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This may need another edit, but it is still a bit time-foldy, but what I’m focusing on is very time-foldy.

When I read the Blue Ant Trilogy from William Gibson (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History) as they came out in 2003, 2007, and 2010 I wondered then how they would hold up, as they were near future scifi. Each was sat in the now and /or the just about to become. If, at the time, you were paying attention to culture (particularly around a technology focused world) all of the elements in the book were familiar to nearly familiar. Most of the roles, technology, and ways of thinking were already at the edges of society, but very very niche and not yet made it into the main consciousness. How does near future look in the future?

I regularly pull Pattern Recognition off the shelf and read snippets and it takes me back to that time in 2003. I’m a big fan of that book on many levels. But, to me it still holds up, yet I’m looking at it from the living through this at the front edge of emergent culture and technology. I still wonder how someone would read this today who was less than, say, 10 years old would read and perceive this today.

In the past week or two I’ve run into a handful of YouTube videos and blog posts / articles by people who have recently read one of the books, most often Pattern Recognition. I find interesting in that some see things in the books from 15 to 20 years ago are still coming in the near future (this really intrigues me) and others things seem quite foreign and more futuristic. Yet for some of us they have happened and became normal outside of the far edges of culture, but were far from mainstream. I was expecting reviews, at least some, to talk about how these books seemed set in the past. But, yet no, not one. They focused on, what to me is, an odd perspective continuum.

This surfacing of ideas and perceptions in a society and culture hit two scenarios and situations: 1) Common, but at the edges; 2) Things from the past that still seem futuristic as they haven’t happened in someone’s (or mainstream’s) perception lens. Yes, William Gibson’s famous, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” applies readily. But, there is more to this where things happen in pockets and spread more widely, but not too widely and don’t take hold broadly, nor are they known of more widely.

This phenomena isn’t just related to scifi and technology, but global understandings around mental models, and the language structures around broad cultural mental models (that are mainstream in another culture in an other part of the globe that people in another culture don’t have curiosity about and are more settled in their parochialism and pedestrian thinking to look up and notice). The scales of this and the complex mappings around it from edge cultures, out to large global cultures are more than a lifetimes of effort. But, the key piece is a response of curiosity or defending one’s own currently limited understanding. The common responses are often, “Wait, what? Tell me more.” Or, “That is wrong.” My common phrase when people discover something new that changes how they see and understand things, and they feel like they were doing things wrong, or didn’t know of other helpful possibilities, is, “You can’t know until you know.”

But, with in those interested in exploring at the edges and particularly around the fluidity of time and understandings and seeing something from the past (20 plus years in the past) that was then just happening at the edges and moved more into some cultures mainstreams and faded, as still in that same state of temporal now or about to happen. Now is different for everybody.

In 2004 I started using the term Everynow and included it in a lot of presentations and writing and ended up writing about it explicitly in the linked post in 2013. I was focussing on technology and ideas that set in play the now. But, for some reason concept of having people read a piece that is around 20 years old about the early edges of something and it being still near future, is really surprising to me. The concept of near future from 20 plus years in the past and for many (yet still a small few in the whole of it all) today becoming again (or still) the near future is wild.

The near future idea, has a sense of anticipation in it that something is coming. But, for those who went through that near future and lived it as it was happening, and to the past transition cycle, it seems odd that a near future for something in the past doesn’t just jump straight to the now stage as they experience it. Having a near future anticipatory stage for something that happened for many in the past feels odd, but it is just another reflection of experiencing the now of others viewed throw and really wide and elastic everynow.