Don’t show me the past or the future; show me what you can give now

By David McElroy · October 28, 2011

Do you ever watch videos from high-tech companies that are supposed to show off what they’re going to bring you in a few years? I watch them, but I know better than to believe they represent reality. It’s dangerous to try to live in the future instead of the present, whether you’re a company or an individual.

Microsoft has a new video out showing us what it expects the office of tomorrow to look like. To me, it just looks like something put together by an art director for an especially sterile and boring science fiction movie. It’s vaguely interesting if you’re into technology, but the track record of this sort of future-looking prediction isn’t good. (If you want a real laugh, check out what a technical magazine predicted in 1968 as life in the year 2008.)

It’s not just Microsoft that makes this sort of thing. I remember a similarly laughable video made by Nokia in 2009, and since Nokia is now fighting for its life two years later, it seems unlikely that the company still plans to pursue those fantasies. Way back in 1987, Apple made a similar forward-looking video based on the vision of then-CEO John Sculley (a couple of years after he pushed Steve Jobs out of the company).

So why am I so disdainful of this sort of video? Is it just because they tend to get things so wrong about the future? No, that’s not it at all. It’s true that the future never looks quite like what the futurists predict, but the real problem is that focusing so much on way down the road — and talking to the public about what’s down the road — does absolutely nothing to sell products today.

If Microsoft thinks it’s a good idea to design the office of the future as shown in the video, it ought to create the products and put them on sale, not just talk about them. (Remember the Microsoft Courier video for a product that was to never exist?) The same goes for Nokia and the old Apple (prior to Jobs’ return). I want to contrast that to Apple after Jobs’ return. Ever since 1997, Apple has adopted the exact opposite policy. Whatever they’re working on or even conceiving for the future is top secret. They don’t talk about something until they’re ready to sell it. As a stockholder — and as a customer — which is more interesting? What products might be available in five years? Or what products I can walk into a store and buy next month?

We need to be the same way with the people in our lives (and we need to expect the same from them). We need to quit dwelling on past glories or future hopes. We need to concentrate on what we’re willing to do — today — for the people we love. We need to ask the people in our lives what they’re willing to be or to give to us — now — not at some undefined time in the future.

I’ve been guilty of living in the future, and I’m not going to do it anymore. I can tell you from painful experience that if you live life in the future, it never comes. All we have is right now. If we live life fully today, tomorrow will take care of itself. If we have our eyes on the future, we get passive and stagnant — ensuring that we never can reach the dreams of tomorrow.

I know where I want to be in the future, but I’m not necessarily going to talk about much of it until I’m closer to delivering it. I’ve had enough of talking and embarrassing myself by not delivering. It’s a great thing to be an artist who shows you great visions of the future, but if you don’t actually convert what you’re talking about into reality for other people, you’re not a visionary. You’re just a dreamer.

Real artists ship real products and make good on real promises for the people in their lives. That’s what I want to do.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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