Warren Ellis Imagines a Grim Meathook Future, or…

Warren Ellis, creator of Transmetropolitan, one of the best cyberpunk comics ever, has recently posted a rather grim outlook for the future. Last week on Comicon.com, in his Warren Ellis’ Ministry Feature, he states:

I wouldn’t think there’s much doubt that things are getting strange again. And not the good kind of strange. A woman married a dolphin yesterday. Seriously. A US senator has declared that no woman can get an abortion in his own state unless she’s a committed Christian virgin who’s been beaten to within an inch of her life and anally raped. He said it on television. Quantum physicists are teleporting light. The truth behind that old “where’s my bloody jetpack” view of the future is that the future is clearly not going to be that simple. In the last few months, I’ve started to get the feeling that maybe old miseryguts JG Ballard isn’t right all the time, and the near future, at least, is going to be anything but banal. Unless, of course, you’re already so dead inside that anything short of Jesus Robots descending en masse from the centre of the sun dispensing immortality juice and flying cars makes you yawn….

…There’s a middle distance between the complete collapse of infrastructure and some weird geek dream of electronically knowing where all your stuff is. (I’m cheating: the end result of pure spime theory is electronic omniscience, which is not a useless concept.) Between apocalyptic politics and nerdvana is the human dimension; how this stuff is taken onboard by smart people at street level. You all know Bill Gibson’s saw from his cyberpunk novels, that the street finds its own use for things. It still holds. But, right now, I think there’s an urgency and a sense of envelope-pushing in exactly what uses are found for these things.

Josh says it in the GMF text: “I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There’s the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future….”

I tend to agree with this sentiment. While we seem to have so much potential for the betterment of mankind, I don’t see the stars aligned for this, at least not any time soon. I am far closer to believing we’ll all need a site like Desirina’s With a Whimper: How to Survive the Coming Apocalypse and Other Helpful Hints to help us through it.