Pay out of the womb. The point being, money has been dematerialized progressively over the past several decades to it’s logical local maximum: the secure, connected device you carry with you 24/7. I expect most of the payments upgrades for the coming decade to take place on the backend (financial plumbing, crypto etc.). There could be some interesting movement on user experience (think: experiments like Amazon Go’s cashier-less shops), but by and large, we’ve found the equilibrium of convenience, efficiency and security.
A $1 bill for my kid will be like the “Silver Dollar” my grandparents gave to me — a relic of a bygone era. Perhaps useable but you’ll get a weird look from the person (or machine) ringing you up.
Cast a Vote
Don’t worry, this isn’t a diatribe on the end of democracy. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s mind boggling to me that the most important election on the planet every four years still relies on technology invented during the Han Dynasty in China (~202BCE).
There are, of course, a few concerns around implementing a new voting system:
Vulnerability to Attacks
Lack of Trust / Public Confidence
UX / Public Understanding (i.e. how it works)
Political Resistance to Change
Regulatory Challenges
Audit Trail
Frankly, the combination of state of the art cryptography (for security, proof of personhood), blockchain (for coordination, audit-ability) and a trusted application layer (developed in house by a government agency — DOGE anyone?) solves three of these problems. Get a crypto-friendly and articulate Senator to push forward a bill and evangelize this to the various states (shouldn’t be to much push back in the coming few years) and you’ve got everything covered.
Admittedly, this is harder than it sounds. In twenty years we’ll either be voting on-chain with our decentralized identities with a public audit and real-time dashboard on election day or we’ll still be scribbling in tiny ovals with #2 pencils like we’re taking the SAT again. Stasis in this respect indicates a bigger underlying problem.
Write in Cursive
Handwriting, I almost forgot handwriting. When’s the last time you wrote a note… in cursive!? A recent Waking Up episode on Technology & Culture with Christine Rosen brought this to my attention again.
Let’s see what the future holds. Until then, every time I feel an autumn breeze against my face, I’ll get ever so wistful about sharpening a pencil or shifting gears in a Fiat 500 rental. I may be melancholy that my future children will never experience these wonderfully ordinary activities, but I’ll be overjoyed with the weird and wild future that lies ahead.