"People are understandably jittery, after the numerous social networking data breach debacles of three years ago that seemingly turned a generation off of oversharing. MTC have gone to great pains to assure users of the system that their data is safe from "getting zucked", and they've begun to provide free personal monitoring services to users of Clipper." Mike writes future-history, and in the midst of it, coins a lovely neologism.

"I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it." Lovely BruceS fiction; not just futurism, but hyperlocal futurism at that.

"Ah - The Big Meg, where at any moment on the mile-high Zipstrips you might be flattened by a rogue Boinger, set-upon by a Futsie and thrown down onto the skedways far below, offered an illicit bag of umpty-candy or stookie-glands and find yourself instantly at the mercy of the Judges. If you grew up on 2000AD like me, then your mind is probably now filled with a vivid picture of the biggest, toughest, weirdest future city there's ever been." Jones on future cities, collating and refining thoughts into a lovely piece of structure and rhetoric. Also, the sentence "wrapping himself in Tokyo to form a massive concrete battlesuit".

The city, it turns out, is there for you to SPEND MONEY IN. And augment the hell out of. No grim meathook future in 2015 Singapore, that's for certain...

Need to finish watching this, but: for all you can ridicule this, a lot of it isn't half bad; the two modes of videophone (share face/share document) are interesting, if only for how useful the latter is. Also, interesting to see how futurism was represented on film at one point.

"Watching classics like The Apartment and Manhattan made me wonder at the romances we’d write about some cities, and Slumdog Millionaire bizarrely seemed like a continuation of that: a romance of the maximum-city." Yes; my favourite thing in that film was the growth of the city around Jamal, Bombay becoming Mumbai, and the skyscrapers growing.

"After being seen as cheap or low-rent housing for much of the 40s, asylums started to be seen as 21st century modern, and desirable places to live." All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. Heathcote's Lyddle End entry is fantastic, and primarily for his writing/futurism.

"Isla Lyddle End lies on the far east of the British Archipelago. It is the largest of the eastern islands in what was once the continuous land mass known as Hornbyshire. Isla Lyddle End celebrates the Golden Jubilee of The Grand Iman of Britain HH Patel bin Windsor with a minaret clock tower, constructed of hard-pack, molded synthetic carbon nodules in full compliance with the Rock and Soil Conservation Act of 2038." Julian's Lyddle End 2050 entry is excellent.

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."

"Anytime I hear the alpha futurist-y featurists get all excited about some kind of idea for how the new ubicomp networked world will be so much more simpler and seamless and bug-free, I want to punch someone in the eye. They sound like a 5 year old who whines that they want a pink pony for their birthday." Julian has ubicomp fail.

"The conundrum is that no path, no vision of progress – technological, social, moral – will be plausible today if it does not include the complexity of costs, yet it will not be desirable if it does. That makes our society blind." Some good, if dense, Kevin Kelly.

"The future is terribly easy to predict. It’s predicting the instantiation that’s hard."

"Computer Entertainment Thirty-Five Years From Today: A solo spoken word performance by Bruce Sterling" Wonderful, surreal, exciting; Sterling's keynote from Austin GDC. Good stuff, and worth a read for gamers, futurists, and designers alike.

"...then, after destroying his nano-network, as an admonition to the audience, extended [Arthur C Clarke's metaphor]: 'Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage.'" Excellent summary of what sounds like a wonderful GDC Austin keynote from Bruce Sterling.

"Fortune500 companies would be better off hiring science-fiction writers than MBA consultants right now."

"In an age before globalisation, products from rockets to radios sprang from local roots. Together they reveal a fascinating ‘lost world’ of British design and invention – a glimpse of a time when the TV in the corner was a Murphy, not a Sony."

"...HG Wells, had [this] huge, leisurely 'here and [now]' from which to contemplate what might happen. Wells knew exactly where he was and knew he was at the centre of things.' Wonderful William Gibson quotation.

Charlies does some maths. The results are at the very least interesting.

"What one will then wear on the wrist will be, not a mini-computer, but a computerized dialling system to the big hook up." Jim R on fine form, on one of Brian Aldiss' many visions of the future.