Zappin’ it to ya / The pressure’s ev’rywhere / Going right through ya / The fever’s in the air / Oh yeah, it’s there! / Don’t underestimate the power / Of a lifetime ahead / Electric youth / Feel the power / You see the energy comin’ up / Coming on strong / The future only belongs to the future itself / And the future is electric youth//

We create our own individual promises of what the future holds. Affirmations discovered in fragments of fiction and culture, constituted into a proprietary baby robot Frankenstein of potentialities. A brute fabricated in the laboratory of adolescence, run mad with corporations and pop stars as proxy guidance counselors. A hallucination shared with accomplices and lovers, imperceivable to creators and progeny. More and faster are mandatory, all else is negotiable. We become temporally tethered to one another with an unspoken hope that is sharp on both ends. It cuts us and those we exclude. The future is shiny, impossible and bleeding electrons.

Well I’m heavenly blessed and worldly wise / I’m a peeping-tom techie with x-ray eyes / Things are going great, and they’re only getting better / I’m doing all right, getting good grades / The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades / I gotta wear shades //

Our collective delusion, our blood brother pinky swear of the future is blindingly sanguine. The timeline maps both moments and a trajectory of increasing betterment. Forward equals more good. Incremental increases in electron bending until we are entitled to sycophant machines that replace and transpose our muscles with our brains. Weak minds married to strong backs, able to lift mountains of illusions. Illusions that obfuscate the Earth as time machine. The past and future separated by fiber optics. The future populated by factories delivering manufactured happiness and distraction on demand, at the speed of wanting. Problems of the past dissipate in amalgamations of ones and zeros fed by an irresistible burning. A conflagration that mocks the very stars whose will it frustrates.

Dead stars are always the blackest / Dead heroes the living empty / Dead martyrs hang on forever / Dead martyrs always take it further / Living for some happiness / Find nothing that satisfies / Had a beginning but it got no end / Got no future / Just dead stars for dead eyes //

It all falls apart at the seams when you try to animate the thing you dreamed. The fraud perpetrated is not the potentiality but the practicality. Baby robot Frankenstein is consumed in her own consummation, martyred for the next in line. Our hallucinations are wish fulfillment. The secret never spoken are those left behind. It is a misdeed to be teach otherwise. The promise of the technological future can only be fulfilled for progeny, not in spite of them. We endeavor to make concrete more futures for ourselves, none for the other. I got mine.

I’m waking up at the start of the end of the world, / but its feeling just like every other morning before / now i wonder what my life is going to mean if it’s gone / but I believe the world is burning to the ground / oh well I guess we’re gonna find out / let’s see how far we’ve come / Well I believe it all is coming to an end / oh well, I guess we’re gonna pretend //

Broken promises always break badly. Short, sharp shards make the collective turn personal. The water is muddied by betrayal and righteousness. The victim fails to see themselves in the perpetrator. We alone cut the tethers by which we were conjoined revealing the shared hallucination as shared deception. More and faster are easy and empty. We didn’t get our jet packs. The sole malefactor is greed. Perpetual disappointment is the promise of the future when empathy weighs less than electrons. The a la carte robot Frankenstein we created has cannibalized herself and become a refrigerator connected to the internet. The future only belongs in the hands of itself. We belong in the hands of one another.

Lyrics: Deborah Gibson, Timbuk 3, Manic Street Preachers, Matchbox 20