Imagine waking up in the Future.

Not like you would have landed in a strange forest of the future world, having arrived with a glowing blue capsule – no. But instead you had just sensed, perhaps during the last year or so, that something had changed.

I’ve lived long enough now (40 years) and having born very close the home computer revolution, which took place during the early 1980s, that I’ve seen “the whole” of consumer electronics evolution. Home computers were kind of geeky rarity in the early 1980s, but the computers had in Finland a very strong reception. Soon I found myself to be in the first grade of elementary school, age 7, and having quite a large vocabulary of English – because I read manuals both to the Commodore 64 home computer and to various games. I played a lot of simulators, some of which were very accurately modeled
after real world. Take Pirates! – a game of high-seas swashbuckling: 80 pages to read.

The Signs?

You were being marketed 3D-objects over the net.
“50% discount for Christmas”.

Say WHAT? 3D-objects?! Who would purchase such? Indeed, there’s
a whole universe and market for 3D objects.

Sign 2: smalltalk about a game’s defense strategy

You were buying virtual weapons and talking about
the strategy of defending – yes, not your own Real
home, but your virtual Headquarters in a mobile phone game.

Sign 3: Your fan-post in email is mostly made by robots

25% of your email consisted of actually notifications
sent by mail robots. They were telling you the latest
moves throughout the world, concerning – well, software
libraries!


"New release of webpack (2.2.0-rc.2) on npm"
"New release of lodash (4.17.3) on npm"


What on earth is this all about?

It’s actually a description, not far from exact truth, of
the very few last days of 2016, and it’s my real email inbox
we’re talking about.

Had they already known of email technology (and computers), what would the 17th century people receive as notifications?

It would probably be something similar, albeit perhaps with a relaxed frequency. A new way to weave sails? Or something to do with the printing press? I guess during Gutenberg’s reign there wasn’t such an active and vocal crowd of hipsters
declaring a coup in design every week, but still… 😉