BRAIN SOUP FUTURE INSANITY LOL

I’m attempting to wean myself off to-do lists by just doing whatever comes to mind in random order, overlapping, with music playing, Tweetdeck chirping at me, the telly playing movies I’ve seen fifteen times, a white noise blanket of distraction through which I might be able to trick myself into getting stuff done. It’s the antithesis of Getting Things Done, a new approach I call How The Hell Did I Just Manage To Get That Done, a branch of the What Was I Looking For and Ooh! Biscuits Yes I Had Some Biscuits They’d Be Nice And I Might Just Clean The Kitchen As Well While I’m There schools of thought.

At the moment, I’m balancing a discussion on the fragility and interconnectedness of ecosystems and the dangers of habitat fragmentation with ongoing thoughts on what Doctor Who assisting thieving Lady Christina’s escape says about his attitude to the law of the land, whether I can get back the ninety minutes of my life I wasted watching the new Red Dwarf, what scumbags like Damien McBride do when they resign if it isn’t just to go and find another scumbag job in Westminster to be a scumbag in, and how many retweets a day is unacceptable behaviour.

Earlier last week I went to meet some Twitter contacts in London, and found myself wandering the streets, mobile phone in hand, watching myself on the screen represented as a small blue dot, moving slowly across a Google Map towards my intended destination, being tracked by GPS. Yes. No more A to Z, now I’m moving zombie-like tracking my own progress across Fleet Street using satellites. In space. Space satellites. At one point I raised my eyes from my phone and saw that I was walking in completely the wrong direction.

All this technology is re-wiring my brain and turning it into a useless soup with no attention span. The Police sang ‘Too Much Information’ in 1981, and that was only 1981. Sting had nothing more to worry about than getting addled at the pace of questions on Ask The Family. No World Wide Web, mobile phones the size of touring caravans had only just become available in a few countries, no rolling news, Sky TV still ten years in the future, and the words ‘Celebrity’, ‘Blog’, ‘Twitter’ and ‘CSI’ all a very long way away. That’s the problem with The Police. Don’t know they’re born.

Now welcome to 2009, where you can work out just how lost you are using satellites, where ‘Facebooking’ someone is an acceptable verb, where the rolling news channels can’t keep up with the news and the newspapers don’t have a hope. On top of this, Twitter informs you of the movements, diets, feelings and interests of three thousand other people, like standing in a waterfall of warm brain ejaculations and lazily clutching at the shiniest ones.

Fast forward to 2029. You’ll ding (a cross between IM and natural conversation) your children while they’re in the same room to tell them to put down the cloned pet (with embedded Playstation 9) and join you at the dinner table, doing this with your skull-embedded comms device (Nokia, naturally. The Motorola ones went wrong too often and gave people embolisms). The dinner table plays the news, hence TV dinners are now conducted around a table and are acceptable.

Diners can interject in the news at any time to share their opinions which are rated by other viewers. Viewers may pass off your opinions as their own to their friends, which is acceptable as long as you prefix your comment with RT @, an oddity which harks back to the old communication service Twitter. Twitter all but disappears from use in 2016, when Stephen Fry’s Twitter account becomes self-aware, destroying the rest of Twitter and leaving thousands of social media experts without work, bankrupting the international petrochemical industry and revealing to the world detailed plans for affordable organic transport powered by laughter.

TV news cameras are no longer required as all news footage is assembled automatically using composite images uploaded from phones and CCTV, meaning that journalists, now a fading institution, need merely to walk to where the news is happening and start talking. Newspapers die off in 2013 after it is established that in many cases they are several hours behind events and have nothing unique to offer except tedious opinions. The language of news changes in 2018 with the Sun’s watershed headline ‘OMG PMSL PWN @Il LOL’ being broadcast when North Korea attempts to launch Kim Jong Il into space and accidentally destroys Japan.

TV programming has adapted to changes in the human concentration span. Eastenders now runs for three minutes per episode, or ten minutes on an omnibus edition with a break halfway through. After the lifting of restrictions on subliminal advertising, the cast’s eyes now beam the phrase ‘Vorsprung durch technik’ directly into your brain from implants in their retinas. Grand Designs runs at seven minutes, which is plenty to fit in an optimistic discussion about the design of the house, fretting over costs, rain ruining the floors and fifteen subliminal adverts for findaproperty.com.

The Internet is so fast that if the fridge runs out of milk, it orders and has the milk delivered through the Internet (milk downloads are old news now) before you even realise you ran out. The fridge also spotted that you were pregnant a fortnight ago and started shipping in a lot of pickled onions.

All of this is in your floating house. In space. With pills for food. And cows on the moon. The end.