« lolConf anyone? | Main | City of Interzone »
Julio 24, 2007
The Sunday Hangover
And in two days I'm off to San Diego (provided they let me into the country), where it never rains and in fact water vapour never actually enters the air. San Diego is an entirely dry-cured city, and is notable for largely looking like it was constructed last week. If you see Europeans laughing at signs seemingly at random in San Diego, it's because they've spotted the plaques announcing the "historic Gaslamp District." I have socks older than the historic Gaslamp District. In fact, there are probably still condoms laying in ditches and around the back of electricity sub-station in the Essex area that, for age and notable events alone, deserve the term "historic" more. San Diego, for me, encapsulates the Philip K Dick Condition in which we live today: just like his paranoid concerns, San Diego looks like it was assembled from flatpacks just before you got there, and will be folded up and put back in the warehouse an hour after you leave.
The postmodern condition, the 21st Century condition, is the Philip K Dick condition. We live in the world that he wrote about because he was afraid of it. This is how deep we are in it: someone created a Philip K Dick android with a computer brain full of his words. And then someone stole it. It's the future not as banal stasis, as JG Ballard would have it, not even as the sort of scary corporate dystopia Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP was turned into -- but as, basically, a broken shithole.
Posted by kpmg at Julio 24, 2007 11:13 AM 