Twenty-ten

One great thing about 2010 is we finally get to refer to each of our years from now on as "twenty-" something. For me, that always seemed the real concrete thing that would bring home just how much we live in the future imagined so vividly by people in the middle of the twentieth century. Referring to "twenty-nineteen" or "twenty-twenty-seven," regardless of the actual historical time involved, sounded futuristic in a particular way that "two-thousand-sixty-one" or "two-thousand-and-ten" just didn't. Now that we're there, and the next real comprehensive future (the future we imagine for the next full generation after us) that we begin to envision (on the scale of some larger cultural narrative) shoots forward to 2060 or so, we can begin to register the discrepancies between what the last wildest age of speculative thought about the future (the "golden age") and what took place. This doesn't have to be done cynically: it's rather a matter of registering the change in the "structures of feeling" that are constituted on a larger time-scale than the individual (though perhaps on a less extensive time-scale than that of a society as a whole), and actually the fact that we can reach back to these alternate futures without positing any really tight continuity... In other words, we can have a concrete encounter with the the fact that we're really living the future of the last generation--always an uncanny thought, but now made even more exciting by our taking up the old dates themselves and seeing how they can be put to so many more and different uses...