Our Sterile, "Metro-y" Future

The future is just around the corner, according to Gizmodo—the technology porn website that creepily treats all things technological with a fetishistic religiosity—and, predictably, it’s casually fascist. Gizmodo raves about the popular new video that Microsoft released this past week to present its version of a Utopian tech future, calling it “futuristic, natural, and metro-y,” (whatever that means) and declaring, emphatically, “I want this future.” The problem is, it’s actually a dystopian nightmare in which life is reduced to a series of turgid, effortless, and empty gestures. Your every move is scrutinized, surveilled, and scanned by corporate and commercial enterprises. Existence becomes an eternal hell of pleasant, passive somnambulism. If someone as much as farted in this brave new world, it would rip a hole in the matrix larger than even sad Keanu could muster.

Of course, being Gizmodo, itself a strange matrix of soulless, apolitical techno nerds with emotionally Vulcan tendencies, there is absolutely no analysis of the video beyond its shiny, all-touch-but-no-feel surfaces. So let’s take a look at just what kind of future Gizmodo and Microsoft have in store for us, which, sadly, appears to be more Helmut Lang than Fritz.

I suppose you could argue that in the future all differences of race and class will be magically erased in favor of some sort of flavorless ethnic and political neutrality, but really, did Microsoft have to start the video by identifying us with the subjectivity of a privileged, white, English-speaking woman in, of all places, Johannesburg, a city where severe divisions of class and race are still entrenched despite the overturning of apartheid? After smiling at her vaguely ethnic chauffeur at the airport, our postfeminist avatar communicates through techno-telepathy with the decidedly black bellhop of her hotel. Apparently some things never change. The representation of race in general in the video is bafflingly backward thinking and unimaginative. Why not a future in which humans use technology to change the color of their skin at will, for example, or at least to overthrow the neo-colonialist regime that seems to extend unchallenged into the world of tomorrow? But no, our resolutely white heroine drifts into the hotel lobby like a doped pony, where other wealthy guests sit in the sterile chrome and silver environment like so much human taxidermy.

In the future according to Microsoft, only wealthy business elites and the people who serve them will have access to technology, while all considerations of class and ethnic strife will be airbrushed out of existence. It’s a seamless, hermetically sealed world that allows for only vestigial cultural permutations. There is no resistance, no questioning of authority, only obsequious smiles in the service of efficiency and professionalism. Although life seems to be an endless menu of options, everything infinitely available at your fingertips, there really is no choice at all. Targeted advertising and stealth marketing have predetermined your tastes and preferences to the point where supply side economics have been hardwired directly into your brain, like the Manchurian candidate. I had a bad acid trip several months ago very much like this video, a kind of premonition of a future already upon us in which your identity is slowly and methodically stripped away and replaced by corporate branding and commoditization. The body snatchers are among us.

Meanwhile, our avatar’s business contact in Hong Kong (doesn’t Hong Kong seem very 90s? Isn’t mainland China more futuristic?) waits on a suspiciously uncrowded subway platform (will public transportation also only accommodate business elites in the future?) and catches the eye of a black man in tribal attire playing some primitive instrument in a virtual benefit concert, presumably in support of the invisible and less privileged classes. Yes, he’s a virtual black busker singing on the subway for his supper. Le plus c’est change, le plus c’est la meme chose.

But wait, it gets better. We’re magically teleported to a conference call with more vaguely ethnic but decidedly WASPy business associates in an office where foliage hangs on the wall in a large frame as if nature itself is a rare, precious commodity that can only be purchased by business elites, like Warhols. (It’s an eco-wimpy variation on the brilliant scene in Norman Jewison’s Rollerball, in which uberwealthy party guests in tuxedos and ball gowns use a kind of flamethrower to destroy the last few remaining trees on Earth, for sport. Well, at least they were having fun!) There will be no nature in the future, only applications that simulate it.

Finally the avatar chats techno-telepathically with her little white daughter who is doing her homework in a house that makes it appear as if the nuclear family is living inside a giant iPhone. A virtual polar bear–now apparently an adorably extinct species thanks to global warming–asks her what she’s making for the bake sale. More charity, of course, which the elite class has plenty of time for now that their business interests are all managed so efficiently by the insidiously invisible technology on display.

The future is a bland, benign Minority Report in which actual minorities have been wholly subsumed by the WASP technocracy, rendered with a pale pastel blue color palette and bad lounge music. Thanks Microsoft.

Previously - Bruce LaBruce for the Purple Resistance Army

Bruce's opinions do not necessarily represent those of VICE.