“Future is the unseen land that excuses everything. We are mostly okay with any courses of action that will take us there. Self-driving cars were already tested in Singapore. The first autonomous vehicle/AV testing facility was opened in 2017 (and news is telling me people are already riding them in China and the US).”

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nonfiction, nov 24

(I wish someone was singing this before I begin, one of my favorites. To create the mood.

“...‘Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh! Hard times come again no more.”)

1

This is an obituary of earthquakes. I first thought of it when scrolling through the fundraisers for Türkiye, right after one shook the country in 2023.

If it was a thousand years ago, people would have no choice but to embrace their deaths silently. No choice but to start cannibalism at one point, to survive (but what happens when there’s no one left to eat?) 

According to many, things are infinitely better now. That may or may not be the case.

Earthquakes—and all the other plagues—are divided between man and God. They are still in charge of it all, to inflict them, as their primary inflictors. To this day.

And catastrophes are part of being human. If you aren’t condemned to suffer it, you have to witness it—at the least. Nirvana is not. It doesn’t count as a provable human experience.

“Humanitarian calls” might be happening today, and back then, it did not. Information societies do have a better chance at organizing global collectives today. But it doesn’t change much. And the idea/contracts of citizenship, glorified as “birthrights” (but which, in fact, infinitely limits and commodifies our movements on this planet) did not fade away, either.

And so I thought, as we move towards the future, we are charged to envisage it. What happens in the future? In that unseen time, quite so famously free from wars, invasions, famines, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, earthquakes, heatwaves, viruses, and frostbites? And probably, capitalism, too?

Somebody, somewhere, has promised, we’d be free from all this. Nobody knows who it is. But someone did.

And one of the possibilities for the human race in the future—amidst countless, endless ones—occurred to me. What if, in the future, we have flying houses?

2

And I admit, in a world obsessed with futurism, flying houses might not be a uniquely new idea.

But I’m somehow sure that it is coming our way. Whether we live to see it or not, technology will take us there. We might not attain Nirvana, but we will attain these things. 

For now, I have some hypothetical questions in mind. For that time, in 2090 AD or so. When the world almost seven decades earlier will seem like an illusion, a mere driftwood, when no one will be condemned to live in the zone of disasters. And the earth will go green again, without the corporations having to greenwash it.

And if everyone is having flying accommodations in the sky, that means we might vacate the lands. Or at least, we will use it less (except for harvests, perhaps.) The castles in the sky will suffice perfectly. And I do have hopes that the entire humanity can fit in. They will have ample spaces for just everyone. 

In that world, spotting someone without a flying home would be the most obscene thing to look at. Because the idea of “birthrights” would entail simply receiving a flying house from the managerial entities in charge. I don’t wish to think those entities will continue being nation-states, though they might still be.

If there are plural entities and the idea of property persists, maybe that world won’t be able to free itself from wars. So far, war is the one thing no one could outlaw. But if homes are not permanently suspended in the air and are movable, it might get easier for people to avoid being lasered down.

But if homes are uprooted from the lands and start existing in the sky, at least earthquakes can’t reach their dwellers anymore. They will be safe from at least one of the plagues, as long as someone doesn’t choose to nest above the clouds right on the top of the volcanoes about to erupt. 

In the ideal world of utopia, concepts of race, skin color, and genders are always minimized. We do have to reach there someday and 2090 AD seems way too soon to meet the deadline.

And there’s a chance that racism will persist, in one form or another.

And perhaps, the homes in the sky might look poor, too. Like some shabby, shantytowns on the clouds. Today’s earth is littered with them, where poor folks are condemned to exist. We do make homes out of tins and woods, clays and muds, straws and haystacks. And often with canvas or polyester. Some homeless people sleep in abandoned concrete tubes.

If billionaires keep being billionaires in the future, too, all this might transfer to sky traffic as well. From where we stand today, that will be a natural progression of things. In one hundred years time or so (and that might turn into one more dystopian nightmare.) 

But we will have to see. Homes for humans need toilets and sewerage systems, too. I hope we will not end up polluting the clouds or making them smelly.

Yet to think of it—just how many things we won’t see, in our own lifetimes! And when they do happen, they will be realities. Not just some wishful murmurings and thoughts at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Not just some fairy dust—as it seems today.

3

Future is the unseen land that excuses everything. We are mostly okay with any courses of action that will take us there.

Self-driving cars were already tested in Singapore. The first autonomous vehicle/AV testing facility was opened in 2017 (and news is telling me people are already riding them in China and the US.) 

Two years ago, a robot served me sushi at a Japanese shop, located in a Singapore mall. It was nothing new for Singaporeans around me. But for me, being from the global south, it was every bit Instagrammable. It is a phenomenon widely common in countries I’ve never been to.

So, in the last few hundred years, how many curses have we brought upon ourselves? And how many blessings are there to be shown for it—outweighing it all?

Holy futurism is a God itself (and we cannot blaspheme.) In the year 1900, French artists thought schools would be loading the syllabus right into our brains in the year 2000. And they drew giant seahorses with us riding them—despite submarines almost being there already. They were soon released, as new inventions of the new century.

A hundred years on, we are still memorizing formulas when it calls for it. We do have computers, but thankfully, no chips are being implanted on our brains en masse. Maybe the human body can be spared from all those upgrades.

Our minds are analyzed by the algorithms now, still. And they are able to predict some of our choices and traits almost accurately. But human excellence is still reigning supreme, and it is still hard to imagine ChatGPT becoming a Shakespeare. It is rather offensive, to be precise.

Thankfully, AI can’t do that. It can’t write like him. Or his hypothetical sister, Judith Shakespear, as she was named by Virginia Woolf.

So, not all of it came true—when most did. There are no flying postmans delivering mail or newspapers at our windows, we have emails and SMS now. That means, the springing components of their imaginations were made up of their own schemas, how they knew people do things in the world they lived in themselves.

After a century, we reached different dimensions of sophistication. And the future is worshiped. You may worship it as you wish.

I choose the flying houses. Leaving only the heritage sites down below, on the earth. The rest of the buildings can be safely taken down, unless there are sentimental values attached to them. And if the future believes in socialism, their residents can share communal kitchens in the sky, too. The kitchen will simply travel to them, in rotation. In that case, the entire house can be reduced to mere sleeping pods, and of course, a few more rooms if one wishes.

The Capsule home’s concept is ages old already. In 2022, Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower was demolished. It should have remained. But right now in Hong Kong, there is an overwhelming upsurge of capsule apartments due to ever shrinking space.

Maybe we can arrange something up there, too, or at least divide between sky and land. It would be way more mobile and versatile, quite certainly.

As for the products, perhaps they can be dispatched from designated facilities. We will have a way for the popular venues of entertainment as well. I guess by then, we will become almost demi-Gods ourselves. And we will come down on earth only as tourists and farmers, or to exercise.

Baba Yaga’s house in the Slavic folklore could dance and walk and spin—we will fly.

The sky will look very different, though. Will it be less blue—or too crowded—if one looks at it from the ground? And what happens to the entire field of architecture? Maybe, that will morph into a new science—getting renovated along with it all.

Let the earthquakes be gone, forever.

Humanity living in flying saucers is still a better option.

But it is in the name of the future, we excuse everything, too. It is in the name of the future, bloodsheds are happening today. And in the name of it, countries are invaded.

And all this makes progressing a very risky business. “Progress” into what, and at what cost? Who must we leave behind? These are the ethical dilemmas plaguing the conversations and discourse of progress today.

It sits at the very core of it, today’s modern fascism. And to manufacture consent from the inhabitants of the global north, the Gods of the holy futurism are always summoned. When the rest of humanity in the global south are systematically dispossessed and deprived of even having the luxury of these wild, sci-fi fantasies. All the fantasies of cutting edge technologies never reached us properly.

At times, it seems overwhelming. What sort of a world is in the making today? Well, I guess I don’t have to start with that. Everyone knows. From Kashmir to Congo to Palestine to Tigray to Haiti (a phrase that I often fear is turning into empty sloganeering by the day, as we grow further desensitized to the genocide porns on our feeds)—we have witnessed too much of it. From West Papua to Sudan to Puerto Rico, it is Social Darwinism all over again—everywhere.

And I don’t have to spill the beans. Only the top of the capitalist hierarchy can reach and afford to dream of a next world. We know who gets dehumanized. For the dehumanized, the European renaissance didn’t happen. Neither did the post-God enlightenment. The only next world they have is still… the afterlife.

This means, technology alone is not enough. It doesn’t ensure their users will behave well and be fair to each other. It never was. Poetry is necessary, too.

This is a prayer. Let there be no earthquakes in heaven. We will fly. We will choose to grow wings, because we can. We will make our houses wear those wings, too. And they will never be shelled again.

^{14 July 2024}

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