We've all seen the future, which is the problem.

A forthcoming event in Manchester, the FutureEverything Conference (May 13-14) seeks to explore the future in all its myriad streams: crowdsourcing, social networking, Twitter, and databases, to answer questions like what will be the next Wikipedia.

There is a constant interest in the future in modern media, with the onrushing progress of internet technology throwing up a series of big new names over the past 15 years in a process of constant fertility: Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, Slashdot, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Friendster, YouTube, Myspace, etsy, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Latitude... All of these promised or promise to change the way we live, the way we (a more nebulous we) do business, the way we are made to buy things and the way we might be able to sell them. We are told there is more around the corner; while many things like Twitter and Facebook appear of uncertain value at first, there's always a chance they'll prove useful, or like cigarettes their value might have no relation to their popularity.

And yet it's a constant theme of postmodern and recent Marxist thought that there is (for people today) no future and no past: what marks the present age is a total absence of history, of the future. Fredric Jameson has launched a quixotic battle to preserve the dying concept of Utopia - following the failure of Marxism and the dreams of the 60s counterculture, it seems nobody has any idea of a better society; the idea that the future will be different from the present has been almost entirely closed off, and utopian thought is vanishing the same way as the idea of medieval chivalry.

Today, there is little sense of the past, of history. Narrative is reduced to a series of moments, a list such as the one I made earlier. A list contains no idea of logical connection, of historical agency, of progress, of will, of conscious choice or motive, or of dialectic. Modern media is focussed on the momentary and the stream of moments - the Flickr photostream; Twitter; the website status updates that preceded and followed it; geo-tagging and location tracking; shared amateur and professional video clips from falling-down dogs to moments excerpted from classic films; RSS streams, aggregation, and the jumble of Google News.

It is possible to suggest a story in a twitter post or a photograph, but such a story will always be tenuous and insubstantial, lacking necessity. A photograph frozen in time, even if it is clear what happened next from your external knowledge and internal clues, denies the certainty of history. It is always possible to halt time, to make things otherwise. A photograph obliterates history. Even a video clip is only the most shallow and sensational version of history - someone falls off a table, someone shoots JFK in the head - leaving more questions than answers. Only the understanding of historical processes can truly explain where we have come from and where we are going, and that is something for which there seems little appetite - because we focus our attentions on the future, a future (the next Twitter, the next YouTube) that inwardly we know offers nothing but more of the same.