People are always complaining about the future and how it’s not what it’s cracked up to be. "Where’s my flying car?" people are often heard to exclaim, as though anyone under 70 was promised a flying car (and not an Orwellian, cyberpunk dystopia). The future, however, is indeed upon us. And, while yes, only the very rich are doing things like taking trips to space for fun, many decidedly ordinary things in the lives of even the least of us have been improved through new technology or trends. "Well, fuck you, that’s bullshit," you might say. But, I say "no." In fact, here’s a list of some common things that weren’t here, even a few short years ago.
I’m not going to count big things, like the Internet, GPS, the ubiquity of mobile communications or even the nearly 24-hour delivery of purchased goods—no, everyone knows of (and is likely aware of ) things like this, and the impact of these things—for better or worse—has been thoroughly considered. So, here are some of the unsung achievements of modern technology— for good or bad.
Cheap, efficient LEDs have made the world brighter—literally. Whether it be ten-year-lifetime light bulb replacements or OLED screens in electronics, like those in your tablet, PC monitor and phone, LEDs have made shit cheaper and more vibrantly lit. Now, when you get your flashlight out of the trunk of your car in the middle of the night to change a flat on the side of the highway, you’ll find that instead of the bulb being toast after months of banging around in there, it’s only the battery which is dead.
It used to be that anything with a small speaker was tinny and barely audible. We had boom boxes of such a size as to basically be an entire in-home stereo—almost jokingly described as "portable"—and they still didn’t get the job done all that well. These days, however, for a scant few dollars, you can get a speaker the size of a soda can, which puts out better sound than even the biggest ghetto blaster from decades past. A $20 bluetooth speaker will connect to your phone and play your entire music library better and more conveniently than both the zipper-case of cassette tapes and the Alpine sound system in your ‘88 Chrysler LeBaron. Admittedly, however, today’s gangstas and B-boys lack the upper-arm strength of their predecessors, who had to carry huge portable stereos down the block.
Companies finally got the fucking hint on this one. Most everything comes in a re-closeable bag, anymore—from dog food to cheese and back again. I imagine this is much to the chagrin of the good people who manufacture the Chip Clip™, but they had a good three decades before it clicked with the collective consciousness of manufacturers. It’s a net gain for all of us. Perplexingly, though, a few things you would think should absolutely have resealable bags, don’t—I’m looking at you, breakfast cereals and potato chips. Why the hell would we not want to reseal a bag of Cocoa Puffs? I can somewhat see not bothering with the chips, as people are well-known to eat entire bags of chips in a sitting, but who’s eating a whole box of Urkel-Os in a single go? However, speaking of potato chips...
These days, potato chips come in a ridiculous amount of bizarre and exotic flavors. Ushered in following a contest by Lay’s to come up with a new potato chip flavor, the companies have realized that the tyranny of "Original," "BBQ" and "Sour Cream & Onion" was not to last. Now, chips have flavors like Biscuits & Gravy, Deep-Dish Pizza, Thai Peanut Sauce, New Car and Spicy Walrus. It’s a great time to be alive, if you like potato chips. It’s just too bad they can’t put the damn things in a resealable bag.
Do you like TV? Well, statistically speaking, you probably do. Televisions are, as of this writing, the cheapest they have ever been in all of recorded history. Advances in manufacturing (see LEDS, above) have made it so they are 99.9% cheaper than they were 20 years ago, even accounting for inflation. Too bad 99.95% of what’s on TV is utter garbage, but I suppose some things never change. At least the average person can finally appreciate all those 4K Hentai Ultra HD Blu-Rays they have now, without breaking the bank.
Now, okay, this is an odd one for sure, but follow me here. At no time in the past have we, the average consumers, had access to so many different milks. Yes, there’s more-or-less always been soy milk, but before it was both your aunt’s coffee creamer and the favorite drink of excitable, open-mouthed Nintendo Switch players, it was exclusively the province of hippies, dirtyfoots and people with lactose tolerance issues. Nowadays, we have almond milk, cashew milk, rice milk, flax milk, hemp milk, hamster milk and beetle milk. Thy cup runneth over, if you like unconventional milks. To those of you saying that many of these ought not to count as milks—as they weren’t milked from a real creature—I agree, but I guess "flax juice" would have been a marketing nightmare.
Yeah, yeah, taxes suck and nobody likes paying The Man for the privilege of staying outta jail, but at least it’s really easy. If you use any of the many software programs available online to do your taxes, you can do them in under an hour. If you gotta pay, then it’s a good thing you can avoid the hassle of needing a whole day to figure out how much.
Yes, we’ve all seen the lame MC Hammer adverts for those adhesive picture hanging strips, but they really are neat. I use the velcro backings on everything and it’s a game changer for if you need something to be somewhere, where putting a nail would be inconvenient or ridiculous. In fact, I am currently suspended from the wall by a series of adhesive strips, given that my chair was confiscated by the Exotic management for an abundance of "shrimp-like smells," that were somehow imbued into its very core. Look, if you guys don’t like the smells I produce (for FREE, by the way), then stop serving those seafood rolls at meetings.
It’s like I stepped into a whole new world. A world of slightly-improved oral hygiene. That’s what I call "value added." I’m sure I forgot something, but perhaps there will be a part two at some point.
Now, for...
I don’t know about you good people (or you, Steve) out there, but I get a remarkable volume of phone spam— several calls a day—and it’s way more than ever before.
"Hi, this is Jason from the employment office on a recorded line and I bet you want to make ten thousand doll..." eat shit! Also, fuck you "Sandra from credit card services™," who wants to talk about "[my] current credit card account." I sometimes push the button to ring to a live scam-perator, so I can insult them, their parentage, their ethnicity, their line of work, their pets, their ancestors, their postman and their reproductive organs—but, mostly, I just hang up and am annoyed.
If you think about rebutting this with mention of the wonderful "do not call" list, then you have no idea how ineffectual that is—same with those apps that are supposed to curtail spam. Both of these things technically work, but only somewhat (and shouldn’t be necessary at all).
While I appreciate the idea that banks pretend to be concerned with our security, chip cards are awful. It used to be, I swipe my card while they’re ringing up my shit at the grocery store, enter my digits and wait until they’re done to hit "OK," at which point I’m out of there. Now, I have to wait until such time as all my goods have been rung up, in order to begin the transaction authentication process. Stick my card in...no, not yet, wait until it says... ahh, too soon, now I have to try it all over! Okay, now we go through the nine screens where the PIN pad asks a bunch of fucking questions about life, the universe and everything. Then, if you don’t pull your card out as soon as it completes, it makes an angry reminder sound, like you got a question wrong on a game show. What I’m getting at, is that a statistically insignificant amount of fraud occurs at a physical point-of-sale and swiping my card, putting it back in my wallet and getting ready to go beats extending the time I’m staring awkwardly at some fucking store clerk, by having to do all this other bullshit in the name of security! Okay, I’m done, I’m done.
Fully-digital networks have given us a remarkable amount of variety in pay TV, but that also means it’s really hard to steal cable anymore. You can’t just pop off those analog TV filters in your cable box and watch Skinemax, like the olden days. A crying shame, really.
May as well just call these mixes of sugar, caffeine and alcohol "blackout/ hangover in a convenient, travel-sized can." The kids love ‘em, though. Then again, the kids also "love" eating laundry detergent, playing Fortnite and jacking off to pictures of Kendall Jenner, so who knows... See, even the bad list isn’t longer than the good. I think the future is reasonably bright, with regard to consumer goods.
Enjoy the present.
