Time Travel

So I went back in time. I'm not able to tell you how I did it. Sorry. But it was a bit like the film "Somewhere in Time" where Christopher Reeve auto-hypnotises in order to go back into the past, but when I did it there were also mobile disco traffic lights and a sort of genital brace. I'm not sure what the brace was for but it focused the mind wonderfully. My mission was to travel back to 1988 and convince the younger me to take a slightly more active part in my life, so that by the time I reached 50 I wouldn't be penniless and fat and the author the best unpublished novels since John Kennedy Toole's mum lost the key to his writing desk.

I found my younger self loitering penniless outside The White Hart pub in Basingstoke, which was where I'd left him. God I was thin. And look at the those teeth! It was surprisingly easy to coerce the younger John into chat as long as I kept putting free beers in front of him. God knows what I looked like to him - some Godawful mix of The Two Ronnies, or a previously undisclosed "funny" uncle - but we sat in the snug of the empty mid afternoon pub for a father and child reunion.

This is what I told him:

John: "You're going to have to get into computers. I know you're rolling your eyes, and you reckon you'll be a painter or a pop star or whatever, but for anything you want to do in the future you're going to need to know how to use a computer. You'll learn anyway once you find out that that's where the porn lives, but I'm trying to convince you to get into them now. If you don't in thirty years time you'll have the same lack of social flexibility as the illiterate did  a hundred years ago. I'm not joking. Its like Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.

Young John: Sorry, what?

J: In the fifteenth century. I thought you'd know this stuff. You're supposed to be pretty sharp.

YJ: Sorry. God.

J: Anyway, there's going to be this thing called the Internet. Its a way for your computer to talk to all the other computers in the world. And a thing called Wikipedia too. Its like a massive Encyclopedia but with the prefix "wiki". I don't know why. That's the sort of thing you'd ordinarily look up on Wikipedia.

YJ: So its like the book in the Hitch Hiker's guide?

J: Yes, its a lot like The Book in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide, but if the internet were to have anything stamped it it would be "Do Panic" in large, emphatic, blood red letters. Computers will be called laptops or tablets but by 2020, where I'm from, almost everything will be done on phones. Your phone will be a camera, a Dictaphone, a reference book, a means of making music, paying bills, doing invoices, sending private messages. You can pay your bus fare with one. They still have buses, yeah. The government use them to pimp obvious falsehoods to a credulous public, but we'll get into that later.

YJ: Could I have another beer?

J: Mobile phones in your time were massive, but then they got really small. They're getting bigger again now. People go to see bands still, but they film the gig and then upload them to the internet so people can see they were there. They don't dance or meet people or get drunk at gigs - they film them to show they were there. The culture of 2020 is very performative. There are people called influencers. Influencers are usually conventionally attractive young people who are given free things and money by businesses to make short videos of themselves endorsing the products. That's sort of it. That's the job. I'm not sure how it works. It has something to do with having a lot of followers on social media.

YJ: You're losing me now. Social media? Like a lonely hearts column or something?

J: Yeah. Social media. Right. This is weird.

The future is a society where being popular is the most important thing. It steamrollers over everything else and nothing else really matters. People are no longer feted for their ability, their skill, their art. That's not quite true. Some people are, though they run the risk of being considered elitist, out of touch and lacking the human touch. You know how you worry about "selling out" about not being "authentic" or being "shallow"? Those things are not a cause for concern in the future. The only people you will hear saying it are angry, bitter people also from the 80's, who don't realise that they sound exactly like the angry, bitter people from the 60's whom they used to mock. One way of tallying your popularity is by the amount of people who follow you on social media sites like "Twitter" or "Instagram" - yes, Instagram does sound almost cartoonishly futuristic. If you have thousands of followers on Twitter people will start to take notice of you, doors will open, that sort of popularity has its own gravity, you will gather speed like a snowball rolling down hill, ready to devour a small Alpine town. When you have thousands of followers on social media people will give you things for free, you will be invited to endorse places and things and brands - brands are key in 2020.

YJ: What is a brand?

J: Right. In the future famous people will no longer be content to do one thing. Famous people have a "brand", which means they stamp their names on clothes, perfumes, sports gear, audio equipment, wine, sex toys and ghost-written romance novels. Autobiographies by footballers and novels by ageing comedians are the only books you can buy in Supermarkets, and supermarkets are the only place you can buy books as there are no bookshops any more. If the only thing you ever wanted to do was be a novelist you'd better be a blogger, a gardener or a nineties stand-up first, because without name recognition and the correspondent tonnage of followers, no one is ever going to publish you.

YJ: Yeah, this is just sci-fi gobbledygook now. A blogger? A blogger is a thing?

J: How to explain a blogger? Right. Imagine you had a diary and you wrote all of your secret thoughts in it. Imagine you then opened your window and projected it into the sky like the Bat signal. That's a blogger and every one is a blogger, so the night sky becomes a jumble of indecipherable words. Eventually no one remembers what the clouds used to look like and the churning glossolalia just becomes the new clouds, noiselessly floating past. In the future everyone is a blogger, even you are. The reason I'm here is to stop you becoming one.   

YJ: Do not become a blogger. Right. I think I can remember that.

J: What else? Amazingly, every single one of the Rolling Stones is alive and they're still touring. David Bowie died. That won't mean much to you now - your David Bowie is in Tin Machine - but eventually he will become your favourite pop star of all. Except perhaps Kate Bush who, mercifully is also alive. The Pixies split up, then get back together without Kim Deal. Kim starts a band with her twin sister and Tanya Donnelly out of Throwing Muses. I'm not making this up - I know it sounds like a dream. At about the turn of the millennium rock music sort of dies. To be fair, rock music is already in its death throes by your time. Rock had a pretty good go at it - about thirty years. But the music you like now isn't really pushing the form, and once people have spent a period of time manipulating feedback, it really plunges into a decadent phase. The 90s have a phenomenon called grunge, whereby heavy metal bands get effects peddles and pretend to be sad. After that its Britpop which coincides with the first Labour government that you remember - you are briefly pleased. Britpop will be relentlessly backward looking, riffing on 60's pop and 70s punk, while adding nothing to either. A band called Oasis will appear - on Creation, no less - and become the biggest band in the country. Their gravity will destroy everything. All bands will be earnest and laddish and play major chords and mean nothing. Physical sales of records disappear as you can ultimately stream pretty much all music for free...

YJ: Stream?

J: People will have devices - this sort of technology is referred to as a "device" - I'm not sure why. There will basically be a little magic robot that you talk to and it will play records and things as long as you speak very clearly and don't hesitate because it hates that.

YJ: A magic robot? Are there flying cars too? Food pills? Bacofoil jumpsuits?

J: No, cars get much worse. They look rubbish in the future. Some of them are electric now. Food becomes a staple of television. Far from being turned into some sort of utilitarian pill, it becomes unfeasibly exotic and aspirational. During the 2020 pandemic people become competitive about baking sourdough bread. There are many different breads in the future. Fashion, like music, breaks down into tiny individual components so that there aren't really any trends anymore, though girl's eyebrows go a bit mad for a while. Basically in the future everyone wears sports wear until they're fifty at which point they start dressing like ramblers.

YJ: That sounds awful.

J: Its not great, no...

YJ: Wait, what was that about a pandemic? Like a proper seven plagues of Egypt style pandemic - all buboes and bleeding from the eyes and craving human flesh?

J: Not really. But you do have to stay in the house.

YJ: Oh.

J: For nearly two months.

YJ: Right. That doesn't sound that bad.

J: Its proven too much for the yeoman breed of old England, who have taken to thick-headed acts of civil disobedience with thuggish aplomb. And aren't being punished for it because the government, who have totally cocked up their response to the disease, would rather like to blame the public for their own deaths. Nearly 40, 000 dead at this point. It may well end up 50, 000 - the second highest figure in the world.

YJ: Shit.

J: Yeah. I know.

YJ: I'm becoming a bit depressed. So fashion is boring, music is dead, computers have taken over the world...

J: They listen to and record everything you say. Oh and your phone records everywhere you go and what you do and social media steals all of your information and sells it to private companies...

YJ:..people earn money from being good looking and describing things they've been given, and everyone else is just typing about their lives and flinging it out into the mute indifference of space.

J: Yeah. All the magazines you like are gone: Blitz, Face, Melody Maker, Sounds. Do you want a drink?

YJ: No. Yeah. Am I still going out with Nicky?

J: Ha ha ha. NO. You really are not.

YJ: And I get fat and grey and my teeth fall out? I'm not really looking forward to this. Thank you so much for coming back in time to tell me. You've crushed the joy out of my world and given me three pints in return.

J: Look, here's why I am here. You're a bright lad. You have certain aptitudes. You could be a pop star, you could be a painter, you could be a writer...

YJ: A writer? I'd never...

J:...but you're a lazy prick and you're a coward and talent will not out. No one will magically discover you and turn you into a pop star - you actually have to do stuff. You have to go out there and hustle, to make it happen.

YJ: I will.

J: No, you won't. I've been you and I know what you're like. I'm not the first person to have this conversation with you, but I am the first person to actually have been you and traveled back through time to carefully explain this shit to you. So I'm hoping my advice is slightly more efficacious than most. I've gone through absolute nonsense in my life and here I am: fat, fifty and not famous. And I have a limp, so that's just great. You could change all this for yourself - you just have to put yourself out there a very long way from your comfort zone and fail and fail again. And do some work. Work out what it is you want to do and do it. Otherwise you'll have to start at forty like I did and not even be able to charm people with your good looks. Oh, and sexual politics are WILD now. Really, you wouldn't believe it. Promise me that you'll work out what you want to do and you'll do it. Learn how to use a computer. Learn how to play an instrument. Not the drums, you'd be shit at them.

YJ: I will. I mean it. Can I have another beer?

J: That is not instilling me with confidence. Right, I'm going to go. Is there anything else you want to know?

YJ: How's Morrissey doing? Is he still cool?

J: Uh...