Old Future

On a recommendation, I’ve started watching Futurama over the past couple months. This being me it’ll probably be a year or so before I finish the show (I’m really bad at watching TV). In the meantime, the show’s a fascinating time capsule. Some of that is in the sitcom tropes it uses, what with the idiot guy/hyper-competent woman pairing and other decidedly dated gender roles, some of it is also in its imagination of a future that’s a relic of the turn of the century. When Fry wakes up a thousand years later, he’s experiencing a future devised back in 1999.

So you’ve got references to tapes as the big way of data storage which, like in Empire Strikes Back, makes sense. Tape was (and still is) a great way to store information, but its ease of use has been eclipsed by more modern media. The internet in the year 3000 is much in line with the internet of twenty years ago — a wild west of websites and potential shady dealings — instead of the mired mess of social media conglomerates it is today. Even cell phones, which the show does feature, are used almost only for talking. There’s no texting or anything resembling modern cellphone usage in this show set in New New York where there are spaceships and aliens and transport tubes. The future is old, it’s a future extrapolated from an older world.

Here’s the thing, I absolutely love that Futurama has a dated future. I think it’s so much fun when people try and guess at what a future might look like with a willingness to not be accurate. We can say that Star Trek predicted cellphones with the communicators, but the show couldn’t imagine the relationship we have with technology today. But those ideas are part of the appeal of science fiction. Let’s have those fun flights of imagination! Then years from now we can look back at it all and have a laugh about how wrong we were.