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Welcome back!
Welcome to the 3000 or so new readers since our last essay.
Today’s essay is a little different from what you’ll get most weeks because it is my version of a 2024 preview. Unlike other previews, though, it’s less, “This is what is going to happen”, and more “These are the table stakes as far as I can tell.”
I think that approach is much more helpful, but you can be the judge.
Lots and lots to come from us this year. Drop your reaction and opinion in the comments — and we’ll see you on the other side.
— Quinn
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I’m Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit.
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2024:
THE GAPS AND HOW TO CLOSE THEM
It’s been twenty-two years since HAL 9000 locked the front door.
Kyle Reese joined the resistance three years ago.
It’s not going great.
It’s been nine years since the whole Grays Sports Almanac debacle and ten years since Deckard joined the LAPD.
Four years since the gang wars in Neo-Tokyo, three years since Sergeant Rita Vrataski saved humanity, and one year since the Sentinels unsuccessfully tried to finish off Earth’s remaining mutants.
The future is coming and passing us by, faster and faster:
2025 is inexplicably next year, which is when Ben Richards toes the line, while Caesar and his lieutenants build a new civilization in the Muir Woods. Soon after, Zefram Cochrane is born. SeaQuest DSV pops back up, Mega-City One opens for business, and a rebuilt Detective Alex Murphy gets back to work.
In a few years, Major Motoko Kusanagi begins her hunt for the Puppet Master and Matt Damon will get left on Mars and we’ll spend an insane amount of money to get him back.
As you can tell, I have spent a significant portion of my life in a collection of fictional timelines. The aforementioned are just a very small selection — most of the others are too far in the past, too far in the future, and/or in/on entirely different worlds to apply here.
Lately — real talk? — the more distant, the better. Whatever takes me away (I bought these stickers for my entire family for Christmas. These also look spot on).
It’s all a little ironic, because part of the reason this newsletter got started is because I was a screenwriter and investor interested in exploring the fictional near-future. I wanted to understand, share, and participate in how we get from here to there — to live and work in the gaps in between.
But now it’s suddenly 2024, and — as desired — my day job is the near-future, and shit feels very real.
Just saying the number out loud — “twenty-twenty-four” — feels like fiction, but now that I’m 41 going on 95, and dad to three very quickly growing children, it feels like everything is accelerating. Like the future is here every day, whether I’m ready for it or not (narrator: he is not).
I understand that’s basically how time is perceived as we age, but also, I think it’s fair to look around and feel like things are becoming just a little bit untethered — at least, from the pax-Americana world we grew up in (YMMV).
In 2024, some gaps are closing — what machines can do for us — and some are still widening.
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