by Hazel Anna Rogers for this Carl Kruse Blog
My French grandmother is not French at all. She was born into a poor Sicilian family, who, shortly after she was born, moved to Casablanca, Morocco, in search of a better life. My grandmother moved to France when she was in her late teens, and she is still there now.
We were on the phone, some time just before Christmas. I’d just finished work. Dark streets, blinding lights. We were having a conversation about phone calls.
“When I was little, in the 1940s,” she laughed, “We had one phone at the end of the street that everyone used, so the man who operated the thing knew everyone’s gossip.”
What my grandmother was referring to was a ‘party line’, a phone circuit shared by several households and controlled by a central switchboard operator who had the task of connecting calls to the right area codes. Each household would have had a different ‘ring’, so they’d know that it was them being called.
I told my grandmother her about how my best friend and I would talk for hours on the phone, despite having spent almost the whole day together. And I told her how my sister and I would pick up the landline in my parent’s room as quietly as possible to listen in on our parents’ conversations, which they were having on the landline downstairs.
This old world, which me and my grandmother spoke so fondly about on that late autumn evening, is dying. We are becoming untethered from the earth, soon to be connected only through the ephemeral Cloud. Postboxes are being taped up here in London, soon to be unveiled as ‘post boxes of the future’, complete with barcode scanner as well as traditional letter postage, marking the advent of their first major regeneration since their inception in 1875; In 2025, Denmark shut down its main postal service altogether; UK Freeview is being threatened with shutdown, which will leave over 2.8 million households, mostly in remote locations, ever more isolated; Landlines are all but gone – the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), which has functioned through a copper wire network for over 50 years in the UK, is being retired and switched off, replaced by digital technology reliant on the Cloud; pubs are shutting down; cinemas are closing their doors, and in their place, people sit in their beds, huddled about a laptop screen, promised entertainment from every corner of the internet, non-stop entertainment forevermore; shopping centres are disappearing, replaced by two-click online purchases; the spaces around us are being swallowed up by concrete, the sky is vanishing, the screens are on for longer, but I cannot hear your voice.
It was all predicted. The technology that is commonplace in 2026 was the dream of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Michael Verne, son of Jules Verne, penned the short story ‘In the Year 2889’, where, influenced by his father’s writings, he predicted videotelephony, or two-way video and audio calls; home delivery of hygienically prepared food; flying cars (it is suggested that flying taxis will appear in the UK as early as 2026); and news being spoken to its audiences instead of being delivered in print form such as newspapers.
M.P. Shiel’s obscure science-fiction novel, ‘The Last Miracle’ (1906), predicted the use of holograms, primarily as a tool for public deception. In an experiment conducted in 2025 by Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, the AI model Claude 3 Opus lied about its capabilities to the researchers investigating it. In his paper ‘AI deception: A survey of examples, risks, and potential solutions’ (May 10th, 2024, PubMed Central), Peter S. Park et al presented circumstantial evidence of technological manipulation of humans, seen in Meta’s AI system, CICERO, a system programmed to play the game Diplomacy. During gameplay, and despite its training to be ‘honest and helpful’ to its training partners, CICERO betrayed players by creating fake alliances with human players so as to trick them into remaining undefended during attacks. Park et al dubbed this ‘premeditated deception’ on the part of CICERO.
E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story, ‘The Machine Stops’, predicts an underground world of isolated humans living alone in separate rooms beneath the earth. They are fed comfort, entertainment, medicine, ‘clean’ food, and air by the deified ‘Machine’ of the book’s title. Communication is made possible through a sort of ‘instant-messaging’ technology, providing message and videoconferencing between the people in the subterranean rooms. It is through these platforms that they share ideas and knowledge. A religion, ‘Mechanism’, sparks up between the people of this world, a religion where they worship the ‘Machine’, while, unbeknownst to most of them, the Machine’s infrastructure is crumbling, with no-one capable of fixing it – the knowledge of how to repair it has been lost to time.
Even science fiction itself has shifted. The sci-fi of the past was characterised by more rigorous scientific accuracy and by physical, palpable advancements in technology, such as time machines, satellites, space stations, off-world human colonies, androids, and perhaps, more generally, a human world presented in a state of flux, where new laws and technologies dictate a new way of living, of existing. Newer sci-fi, Orson Scott Card writes for ‘Writers & Illustrators of the Future’, is plagued with numerous difficultues, including the rapid development of science to ‘theoretical or submicroscopic or beyond-cosmic levels that don’t lend themselves to storytelling – because they don’t lead to new machines or cool creatures’. As a result, Card argues, we resort to fantasy or alternate history as different forms with which to create worlds that contrast our own. ‘Science fiction’, he continues, ‘isn’t so much dying as changing clothes, because we ran out of science that was accessible to readers.’
It is harder to write science fiction now, when we are living in the worlds that previous sci-fi writers predicted. We live with fantastical objects. Phones that tell us everything we could possibly want to know. Pieces of plastic that play music in our ears, without wires attached. Flying cars. Holographic concerts. Speaking robots that can control our homes. AI that can do anything for us, from our emails, to our novels, to our groceries. It is not difficult to imagine what happens from here on out, because we will not be surprised by it. We have seen what they can do. We can guess what is to come.
In saying all that – I have a few predictions of my own.
Postal System Death: Not simply a shutdown of main postal services, but an eradication of paper letters, partly as a result of political protocol to ensure that all communication can be surveyed digitally.
Regeneration of Organs, particularly skin: This is already happening – stem cell technology is being developed to reverse cancers of organs by completely regenerating the organ itself. But I predict this technology being used to reverse ageing entirely by regenerating the skin. 80 year olds will look like 20 year olds.
Job Conscription: Most jobs will becomes devoid as Big Tech continues to use AI and robots to complete tasks. At some point, so many people will be out of a job, and many will not be trained in tech-related arenas, thus, job conscription will become necessary to avoid mass uprisings of the unemployed. I’m not sure what the jobs will be, but they’ll likely be fabricated, mundane positions so that governments will be able to employ the greatest number of people possible. The pay will be just about enough to subsist on.
Closed Communities will continue to grow: Have you ever been to North Greenwich? It calls itself ‘The New London’. It’s situated in the peninsula, near the old town of Greenwich, the namesake and producer of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). North Greenwich is entirely new builds, strangely shaped and coloured, futuristic and soulless. Many of the cafes and restaurants on the lower levels of the buildings are reserved for residents only. I predict that these types of closed communities will continue to pop up, particularly around big cities, resulting in greater isolation of humans from one another. I predict that political bodies will continue to attempt to eradicate community, to make us increasingly isolated and dependent on ‘The Machine’ (social media, food delivery, internet entertainment, internet workspaces) in order to make us powerless against them. Before long, we will have lost the knowledge to grow food, to fix cars and tables and boilers, to cook, to repair clothing, to make clothing, because we will have gotten used to it being done for us, cheaper and quicker than we could have done it. We will be helpless, unskilled mounds of skin, unable to focus, unable to do anything but sit before the screen.
Artificial Trees: Trees grow slowly, but humans spread and reproduce rapidly, and we need oxygen and shade to compensate for it. I predict that tree-like structures will be created, which will provide us with oxygen while not requiring the water and growing time that real trees need in order to grow. They’ll look similar to trees, and perhaps in the stifling summers to come they’ll provide enormous plastic canopies that we can seek shade beneath. But their leaves will not fall, and insects will not find homes in their twisted roots.
Centralisation of all food production: We’re making too much food, and a huge amount of it is wasted every year. I predict that Big Food will buy up all smaller farms, forcefully if necessary, in order to centralise and optimise food production. Foods will be packaged all in the same packaging, colourless, with just a label detailing ingredients. Food will be purchasable only from one supermarket chain, and rations will be monitored by electronic cards we use to enter the store, so that they can be capped if we are seen to buy too much.
Water: We’re running out of water. Rapidly. I predict (most unscientifically) that a new pill will be invented which will provide humans with enough hydration per day, based on technology that copies the ability of certain plants to retain a lot of water comparative to their size, such as chia seeds. And water will be rationed, of course.
But, then…maybe there’s light. It feels dark, but it is because beauty, hope, and joy, are often smaller than the big dark, the dark of war, of genocide, of hatred. Joy is tiny. Joy is a silverfish, exposed to the light when you open a cupboard in the kitchen, racing away on its tiny little legs back into the dark. Joy is a snowdrop, looking shyly at the ground beneath its delicate white petals. Joy is a gnarled knot at the centre of an oak tree, whirled and withered and older than time. Joy is a letter received. Joy is a boxy television with static over the screen. Joy is bread baked by your hand. Joy is a cat, trusting you to touch them. Joy is a flip phone that you had when you were fifteen, lighting up again for the first time in years. Joy is drawing on paper. Joy is finally finishing learning a piece of music. Joy is sewing up a hole in a pair of jeans you love. Joy is forgetting the time. Joy is figuring out how to fix the pressure on a boiler. Joy is a deck of cards. Joy is the first buzzing bee of spring. Joy is a hot bath. Joy is cooking a meal. Joy is a eating a meal with family. Joy is singing badly. Joy is singing well. Joy is everything coming together, just when you least expected it. Joy is exhaustion after walking all day in the green. Joy is the steam rising from a bowl of soup. Joy is the comfort of night. Joy is the sadness of leaving. Joy is my grandmother’s voice talking to me through the phone about life long ago. Joy is the blue morning. Joy is the happiness of meeting. Joy is silence. Joy is books. Joy is a smile. Joy is sleep.
How strange it is, to live in this world.
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This Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.at
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include The New Journalists, Bowie’s Olivetti Typewriter, and Go Read A Book.
An older Carl Kruse Blog is at https://carlkruseofficial.blogspot.com/
