“I’ve seen the future and it will be.”

The title of this entry is taken from Prince’s song “The Future”*, and for a long time I didn’t understand what it meant. But I’m coming to realize that its ambiguity is intentional. We never know what’s coming, but the future *will* be, however it turns out. It came to mind because of some work I was doing for my parents last week. My wife is in the ongoing process of helping them go through their house and organize, and this particular session involved a lot of paper shredding, which I volunteered for. I think of myself as an expert shredder, having worked in the Borders accounting department for almost a year in the 90s. What I ended up for my parents was disposing bags of papers with any personal information – from late-1980s check stubs to the torn-off subscription information of hundreds of magazine covers.

The experience – and the subsequent dinner conversation later that day -- brought into focus a kind of generational difference on the wired world we live in today. My parents – and by that I mostly mean my mother, since my dad is so reluctant to new technology that he’s never used the Internet – is inherently suspicious of anything and everything having to do with the web. It’s been hard to even get her to pay her bills online. She doesn’t seem to grasp that the people who have online businesses are hyper-aware that their livelihoods depend on making sure that your transactions are safe and secure.

My wife and I are much more realistic about security and privacy, but I can understand my mom’s mild paranoia. Patton Oswalt has a great chapter in his book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland that attempts to explain how he, and most of Generation X (of which I’m a member), are suspicious of the new wired world. Things that used to be free, like TV, now cost money to use, and things that used to cost money, like music, are now free. Growing up before the revolution, living through it, and having kids who never know what it is to be unplugged has given us a unique perspective, an appreciation for the inevitability, the possibility and the wonder, of everything the new world has to offer.

Not having used the Internet until her fifties, my mom doesn’t have the same trust that comes through familiarity and understanding. Shredding every document that has any personal information on it is a good prevention against identity theft, if (and this is a big IF) you believe the only thing keeping people from stealing from you is because it’s hard. Even so, I don’t think that any cyber-criminal worth his salt is going to be rummaging through anyone’s trash. There are much easier ways, and again we come to that flip-flop of common sense that Patton talked about.

In talking about this with my mom and wife, we started having a discussion about bullying, both online and in person. The consensus we all came to was that bullying seems to be getting better, mostly because of the spotlight that social media has thrown on it recently. On the other hand, it also seems like there are new opportunities for cyberbullying, so maybe the new venue is simply balancing out the equation. I don’t think that bullying will ever end… there will always be parents who are abusive or neglectful to their children, and in turn those children will always turn around and punish those around them. But the level of transparency is rising, from cameras on school buses to the saving of text messages.

And that, ultimately, that’s the crux of the issue. The Internet is a tool, and as such it can be used to build something new, or knock something down. I’ve always had a pragmatic view of society and everything new that gets introduced into it… there will be problems and solutions, some things will be harder and some will be easier, but eventually things will settle out, and more often than not we’ll turn out better for it. Society will progress.

An example of this that I’m trying to hold onto is the recent collusion of Amazon and the Department of Justice in bringing monopoly charges against all the major book publishers. They allege that they met with Apple in an attempt to fix book prices, which ironically would prevent Amazon from basically giving away e-books to promote their Kindle Fire tablet computer. Personally, I believe that this will de-value books in general, and as a result publishing companies will have to downsize or fold altogether, and book quality will go down, with unedited, unsolicited tripe being just as available as thoughtful high-profile titles. Now, if I wasn’t biased against the survival of the publisher system – bear in mind that up until this year, my whole life has hinged on the idea of books as quality entertainment and information – I’d have to go back to the last paragraph and say that eventually this will be a benefit for writing as an art. But right now I just can’t see it that way.

I firmly believe that with the way things are going, running a book publishing company is going to become an untenable prospect, and if they don’t disappear completely, they will have to downsize to the size of a small marketing firm to survive. If there were only time to adjust, there wouldn’t be thousands of jobs lost, and lives impacted. But my wife brought up a good point about this: the newspaper and music industries weren’t given time to adjust and adapt, why should books be any different? And maybe this will open the door for all those part-time writers – myself included – whose main reason for not being published is the sheer number of rejection letters to expect and hoops to jump through. Maybe we’ll be opening up a whole new world of voices and ideas. Or maybe people will start universally using apostrophes to pluralize things.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. I have to go back to Prince, and present my quote of “The Future” in full: “I’ve seen the future and it will be / I’ve seen the future and it works.” Here’s hoping that it does.

*Geeky Music Fact™: This song is probably best known by its being sampled in one of Prince’s biggest hits, “Batdance” from the 1989 Batman movie soundtrack. “Batdance” itself is a sample-filled remix of a song called “200 Balloons” that was also written for the movie, but failed to appear on the album at all.