‘The Future of the Future’ by JG Ballard

One of the most surprising but barely noticed events of the period since the
Second World War has been the life and death of the space age. Almost twenty
years ago to the day, 4 October 1957, I switched on the BBC news and heard for
the first time the radio call-sign of Sputnik I as it circled the earth above
our heads. Its urgent tocsin seemed to warn us of the arrival of a new epoch. As
a novice science fiction writer, I listened to this harbinger of the space age
with strong misgivings — already I was certain, though without the slightest
evidence, that the future of science fiction, and for that matter of popular
consciousness in general, lay not in outer space but in what I had already
christened `inner space’, in a world increasingly about to be remade by the
mind.

None the less, I fully expected that the impact of the space age would be
immediate and all-pervasive — from fashion to industrial design, from the
architecture of airports and department stores to the ways in which we furnished
our homes. I took for granted that the spin-off of the US and Russian space
programmes would transform everything in our lives and produce an extrovert
society as restlessly curious about the external world as Renaissance Europe.

In fact, nothing remotely like this occurred. Public interest in the space
flights of the 1960s was rarely more than lukewarm (think, by contrast, of our
powerful emotional involvement with the death of President Kennedy and the
Vietnam war), and the effects on everyday life have been virtually nil. How many
of us could name, apart from Armstrong himself, a single one of the men who have
walked on the Moon, an extraordinary achievement that should have left a
profound trace upon the collective psyche? Yet most of us could rattle off
without a moment’s thought the names of lone transatlantic sailors — Chichester,
Chay Blyth, Tabarly, Clare Francis … Looking back, we can see that far from
extending for ever into the future, the space age lasted for scarcely fifteen
years: from Sputnik I and Gagarin’s first flight in 1961, to the last Skylab
mission in 1974 — and the first splashdown, significantly, not to be shown on
television. After a casual glance at the sky, people turned around and went
indoors. Even the test flights taking place at present of the space shuttle
Enterprise — named, sadly, after the spaceship in Star Trek — seem little more
than a limp by-product of a television fantasy, More and more, the space
programmes have become the last great period piece of the twentieth century, as
magnificent but as out of date as the tea-clipper and the steam locomotive.

During the past fifteen years the strongest currents in our lives have been
flowing in the opposite direction altogether, carrying us ever deeper into the
exploration not of outer but of inner space. This investigation of every
conceivable byway of sensation and imagination has shown itself in a multitude
of guises — in mysticism and meditation, encounter groups and fringe religions,
in the use of drugs and biofeedback devices — all of which attempt to project
the interior realm of the psyche on to the humdrum world of everyday reality and
externalize the limitless possibilities of the dream. So far, though, the
techniques available have tended to be extremely dangerous (drugs such as LSD
and heroin), physically uncomfortable (the contortions of classical yoga), or
mentally exhausting (the psychological assault course of the suburban encounter
group, with its staged confrontations and tantrums, its general hyperventilation
of the emotions).

Meanwhile, far more sophisticated devices have begun to appear on the scene,
above all, video systems and micro-computers adapted for domestic use. Together
these will achieve what I take to be the apotheosis of all the fantasies of late
twentieth-century man — the transformation of reality into a TV studio, in which
we can simultaneously play out the roles of audience, producer and star.

In the dream house of the year 2000, Mrs Tomorrow will find herself living
happily inside her own head. Walls, floors and ceilings will be huge, unbroken
screens on which will be projected a continuous sound and visual display of her
pulse and respiration, her brain-waves and blood pressure. The delicate
quicksilver loom of her nervous system as she sits at her dressing table, the
sudden flush of adrenaline as the telephone rings, the warm arterial tides of
emotion as she arranges lunch with her lover, all these will surround her with a
continuous light show. Every aspect of her home will literally reflect her
character and personality, a visible image of her inner self to be overlaid and
enhanced by those of her husband and children, relatives and friends. A marital
tiff will resemble the percussive climax of The Rite of Spring, while a dinner
party (with each of the guests wired into the circuitry) will be embellished by
a series of frescoes as richly filled with character and incident as a gallery
of Veroncses. By contrast, an off day will box her into a labyrinth of Francis
Bacons, a premonition of spring surround her with the landscapes of Constable,
an amorous daydream transform the walls of her bathroom into a seraglio worthy
of Ingres.

All this, of course, will be more electronic wallpaper, the background to the
main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player.
Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic
life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back
to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best
profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through
the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened
re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order,
each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually
unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to
an appropriate supporting role.

Free now to experiment with the dramatic possibilities of our lives, we will
naturally conduct our relationships and modify our behaviour towards each other
with more than half an eye to their place in the evening’s programme. When we
visit our friends we will be immediately co-opted into a half-familiar play
whose plot-lines may well elude us. Even within our own marriages we will
frequently find ourselves assigned roles which we will act out with no rehearsal
time and only the scantiest idea of the script — on reflection, not an
unfamiliar situation. So these programmes will tirelessly unfold; a personalized
Crossroads or Coronation Street perhaps recast in the style of Strindberg or
Stoppard, six million scenes from a marriage.

However fanciful all this may seem, this transformation of our private lives
with the aid of video-systems and domestic computers is already at hand.
Micro-computers are now being installed in thousands of American homes, where
they provide video-games and do simple household accounts. Soon, though, they
will take over other functions, acting as major domo, keeper of finances,
confidant and marriage counsellor. `Can you afford the Bahamas this year, dear?
Yes … if you divorce your husband.’ The more expensive and sophisticated
computers will be bought precisely to fulfil this need, each an éminence grise
utterly devoted to us, aware of our strengths and weaknesses, dedicated to
exploring every possibility of our private lives, suggesting this or that
marital strategy, a tactical infidelity here, an emotional game-plan there, a
realignment of affections, a radical change of wardrobe, lifestyle, sex itself,
all costed down to the last penny and timed to the nearest second, its
print-outs primed with air tickets, hotel reservations and divorce petitions.

Thus we may see ourselves at the turn of the century, each of us the star of a
continuous television drama, soothed by the music of our own brain-waves, the
centre of an infinite private universe. Will it occur to us, perhaps, that there
is still one unnecessary intruder in this personal paradise — other people?
Thanks to the video-tape library, and the imminent wonders of holistic
projection, their physical presence may soon no longer be essential to our
lives. Without difficulty, we can visualize a future where people will never
meet at all, except on the television screen. Childhood, marriage, parenthood,
even the few jobs that still need to be done, will all be conducted within the
home.

Conceived by artificial insemination, brought up within the paediatric viewing
cubicle, we will conduct even our courtships on television, shyly exchanging
footage of ourselves, and perhaps even slipping away on a clandestine weekend
(that is, watching the same travelogues together). Thanks to the split-screen
technique, our marriage will be witnessed by hundreds of friends within their
own homes, and pre-recorded film taken within our living rooms will show us
moving down the aisle against a cathedral backdrop. Our wedding night will be a
masterpiece of tastefully erotic cinema, the husband’s increasingly bold zooms
countered by his bride’s blushing fades and wipes, climaxing in the ultimate
close-up. Years of happy marriage will follow, unblemished by the hazards of
physical contact, and we need never know whether our spouse is five miles away
from us, or five hundred, or on the dark side of the sun. The spherical mirror
forms the wall of our universe, enclosing us for ever at its heart …

— JG Ballard, The Future of the Future, Vogue, 1977 
  (A User’s Guide to the Millennium)

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