from the LP Prototype, Short Circuit Records, 1982Back in the 1980s, didn’t it seem like the future, a seemingly glorious and resplendent thing, was arriving all at once?! Surely, we thought, if personal computers and portable phones are a reality, it wouldn’t be long at all until we were all living in a modern-day translation of the Jetsons…right? Wrong. It almost seems like, as soon as the cold war began to thaw and the threat of thermo-nuclear annihilation de-escalated, innovation just stopped---well, other than making things smaller or thinner. I remember being in school in the ‘80s and doing reports on what our lives would look like by the year 2000, a nebulous and sci-fi concept back then: 3D hologram televisions, flying and/or electric cars, bloody utopic technocracies powered by the wind & the sun for christ’s sake! Not quite a decade on from that marker, a friend of mine recently summed it up best in wondering, “Where the fuck is my hooverboard?!”
