The future is flat, or so I thought… noting wryly that it sounded like a slogan for tricked-out televisions. Staring at my laptop, my eyes crossed slightly – lapsing from the C L U T T E R, this present-day clutter of information masquerading as acquired goods (stacks of CDs, DVDs, books, photographs), to rooms, stark rooms with empty walls and hidden panels. Sharp corners. It all seemed so clean and I recalled how last Sunday evening I spent five hours properly renaming and archiving thousands of text, music, and image files on my hard drive. The next morning I scanned the rather abstract fruits of my labor – look! look how all the files are numbered and properly capitalized and the directory trees, how they cascade down in a predictable clickable line like the plucked arpeggio of a harp! – and I felt a deep satisfaction registering throughout my brain, like the synapses were cooling. Neural interface slowing.

I then glanced away from the cool glow of the display, back to the stacks of T H I N G S around my desk, and in that moment I imagined I was stepping outside of it. Seeing these times for what they are in a way that would normally be reserved for entire decades, eras gone by, fat chunks of time that can be emblematized, characterized. While pretending to view these messy days through the lens of twenty years from now, I thought how nice it would be if oversaturation, wires, and webs were to become passé. Maybe we aren’t snowballing down such a ridiculous tunnel, I thought to myself. Maybe things will start to get cleaner again. The idea of everything folding in on itself is too predictable. And predictable is boring. I won’t have it. The information isn’t going to disappear, so I think I’ll just tuck it away invisibly, 01010-style, in cabinets and boxes, only to be accessed on a need-to-know basis.

At that point I think I will redefine need-to-know.

Because in simple moments, free of cynicism and so-called irony (free of so-called anything), I think the future may just be outside again. Outside is where it’s at, tuning into the broadcast of autumn leaves and cold air smell. My lover’s unwitting sigh is where it’s at, the moments when he doesn’t know he’s being listened to. I like the image of my post-post-modern house. It will be clean and windowed and linked to the world. Everything in its right place. And my headspace will be free, a post where intellect and emotion are their rightful equals and I take in and am taken as naturally as an inward-outward breath.