El oficio de futurista ya no es lo que era

Bruce Sterling se despide de su columna mensual en Wired con My final prediction.

… we're entering a new era, the post-Internet age, a world in which the Net will be everywhere, like the air we breathe, and we'll take it for granted. It will be neither the glossy nirvana of technophilic dreams nor the dystopia of traditionalist nightmares. It will look a lot like today – but with higher contrast, sharper focus, and a wide-angle lens…

The future of the Internet lies not with institutions but with individuals. Low-cost connections will proliferate, encouraging creativity, collaboration, and telecommuting. The Net itself will recede into the background. If you're under 21, you likely don't care much about any supposed difference between virtual and actual, online and off. That's because the two realms are penetrating each other; Google Earth mingles with Google Maps, and daily life shows up on Flickr. Like the real world, the Net will be increasingly international and decreasingly reliant on English. It will be wrapped in a Chinese kung fu outfit, intoned in an Indian accent, oozing Brazilian sex appeal.

En este mundo que anuncia Sterling el futurismo ya deja de ser un oficio, se convierte en la actividad cotidiana de todos lo que lo deseen:

One upshot is that futurism itself has no future. Once confined to an elite group, the tools and techniques of prognostication are all widely available. As for pundits: The world used to be full of workaday journalists, with just a thin sprinkling of opinion mongers. Now a TypePad account is a license to deliver nose-to-the-pavement perspective with an attitude. The very word futurism is old-fashioned, way too 1960s. Today's Internet-savvy futurist is more likely to describe himself as a strategy consultant or venture capital researcher…

So mark my last little act of prediction in this space: I don't have a poll or a single shred of evidence to back it up, but I believe more good things are in store, and some are bound to come from the tangled, ubiquitous, personal, and possibly unpredictable Net.

Algunos ya lo saben y lo anuncian en las paredes de las calles. David de Ugarte, recordando el mito de Croatán creado por Hakim Bey, nos mostraba como epílogo a su post el trabajo de algunos de estos visionarios low tech, pero enormemente clarividentes:

Por cierto, no piensen esto utopía comunitarista, es símplemente una consecuencia del capitalismo que viene, una ensoñación sobre un mundo en el que las fronteras entre sujetos y objetos, entre productores y consumidores, entre empresas y audiencias se tornan confusas, en que los propósitos se vuelven vagos, se diluyen. Y con ellos el mundo de los certeros conquistadores deja paso a un futuro de cartógrafos de lo movedizo.

Y para finalizar, Fernando Tomás nos regala en un comentario al post de Ugarte esta otra fotografía callejera de otro visionario de las redes ubícuas: