One of the conceits of South, my near-future thriller, is that in 2032, we will all be carrying what essentially is a national ID card embedded with voluminous information about ourselves, and security agencies will have an ID reader that can access all this data as well as check it…
A while back, I posted about fashion in 2032 in connection with my work-in-progress, South. One aspect I didn’t think much about is passive surveillance countermeasures. Discovery News wrote on 18 January about Adam Harvey, a New York artist and activist who has debuted a line of outerwear using a…
Writing any story not set in the world of today, a couple years back, or a couple years forward is an exercise in period fiction. “Period” doesn’t have to mean hoop skirts, horse-drawn carriages and swords. Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, set during the mid-1990s tech bubble, is a period piece. So…
Flying cars? Teleportation? Bullet trains? Not even. In the version of 2032 envisioned by South, governments don’t have money to spend on real police or schools, far less this kind of stuff. The transportation picture then looks much as it does now, with certain big absences. Trains Amtrak, long…
In Part 1, I went over the current state-of-play in American healthcare finance and reviewed the Republican proposals for changing the system. Assuming this agenda takes hold (the basis for the future I planned for South), we end up with a picture that unfortunately is a more extreme version of…
[10/7/13 update: not unexpectedly, the Mitt Romney for President website has been taken down, so you won’t be able to follow the links to that site provided below. There are plenty of other links that still work, though.] No matter what happens in the future, one thing will remain constant:…
In South’s version of 2032, our hero Luis helps American Muslims go south across the border into the relative safety of civil war-wracked Mexico to escape from the detention camps that have swallowed 430,000 of their co-religionists. How did this happen? How could it happen? It has before. Unless you’ve…
In the last installment, I talked about some of the influences on fashion design in South’s version of 2032. Now I’ll look at the clothes themselves. In general, I intend to avoid the usual future-styles tropes: jumpsuits (hot and impractical for everyday wear), metallic fabrics, unisex smocks, government-issued uniforms, and…
Enough with the heavy stuff about surveillance and putting the Fourth Amendment through the shredder. Now I’m going to try something truly foolish: figure out what people will be wearing in May 2032 in the Southern California of South. This is foolish because it’s hard enough to predict what will…
Apropos of my four-part series on surveillance in 2032 America comes this, from Gizmag.com: Using an off-the-shelf Emotiv BCI costing only a few hundred dollars, the team has shown that it’s possible to “hack” a human brain and pull things like bank details straight out of your skull. For more…