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.

Those prudish Americans!

It's a common myth that Victorian English people were so appalled by the sight of a bare ankle that they placed skirts or trousers around piano legs. In fact, this was first reported as something done not by the prudish English but by Americans. It seems to come from Frederick Marryat's Diary in America Volume II, from 1839. Marryat was an English naval officer and novelist who visited North America in the late 1830s, helping to defeat a rebellion in Canada and touring the USA. Like Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope, who both visited the USA around the same time, he wrote a detailed account of his travels.

Only the last paragraph of this excerpt is relevant, but the earlier provide an amusing build-up.

When at Niagara Falls, I was escorting a young lady with whom I was on friendly terms. She had been standing on a piece of rock, the better to view the scene, when she slipped down, and was evidently hurt by the fall; she had in fact grazed her shin. As she limped a little in walking home, I said, "Did you hurt your leg much." She turned from me evidently much shocked, or much offended; and not being aware that I had committed any very heinous offence, I begged to know what was the reason of her displeasure. After some hesitation, she said that as she knew me well, she would tell me that the word leg was never mentioned before ladies. I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to my having been accustomed only to English society, and added, that as such articles must occasionally be referred to, even in the most polite circles of America, perhaps she would inform me by what name I might mention them without shocking the company. Her reply was, that the word limb was used; "nay," continued she, "I am not so particular as some people are, for I know those who always say limb of a table, or limb of a piano-forte."

There the conversation dropped; but a few months afterwards I was obliged to acknowledge that the young lady was correct when she asserted that some people were more particular than even she was.

I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies, and on being ushered into the reception-room, conceive my astonishment at beholding a square piano-forte with four limbs. However, that the ladies who visited their daughters, might feel in its full force the extreme delicacy of the mistress of the establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!

(on archive.org, or reprinted Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT, 2004, p90, accessible via Google Books)

Tales of central Asia: the artist and the Islamist soldier

Adam Curtis traces (1 2) the relationship between conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti and 18th century Muslim rebel Sheikh Mansur who led the Chechens against the Russian empire under Catherine the Great. Mansur may have been born in Italy, a one-time monk called Giovani Batista Boetti who went to the region a missionary, fell in love with the daughter of a local leader, and converted to Islam. He was also, perhaps, an ancestor of the other Boetti - unless the letters from Mansur, found in Turin in the late 19th century, describing his Italian roots, were forgeries. Alighiero e Boetti, an artist with roots in the arte povera movement, arrived in central Asia - Afghanistan - in 1971. Seeking to expunge western ideas of creativity and individuality, the later Boetti paid Afghan weavers to produce embroidered designs for him, maps of the world and diagrams encoding the predicted date of his death. He also bought a hotel and took a lot of heroin; with the new flow of western travellers to the region, heroin became increasingly popular, and people started to smuggle it back to Europe. In the last few years, Italian soldiers have arrived in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, who are at once Islamist warriors and drug dealers.

Book of historical failures

An amusing old conspiracy theory has recently come my way. In 1981 many right-wing Labour party members quit to form a new party, the SDP. The year before, the Labour party had elected the very left-wing and pro-disarmament Michael Foot as its leader. Some of those who formed the SDP voted for Foot despite their political differences. Why? Nevil Sandelson, an MP for Labour and later the SDP, claimed that he was one of six right-wing Labour members who conspired to elect Foot and thus destroy the Labour party. Sandelson went even further: as an SDP MP in 1987 he called on voters to vote for the Tories rather than his own party, in order to destroy Labour more thoroughly. Could any MPs today have similar plans? (The Telegraph's obituary of Sandelson)