Wow. That mysterious, far-future year 2011 has arrived.

In my childhood, we had a name for stories, TV shows and movies set in any year of the 21st Century. We called them "science fiction."

So apparently we've now reached the threshold of the "deep" 21st Century, the setting of the last century's science fiction. What should I do to fit in? Start wearing jumpsuits or something?

At the very least I should look into buying a smart phone in the next year or so to replace the Nokia 6010 I purchased from Radio Shack in the summer of 2006. Though the old Nokia has proven itself durable and doesn't seem in any danger of failure: It has survived a dunking in the toilet and numerous hard landings, including one which caused detachable pieces to fly apart. I snapped the pieces back together, and the phone worked! Those Finns make good stuff.

I've also recently skimmed through an ebook version of FM-2030's book, published in 1989, titled Are You a Transhuman? (PDF). The real year 2030 probably won't much resemble FM's vision of it, considering all the things FM got wrong about the year 2010 from his perspective in 1981 (the year Eric Drexler published bad futurology in his PNAS paper, coincidentally). FM's forced framing of what he calls "progress" leaves much to desire. I don't have a problem with martial arts, firearms ownership (Oklahoma and Arizona both have a strong gun culture - and so does Finland, from what I've read), competitive sports and other masculine things which FM, who had something of the dainty about him (Persian effeminacy?), wanted to take away from us in the 21st Century.

FM came of age in middle of the 20th Century, when environmentalist views of human nature like Marxism, behaviorism and social engineering dominated intellectual life, and his nonfiction futurist writings assume a view of human-nature plasticity which has fallen out of fashion lately in favor of biological models of human behavior. If biological human nature exists and it constrains plasticity, then social engineers and their enablers like FM can't just impose any vector they want on human societies and call it "progress." Organic processes in human societies keep throwing up obstacles to that sort of conceit.

FM's world view also reminds me of a cargo cult, in that he emphasized getting the symbols of a "futuristic" lifestyle right, instead of really understanding and working with the substance. Years ago someone compared FM to a mime who stands beside a laborer at work digging the ditch, and imitates the laborers movements. The motions of the two men might look similar, but the laborer actually accomplishes something. So, who comes closer to living as a real "transhumanist": The pretend-guy who gets all the symbols right as advocated by FM, like a practitioner of transhumanist feng shui, without contributing anything tangible to, say, the quest for radical life extension; or the guy who studies the aging process in the lab and publishes peer-reviewed papers of his research, but comes home to a steak dinner, watches mixed martial arts on TV, takes judo lessons, shoots guns on the week ends at the range, reads military science fiction, votes for conservative Republicans and goes to church with his religious wife on holidays to make her happy? I'd rather make friends with the second guy, honestly.

I guess my stream-of-consciousness blog post has the theme that both science fiction and futurology have only coincidental resemblances to life in the real 21st Century. At best you can grab and exert some control over your piece of reality, then call the result "futuristic," if you wish.