Future Shock – The Art of Accidentally Predicting Future Technology.
The ‘Global Data-Net’? Where can I get an app for that?
Whilst reading an old graphic novel recently, I was surprised to see a passing reference to what is basically an iPhone or smartphone of some kind.
One of the characters in Sinister Dexter, a series that ran in 2000 AD (the home of Judge Dredd) from the mid- to late 90’s, shocks another by producing the device and telling him he’s run a check on him using his ‘Fact-Totem’, enabling him to access the ‘global data-net’. Wow. Imagine that!
Written in the 1990’s when mobile phones were not as commonplace and nowhere near as sophisticated as they are today, the idea that someone could access information on a handheld device would have seemed futuristic to contemporary readers. In fact, even the character being shown it seemed pretty awestruck, as if even in the future it seemed outlandish.
The ‘Fact-Totem’ – Or just an iPhone?
Little did the creators of the graphic novel, Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, know, that in less than fifteen years after publication data-surfing handheld devices would be everywhere. Or maybe they did?
So in the future, data-connected devices are new-fangled, but smoking in public is perfectly normal.
In the frame above, Sinister is seen explaining to his young protege that the Fact-Totem enables him to look up work information whenever he wants. No doubt he looks up the future equivalent of Craigslist or Gumtree and flicks through the ‘Hired Guns’ section or something. What I find more interesting from a modern, jaded point of view however is that the protagonists live in the near-future, where being able to search the internet from anywhere is an amazing development, but smoking in restaurants is perfectly normal. I bet the creators had to stretch their imaginations to come up with the technological advancements, but totally neglected to consider public health law.
Also slightly weird to see in other parts of Sinister Dexter is a couple of references to ‘Googol’, the mathematical term the creators of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, bastardized for their company name. In the graphic novel it’s used as the name of a bay, Googol Bay. But in a postcard seen in one of the comic frames, you can clearly see an address written as ‘Googol Plaza’, not a million miles away from the name of Google’s HQ, the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
Later, what appears to be for all intents and purposes to be an iPad-style tablet is produced by a law enforcer to show mugshots of the main characters. Again, this would have been a flight of fancy for the creators of the story, but by today’s standards it’s de rigueur, as every day as TV or say, obesity.
Wow – a futuristic tablet computer thing!
The weirdest thing is considering I was reading this old graphic novel at about the same time Apple were announcing the new iPhone 6, like some kind of ‘time-versus-technology’ interface was taking place around me and I was being subtly made aware of it through twenty-year-old comics!
I wonder if these devices run iOS8?
Old sci-fi comics must be full of these weirdly prescient glimpses of the future. When I was a teenager I had a metre-tall stack of 2000 AD comics in my collect. I eventually ditched them when I realised that it would take about a hundred years for them to be worth anything. I should have kept them to see which crazy devices have crept into our lives, like a neighbourhood cat who decides you’re its new owner.
Got any examples of your own? I’d love to hear about them.
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