retro-futures
Jay-Z's Euro-punk Future Cost Him At Least $1.15 Million
Four years ago this week, the value of the euro reached an all-time high against the U.S. dollar: $1.594 to €1. Jay-Z — then as now a businessman as well as a business, man — must have seemed to all observers something rarer still. Namely, a successful
RoboSlop: The Future of Automated Eateries Is Now
New Zealand nerds postulating about the future of the sex robot industry. Robot prison guards beginning real-world trials in South Korea. A RoboCop remake currently in pre-production. The robo-apocalypse is coming, and I feel... hungry?
The Best (Worst) Bike Videos to Watch on Acid
Sixty-nine years ago today, Albert Hofmann went on a bike ride. Three days prior, the Swiss scientist "inadvertently ingested":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/4/16/albert/hoffman-and-the-greatest-discoveries-of-lsd enough lysergic acid...
The Giant, Fallen: Sony Is Betting Its Life on Cell Phone Watches
On "January 13, 1946":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tracy#Evolution_of_the_strip, Chester Gould gave Dick Tracy a two-way wrist radio and adolescent boys across the country became transfixed with the idea of miniature portable communication devices...
Motherboard TV: William Gibson in Real Life
William Gibson's foray into television included an _X-Files_ episode that aired in 1998, called "Kill Switch," and it's one of my favorites. In it, Mulder and Scully must pursue a killer computer that lives in an RV and drives around killing people...
The First Cell Phone Call Almost Got Bloody
On April 3, 1973, Motorola researcher Martin Cooper was perched on a New York City street corner on his way to a press conference, when he pulled out an enormous prototype phone in front of a few reporters and placed the first ever cell phone call, to...
The Ecstasy of Fetishization: An Interview with Guy Maddin
If you listened carefully while the Academy Award for Best Picture went to _The Artist,_ you could hear thousands of film geeks across the world whisper, “Bullshit.” Making a silent movie? Pssh. Guy Maddin’s been doing that kind of thing for years. And...
Thousands of People Are Still Lurking Inside the Internet's Run-Down Sex Chat Mansion
As the "World Wide Web" sloughs forward into the privately-owned public spaces of apps and gated communities, old abandoned lots and seedy backrooms still flourish, somewhere, welcoming misfits whose vocabulary is still full of IRCs, GIFs, NIFOCs. At...
In the 1930s, the Home of the Future Was a Ball You Towed by Tractor
Whether it's deserved or not, mobile homes have kind of a stigma about them. Whether it's trailer park meth heads or the good-natured gents that used to live in Winnebagos outside my house in Santa Barbara, people tend to be just a wee bit skeptical...
Commercials by David Lynch: Definitive Gold Box Edition
I was just talking about Old New York yesterday, which I guess is Old New York today. Trippy. One of the things I love about the New York of yesteryear is the filth and the grime (not that I'm going around trying to get a rise out of "Iron Eyes Cody...
The First Domain Name Was Purchased 27 Years Ago Today
On March 15, 1985, REO Speedwagon was topping the U.S. charts. Almost as importantly, that was the day a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer, with the perfectly dotcom-ish name Symbolics, purchased symbolics.com, the world's first .com...
The Mutant Food of Retro Space Flicks
When we think of the retro futures portrayed in old movies and television, the culinary aspects tend to get lost amid the flying cars, robot maids, and glittery space travel. I guess we tend to assume that futures past all contained food in pill form...