April, 1986
Dear Justin,
Greetings, I am writing this to you from 40 years in the future. I am happy to say that you turn out OK and that the Russians haven’t nuked us yet. You will have a successful career in computers which will provide you funds to pursue your other interests (video production, music, flying) as hobbies. And, as impossible as it seems to you know, you will have a wonderful wife and two beautiful daughters who you will love more than you can possibly conceive.
You’re pretty good with computers and you’ve got a lot of great ideas that will come to fruition soon. That idea you had about combining a scanner and printer to also make a FAX and copier – someone’s going to do that and sell millions of them. That Quantum Link service you tried out with your new modem – it’s going to make so much money that they purchase Time-Warner.
But some of your ideas aren’t that great. That one about being able to just press a button to order food in a restaurant – you’re going to hate actually using it. Your modem is capable of delivering up-to-date news and weather it’s going to be riddled with ads and of questionable accuracy. And while you may lament the biases of the current day news reporters, the free-for-all that replaces it is going to be far worse in ways you cannot imagine.
And forget your dream of being able to live away from where you work. It turns out that humans really need face-to-face communication to effectively collaborate (or even just get along). Remote work will suddenly become the norm due to a cataclysmic event. Nothing cool will be invented afterwards and human interaction will never be the same.
You see, you currently live in a medium-sized town. Some of the folks have lived there forever and some have moved in recently. Regardless of where they came from, they all live, work, and participate in the community. They go to the same churches, their kids join the same scout troops, they get their news from the same places, and generally just interact with the people around them in a largely positive way.
You will live in this town for your whole life, but it is going to undergo explosive growth for decades. The people coming in are going to be more transient in nature. They will physically exist in your town, but you won’t interact with them much. You’ll see them out walking, but they will have headphones on or have their faces buried in these little pocket computers that every single person in the developed world will carry at all times. They will never invite you to their home, but they will stay in constant contact (multiple times a day) with their friends and family “back home”. They won’t change their phone numbers or their sports team allegiances.
Initially it will be for work reasons, but once the remote work bomb goes off, they will move here just because they heard it’s a nice place. Their job will be in some far-off city where they are also not part of the community. This will be made worse by massive consolidation of media and retail outlets. Every city will become just like every other city.
If that sounds bad, their kids will have it even worse. That same cataclysmic event will confine them to their home for years where they will be only exposed to the information coming through the little pocket computers in the free-for-all information exchange. Bizarre ideas will become accepted as “Science” and many of them will be led into dark corners of humanity. Their social development will be stunted. They will be terrified of everything and incapable of simple social interactions. Many of them won’t even get their drivers’ licenses.
So, keep honing your coding skills and pursuing your interests, but don’t ignore the concerns of “loss of humanity” that some of your friends have. They are right, though ironically many of them will get swept up in this madness themselves. When this thing called “social media” gets invented you will resist it at first and embrace it later. Your initial instincts will indeed be correct, so follow them. It will be the same story with the little pocket computers – they will be advertised as a convenience to help you but will also be used to monitor and control you. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to opt out of those because the world will marginalize and exclude you from many activities if you do not possess one.
You won’t be able to prevent any of this, but you can enjoy the things you have while you have them. Read the newspaper – it will eventually be reduced to just a few pages and become horrendously expensive. Enjoy your local radio stations – they will soon become nationalized and play the same 50 songs endlessly for decades. Hang onto your CDs and VHS tapes – because you will eventually only be able to rent movies and music (not that you’d want to – the new ones are horrible).
But most importantly, take care of yourself. Watch what you eat – that’s going to cause a lot of problems for you. Read some books – you don’t think much of them now, but you are going to enjoy them more later (especially Sci-Fi). Your chronic ingrown toenails will get fixed, and you will eventually enjoy hiking, so try not to have such a negative view right now. Your future self will thank you.
Signed,
Your future self – April 2026.