Tag: contrail

I both like reading David Mitchell and hate his politics. In Bone Clocks, that I just finished, among many other things, he talks about the time, in the near future, when there would be no more vapor trails, and how people would miss them. His bitter vision of the future presses all the right buttons for my paranoia. His lyrical pessimism reminded me of why I stopped subscribing to Harpers. His vision, despite all that lovely attention to detail, is too linear and simplistic, I tell myself, and I keep picking it apart, convincing myself that he is wrong, and that our western liberal secular enlightened civilization is not going to fail and collapse the way he predicts, in 2030s, even if it may often seem to go in that direction, and that there are enough counterforces (comprised of each one of us conscious humans, and the complicated systems we’ve built) to push it away from the not-necessarily-inevitable collapse.

But still, I now stop and appreciate the contrails, and the social order, and shops full of food, and all the other technology wonders that we have now, and know that they can disappear so easily.