Whatever Happened to the Future?

Pulp is the latest in a long list of 1990s bands with too-clever accountants and mortgages to service that are touring again. One of the Sheffield group's bigger hits was Disco 2000, a wry look at teen unrequited love and the hope of reunion when the millennium clocked over. Recorded in 1995, the song will take on an odd retro-futurism when it's performed this year - 11 years after the rendezvous deadline. Since this song bounced through Converse All Stars in the mid-90s we've stopped focusing on a point in the future as hopeful.



All through the 20th century, the year 2000 was something to aim for, a number that became synonymous with the futuristic, from the ABC TV science program Towards 2000 (which became Beyond 2000 then Beyond Tomorrow) to the British comic 2000AD. But the hope for the year 2000 became infected with the Millennium Bug as Y2K became something to fear. By 1999 Silverchair snarled in their Anthem for the Year 2000: "Never knew we were living in a world/ with a mind that could be so small". The shift from hope to betrayal was captured in the recent Threadless T-shirt which opines "This was supposed to be the future - where is my jetpack?"

So it's interesting to see the positive future making a comeback. The Future Timeline looks to capture predictions for the coming centuries including robot insects acting as spies and the disappearance of Nigeria's rainforests. And that's just the next ten years. Technology brings most of the good news - why jetpack when you can teleport? Good to hear that gay marriage will finally be legal in every US state and someone has finally cured the common cold. Okay, so the site is based on predictions but references point off to projects currently underway and some show long-term trends (like the fact that by 2015 more Americans will be in favour of gay marriage than against). And while there's terrifying tales of extinction, shortages and war, there is also hope.


Literature has long favoured dystopia when it looks into the crystal ball. The 20th century saw Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World, The Handmaiden's Tale and many more. In this millennium Cormac McCarthy recently limped out of the West to tell us just how grim the future is looking in The Road. So Jennifer Egan's approach to the future in 2010's A Visit From the Goon Squad has to sneak up us. The inter-connected short stories slouch through the 1990s into the post-millennium with the last few chapters tracing her characters into the future.

It's not a utopia by any means - mobile phones have become so essential even toddler text, viral marketing has become parroting and English has hollow words so "'American' had become an ironic term". But there's also hope. A girl tells the story of her brother's autism through a Powerpoint presentation (which has retro appeal in the future) and humanity is better connected. The music industry finds a younger audience and an unlikely folk hero. It's hopeful future as dirty and ragged as today.

 
The Long Now project saw the disappointment of the year 2000 coming. They set up in 1996 looking to shift people's vision beyond the next 5 years and think long term. Founder Danny Hillis explains it:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all."

Jean Marc Côté's 1901 vision of the classroom in the Year 2000

They're so far forward looking at Long Now that they have five digit dates "to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years". Along with a project to make a clock designed for 10,000 years and never chime the same melody, they also have Long Bets. It encourage amateur futurists to bet on their own predictions with winnings being awarded to charity. Zeus Jones reckons that by 2020 historians will reach the consensus that the early 21st century was the start of the "Second" or "New Rennaissance". Let's see if he can't be proved right.

In Other Words: Verbal Texters

When your work colleague asks you “Report QUESTION MARK” you’ve got a case of verbal texting on your hands. It’s that socially awkward mode of speech that texting and emails has left us with, where people believe they can no longer communicate tone and need to spell out their punctuation. We are so sick of these guys EXCLAMATION POINT.

At its worst it can degenerate into emoticons – “You’re giving me FROWNY FACE right now and I need TONGUE POKING.” – and initialism - “Don’t make me LOL” – in conversation. Some try to specify font in conversation – “This joke is much funnier in Comic Sans” – but at its worst it becomes twitter speak. There’s nothing worse than talking to someone using hashtags in dialogue #justsayin. And it has to stop before people start trying to insert hyperlinks into speech FULL STOP.

In Other Words is a regular on the

Publish Post

Big Issue's Ointment page. Off Verbal Texters appeared in Issue No. 374. 

In Other Words: Geekocracy

If you’ve ever waited by your broken computer all morning to finally get a pasty kid in a Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt to visit and tell your machine is broken then you’ve already met a princeling of the geekocracy. The geeks have inherited the earth in a bloodless coup of confusing jargon such as power-cycling (switching your machine on/off), user error (blaming you for computer breakdown) or server issues (meaning “We have no idea what just happened”).

The kings of the geekocracy rarely leave their courts. With titles like Sys Admin or Chief Architect of All Time they are guarded by banks of servers and rarely deign to answer the phone preferring you “Fill out the email form and we’ll get back to you”. You are as likely to see a Sys Admin as Queen Elizabeth II popping around to explain why Windows keeps crashing.

In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue's Ointment page. Geekocracy appeared in Issue No. 362. 

DRM and Writers: Fight for Your Right to Parity

With the talk that e-books have finally arrived in Australia and that app reading with iBooks will open new markets, writers are getting forgotten.

There's no doubt new markets and new readers are opening up with new technology, but few of these new revenue streams are passed on to writers. Including a forthcoming app on Sydney, I've written for five apps and the experience has varied considerably as publishers try to work out the rules.

Mostly these projects have been re-purposing of text - that is getting text from a print project and using it in an app. In print this would be called syndication and an additional fee would be offered - often less than the original fee. By re-naming syndication re-purposing, publishers sidestep writer's fees.

And there are good arguments for publishers making money off the digital frontier. They've invested in developing an app, gambled on costly technologies and have to work with unfamiliar distribution methods. But when publishers create a new revenue stream, writers deserve a share.

When literary agent Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie stormed out on Random House earlier this year, he was demanding a share of digital rights for his authors. And when he didn't get it he started Odyssey Editions. The simple site design and quick retreat (he dropped from 20 to 7 titles and hasn't added any more for months) suggest it was more publicity stunt than publishing house. Wylie is now making nice with Random House again but secured for his high-profile clients close to 40% in royalties. Compare this with the more typical 25% for print royalties (usually 10% in Australia) and digital rights should offer more to authors.

Kindle edition of
Live and Let Die

More recently James Bond fired a shot at traditional publishers: Ian Fleming's estate leapfrogged Penguin to sell e-books directly through Amazon. JK Rowling must be rubbing her hands together as her publisher Bloomsbury never secured the digital rights for Harry Potter and recently her agents have been saying e-Harry may be possible.

But these are the big names making even bigger bucks. Surely smaller authors don't have the clout to demand more for their rights?

This week, I was part of #ewfchat talking about apps. There was a lot of discussion about what apps meant for publishing and if some forms of writing worked better on apps or e-books. One excellent question was "Who are the new publishers?" The answer was simple: developers.

With an app sold through the iTunes store, Apple take 30% as a distributor of content (which is similar to what a distributor of a print book takes) and leaves the remaining 70% to developers and content creators. You can see where Wylie's almost 40% for authors comes from.

If publishers don't build realistic financial relationships with authors then there are other partners out there. And new partners will invest not just financially, allowing writers to re-invent themselves and what books can be.

In Other Words: Off Gridding

You’re probably already overwhelmed by iAnxiety – that rising mania as everyone you know has bought at least one iPad. Plus your inbox is full, you’ve got 14 unanswered Twitter DMs and they’ve probably just invented a new social network for you to be behind on. It’s time you embraced off gridding.

Author Susan Maushart took the off gridder experiment, telling her family they’d live screen-free, truly cordless lives for six months. The connected kids LOLed, but Maushart’s book Winter of Our Disconnect has become a bible to turn off, tune out and drop out. Though they talk about increased attention spans and appreciating boredom, off gridders are commonly mistaken for Amish.

In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue's Ointment page. Off Gridding appeared in Issue No. 356.

American Psychoanalysis: Profile of Bret Easton Ellis

Photo: Jeff Burton

In the dying days of his book tour promoting his latest Imperial Bedrooms, cult author Bret Easton Ellis is so over answering questions about his novels. “I have a completely different relationship with the novel than the reader does,” he sighs. “Which is why it’s very hard to sit here and answer questions about the book, because it’s such a disconnect.” Imperial Bedrooms uses the characters of his 1985 debut, Less Than Zero, 25 years later and looks at how time has scarred both the characters and the once enfant terrible himself.

On this tour he’s survived that interview at Byron Bay Writer’s Festival where he repelled questions from Ramona Koval about his role as a satirist by joshing about his newfound crush on Delta Goodrem. Koval in turn scolded him for treating the interview as “a stand-up routine”.

But in person Ellis is entertaining yet open – his powerful chin is blunted by a navy Nike cap and his playboy image muted by glasses and an overcoat over a woollen hoody. Sure, he bats away the odd issue by laughing “That’s like a dating site question”, but he shares a swinish charm with his books – initially you’re repelled but you keep reading or listening.

His name dominates the covers of seven books, including cult hit American Psycho, but he’s recently realised that with “every book I’m working through my issues.” Less Than Zero was written when he was just 19 and coping with his LA’s peculiar isolation amid partying plenty. “I had the mind of a writer and that makes you a bit of voyeur… but I always did feel alienated from everything. That alienation made me sad and a lot of Less Than Zero was me working that out.” He rolls through his canon connecting them to his own experience – “Unrequited love – that sucks. So then Boom! Rules of Attraction starts building itself.”

His most complex book remains American Psycho and in the past he’s talked about its protagonist Patrick Bateman as based on his own father. “That was when I was blaming my father for everything – I’ve let it go now,” he rolls his eyes to let you know he’s using Californian psychobabble both meaningfully and ironically. But he confesses to a troubled relationship with American Psycho. “I was very defensive about that book because of the heaps of criticism poured on it. I wanted it to seem more important than what it actually was.”

On the surface American Psycho was criticized as sex and slash, but at its core Easton Ellis maintains it’s a satire of a lifestyle he couldn’t adopt when he moved to New York. “It was making me angry, I hated that life, I hated what was expected of me as a man in this society, the things that I’m supposed to have that make me successful and cool.” Unsurprisingly he left New York four years ago to return to LA.

This return also meant a return to Less Than Zero as he re-read his own book like a guidebook to the LA of his youth. It was an uneasy read. Many fans tell him it’s the book that made them move to LA. “And I go “Really? That’s the book that made me want to leave LA for 20 years.”

During his re-reading something didn’t sit right. His main character Clay had a “passivity that was protecting him from this blasted moral landscape that he found himself in.” He began a dialogue with the character and his own past wondering where Clay would have ended up. Ellis reckons “The Clay character in Imperial Bedrooms, I guess has something against me.” Perhaps it’s because Clay sees so much of himself in Easton Ellis. “I drifted around at 19. I went wherever people told me, to parties… I have things to do now. I’m much more active at 45 than I was at 19.”

The 25 years since Less Than Zero have rollercoastered by for Ellis – the height of American Psycho being made into a successful film plummeted when a studio churned out a horrific sequel, American Psycho II: All American Girl. The deepest low was the loss of his long-term partner Michael Wade Kaplan in 2004. Humour has long been a coping mechanism. “You find yourself going ‘Oh this is the way world works. God it plays a lot of fucking jokes on you. Jesus, it’s a tricky place to navigate.’ And you either paint it pink or you paint it black.”

Ellis’ shade of pink is both fleshily real and satirically lurid. Clay’s screenwriter has no real power in Hollywood, more punchline than player. He’s drawn from Ellis experience of having his scripts mangled by the studio machine but it’s all part of his “letting it go” ethos. He’s in pre-production a new film project The Golden Suicides with Gus Van Sant and wants Angelina Jolie for the lead. “Writers and actors are the two people treated the shittiest in Hollywood, because there’s so many of them,” he says mater-of-factly. He follows it with what might have be his Hollywood coping mantra: “The writer has no control.”

An edited version of this article appeared in The Big Issue, No. 363.

What the Haigh's

One of Adelaide's biggest landmarks is the corner of Rundle Mall and King William Street, known as Beehive Corner. If you look up you'll spot the landmark insect buzzing over Haigh's Chocolate. Almost ready for its 100th birthday, the first store appeared here in 1915 and their luxury chocolates have spread to Victoria and New South Wales.

But there's something special about getting them here at the source. Their chocolate frogs pre-date Harry Potter's sweet-tooth as they've been selling them for 67 years. Today they offer them in peppermint and dark and reckon they sell more than a million a year. But the frogs are getting pushed aside by Adelaide's Panda-monium and you can now buy large chocolate blocks in the shape of Adelaide Zoo's Wang Wang and Funi. Plus there's truffles, blocks and choc-coated fruit. But the best thing about visiting the Haigh's store is coming out with a free sample - they usually insist on giving you a taster at the cash register.