Crikey. This guy has made it all

Vanessa glared at her husband. “Well,” she said, “it's just that college admissions these days — it's really all a question of the right breeding, isn't it?” Vanessa fingered the strand of pearls around her neck. “And your husband — I would never speak ill of the dead, mind you, but your late husband was a ...” Vanessa paused briefly before delivering her coup de grâce. “He was a plumber.”

Anne stuck out her chin. “And a good plumber, too. He was a smart man. But back in the old days, you had to fill out an application for college — not like now, where you just send in a cheek swab. He always said that he just couldn't be bothered to apply.”

I'd put it down to us mistaking Sense of Wonder for Innovation. We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the "eyeball kick" as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly different and new for the first time. But today you don't need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse "New Scientist". We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We're carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn't a 1980s cyberpunk vision that's imploded into the present, warts and all, I don't know what is. Seriously: to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF.

"in the past 30 years the only truly challenging new concepts to come along were cyberpunk and the singularity. Both of which amount to different attempts within the genre to accommodate the first-order implications of computers and networking as the defining technology of the near future" ... " to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF."

You're not looking in the right places.

via rhizome commissions

klassischer fall von <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4UQuXbl4G4&feature=plcp">standardsituationen der technologiebegeisterung</a>.