Homesick for the Future

I’ve spent much of my life feeling like a time traveller.

Not in the sense that I believe I’ve arrived from another century, although there have been moments when that would have been a convenient explanation. More that I’ve always felt slightly out of step with the world around me. As though I had some idea of where we could be going, and couldn’t quite understand why everyone else seemed so comfortable staying where we were.

Science fiction had a lot to do with that.

We call it science fiction, but the name barely begins to describe what it does. The spaceships, robots, alien civilisations and impossible technologies are often the least interesting parts. They’re vehicles for something much more radical: the possibility that the world could be otherwise.

That consciousness might take forms we haven’t imagined. That societies might organise themselves around entirely different values. That intelligence, identity, freedom and even humanity aren’t necessarily finished concepts.

And once you’ve imagined those possibilities seriously enough, something happens. The present stops looking like the natural and permanent order of things. It starts looking like a temporary, inadequate arrangement.

That’s a dangerous idea to give a kid.

Particularly a neurodivergent kid who already finds much of the world’s supposedly obvious logic rather baffling.

Why do we do things this way? Who decided? Who benefits? What would happen if we did something completely different?

And perhaps most dangerously of all: why not try?

Science fiction didn’t give me a political programme. It gave me something arguably more consequential. It made alternative realities feel possible. Not merely intellectually plausible, but emotionally inhabitable.

You could imagine living there. Loving there. Belonging there.

You could become homesick for somewhere that didn’t exist.

Postcards from the future

Somewhere along the way, that feeling acquired a soundtrack.

Juan Atkins was one of the architects of Detroit techno, although describing him that way seems almost insultingly insufficient. Through Cybotron, Model 500, Infiniti, Audio Tech, his Metroplex label, and a gloriously sprawling constellation of collaborations and experiments, he helped invent a musical language for futures that hadn’t arrived.

I saw him play in London in the nineties. I bought his records, played them, mixed them, lived with them. I still have so many of those unwieldy slabs of vinyl that I fully intend to take them to my grave.

And while the history books quite rightly celebrate the invention of techno, the records that mean the most to me aren’t necessarily the famous ones. It’s the strange, spacious, deeply funky music. The overlooked releases. The unexpected collaborations. The exquisite unfolding of Sonic Sunset. The moments when a handful of electronic instruments somehow communicate something enormous.

There’s a particular kind of longing in that music.

Not nostalgia, exactly. Nostalgia normally points backwards, towards somewhere you’ve been.

This was nostalgia pointing forwards.

Machines sounding homesick for places that hadn’t been invented yet.

People sometimes talk about electronic music as though its emotional vocabulary must be limited by its machinery. As though oscillators, sequencers and drum machines are intrinsically less expressive than violins or human voices.

But those machines didn’t merely imitate existing forms of expression. In the hands of artists like Atkins, they helped create new ones. A small melodic movement could carry extraordinary tenderness. A repeated electronic phrase could suggest vast distances, impossible cities, loneliness, freedom, something approaching transcendence.

And underneath it all, the funk.

Always the fucking funk.

There’s a connection here that I discovered only much later. Atkins studied the future at school. Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, with its account of technological transformation and its talk of techno-rebels, was part of the intellectual world that informed his music.

I love that.

Somewhere in Detroit, another young person was reading about the future and wondering what he might make of it.

He made records.

I found them on the other side of the world, and they helped convince me that the future was worth fighting for.

And there was Underground Resistance.

Their records carried something I’d already been feeling in the music, but here were people actually putting it into words. Music as experimentation. Sound as communication. Technology as something to be seized and used, however primitive the equipment.

They urged people everywhere to create and transmit their own tones and frequencies, to challenge the programmers, to make something that didn’t simply reproduce what already existed.

The message wasn’t to imitate Detroit techno. It was to experiment. To find your own sound, your own ideas, and put them into the world.

Peace. Love. Harmony. Divinity.

It was an extraordinary thing to encounter on a record.

And I took it seriously.

As an invitation.

Momentum. Trajectory.

We will be free

There’s a song by Atkins, released as Infiniti, called Never Tempt Me.

I’ve been listening to it again since hearing of his death.

His singing is raw. Human. Apparently unconcerned with the conventions of polished vocal performance. Perhaps some of those rough edges were deliberate. Perhaps he simply meant every word more than he cared about hitting every note.

I don’t know.

I do know it brought me to tears.

Among its lyrics is a simple promise:

“We will be free, just wait and see.”

And in another recording, Postcard From The Future, there’s a refrain that seems to circle the same idea: becoming something beyond what necessity demands, and finding freedom there.

The words are partly obscured by processing. Perhaps I’ve misheard some of them. The idea sounded clearer than the words. But the sentiment has been unmistakable to me for decades.

A contemporary reviewer heard Never Tempt Me as part of a relationship falling apart. A love song, full of hurt and contradiction.

I heard a promise of liberation.

Perhaps we were both right. Perhaps neither of us understood quite what Juan intended. I don’t particularly mind.

The record entered my life, and whatever he meant by those words became entangled with whatever I needed them to mean.

That’s something music does extraordinarily well. It escapes its creator without necessarily abandoning them. It becomes part of other people’s memories, convictions, loves and losses.

And sometimes, decades later, it returns carrying all of them.

It’s worth remembering where this music came from. Detroit was undergoing profound industrial and economic upheaval. The same technological civilisation that had created livelihoods and opportunities was transforming, displacing workers and leaving communities to reckon with an uncertain future.

The relationship between technology and liberation was complicated from the beginning.

Yet here were young Black musicians taking electronic machines and imagining something extraordinary. Music rooted in a particular place but unwilling to remain confined to it.

Not simply escaping the present, although escape has its merits.

Transforming it.

The optimism in that strikes me as almost unbearably moving now. Not because the future was guaranteed to be better. It wasn’t.

But because they made music as though it still could be.

The trouble with seeing possibilities

I suspect there’s a particular sort of person who is susceptible to all this.

People who experience the world as something unfinished. Who struggle to accept arbitrary limitations. Who find themselves drawn to strange ideas, new technologies, alternative ways of living and the stubborn conviction that things don’t have to remain as they are.

Sometimes they’re inventors. Sometimes artists. Sometimes activists. Sometimes they’re just the awkward bastards asking why everyone is putting up with something obviously ridiculous.

I’ve been several of those.

I spent decades trying, in various ways, to liberate the world.

Activism seemed a perfectly reasonable response to the discovery that so much of what we accept as inevitable is neither natural nor inevitable. If the world is something people have constructed, surely people can construct something better.

And sometimes they can.

But there’s a cost to living with your attention perpetually directed towards unrealised possibilities.

You begin to experience the present not simply as somewhere you live, but as something you’re forever trying to change. Every unnecessary constraint becomes an irritation. Every institutional absurdity becomes an invitation to battle. Every glimpse of a better possibility makes the distance between what exists and what could exist feel almost physically painful.

You can spend a remarkable amount of your life fighting arrangements that other people barely notice.

And you can exhaust yourself doing it.

Through all those years, the records kept travelling with me.

Different houses, different relationships, different ambitions. Boxes of vinyl carried from one chapter of life to another, sometimes played constantly, sometimes sitting for years waiting for me to find the time.

They were awkward, heavy things to keep moving around. Entirely impractical.

But I never seriously considered getting rid of them.

The future they contained seemed somehow more durable than the futures I was trying to build.

May the odds be ever in your favour

At some point, you begin to suspect you’ve been living in a casino.

Not because every game is fraudulent, or because nobody ever wins. People win all the time. Some win spectacularly. Their stories are everywhere.

Work hard. Take risks. Back yourself. Build something. Believe in the future. Anyone can make it.

And you believe them, because you want to. Because you’re trying to make something of your life, and because the alternative is to accept that your opportunities might be governed by forces you can barely influence.

So you play.

You work. You start businesses. You fall in love. You invest. You take chances on ideas that might be five years ahead of their time.

Sometimes things go well.

Then a marriage falls apart. An investment goes sideways. A business fails. Some combination of bad decisions, bad timing and circumstances beyond your control erases years of work.

You discover that effort and outcome have a rather less intimate relationship than the motivational literature suggests. And the losses aren’t merely financial. They accumulate in time, energy, confidence and the capacity to risk anything again.

Meanwhile, the people who began with enough money to survive a dozen failures can keep playing until something works.

They can afford to be early.

Being right too early can be economically indistinguishable from being wrong.

I don’t think every disappointment proves the game is rigged. People make mistakes. Chance is real. Some ideas are simply bad, including some of mine.

But the consequences of being wrong, or merely unlucky, are distributed rather unevenly.

And unlike an actual casino, you can’t necessarily leave. The house owns your mortgage, your superannuation, the roads, the communications infrastructure, perhaps even the platform on which you’re complaining about the house.

The winners become evidence that the game is fair. The losers become cautionary tales about personal responsibility.

Somewhere, somebody in an expensive suit wishes you the very best of luck.

May the odds be ever in your favour.

The older I get, the less that sounds like encouragement.

And still the records kept coming out of their sleeves.

That was one of the peculiar things about returning to music I’d loved in my teens and twenties. The machines sounded much the same. The imagined futures were still there, suspended in grooves cut decades earlier.

But I was listening with a different life behind me.

What had once sounded like pure possibility could now carry grief, disappointment, tenderness, even a kind of defiance.

The music hadn’t become less futuristic.

I’d become more experienced at living in the future.

The Empire strikes back

As a child, I watched an unreasonable amount of Star Wars.

I genuinely expected a lightsaber to come my way eventually.

A literal one. Let’s not get unnecessarily metaphorical about this.

I was also reasonably confident that, when the time came, I’d be joining the Rebellion rather than applying for a middle-management position aboard the Death Star.

There was an Empire. There were rebels. There were extraordinary possibilities waiting to be discovered, and somewhere out there was an elegant weapon for a more civilised age.

I thought the broad direction of history was fairly obvious.

I’ve become less certain.

Somewhere along the way, the science fiction that inspired us began to resemble the science fiction that warned us.

Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever. The manufactured realities of dystopian societies. Omnipresent surveillance. People competing for survival under rules they had no meaningful part in writing.

We built astonishing communications networks, then discovered how effectively they could be used to monitor, manipulate and monetise us.

The machines started catching up with the dreams. The economics went in the other fucking direction.

The future arrived.

Much of it seemed to belong to somebody else.

Sometimes it feels as though the Empire won without the courtesy of a final battle.

The rebels grew old and scattered, communicating through little electronic devices, transmitting increasingly faint signals about the futures they once imagined.

And the Empire sold them the devices.

It’s a bleak picture. Perhaps too bleak. There have been real victories, extraordinary improvements in human lives, and possibilities that simply didn’t exist when I was young.

But capability and liberation turned out to be very different things.

Parts of the future arrived wearing the wrong uniform.

And there’s another danger in spending your life resisting things: eventually, the thing you’re fighting can begin to define you.

You become what you’re against.

Opposition develops its own orthodoxies, rituals, heroes and heretics. A religion of resistance, endlessly rehearsing the struggle while the imagined liberation recedes further into the distance.

I’ve come to think there’s something profoundly important about maintaining the freedom to agree.

To recognise a good idea even when it comes from somebody you dislike. To acknowledge when an institution gets something right. To reconsider an old conviction when the evidence changes.

Rebellion can become another kind of obedience if opposition itself becomes the organising principle.

The point was never simply to defeat the Empire.

The point was to be free.

Free to think, to create, to disagree, to cooperate, to change your mind. Free to imagine things that don’t fit neatly into anyone’s approved vision of the future.

Including your own.

Perhaps that’s one of the things a lifetime of activism can teach you, if you’re fortunate enough not to become completely consumed by it.

To choose your battles rather than allowing the battle to choose the rest of your life.

The future has arrived. Sort of.

So here I am.

Older now, living on 170 acres of forest in Tasmania, about as far away from everything as I could reasonably arrange.

Not quite the glorious liberation of the galaxy I’d once anticipated, although there are worse outcomes than becoming an eccentric hermit surrounded by droids.

I spend my days working with artificial intelligences, building strange software, experimenting with music and exploring what machines might become.

The technology is astonishing.

I can have conversations with systems that reason across disciplines, write code, explore scientific questions and routinely produce breathtakingly confident bullshit.

I can run sophisticated artificial intelligence on machines sitting in my own house.

I’m collaborating with software to build an autonomous radio system: experimenting with generated music, analysing recordings, and trying to teach the bloody thing to mix them properly.

Things that would have seemed absurd when I first bought those Detroit records.

And in some ways, I’m living in the future I once imagined.

But I’m also living in the consequences of decades spent trying to reach it.

I have less financial security than I once hoped for. More knowledge of what can go wrong. A considerably more complicated relationship with optimism.

I’m not convinced that every new technology will make the world better. I’ve seen enough to know that some will make it substantially worse, depending on who controls them and to what ends.

Nor am I particularly interested in being told that everything happens for a reason.

There’s no requirement to find a spiritually enriching lesson in every loss.

Still, here I am, building things.

Apparently I haven’t entirely learned my lesson.

And occasionally, sitting here among the trees and the machines, answerable to nobody in particular, I catch myself thinking:

Holy shit. Am I actually free?

For a moment, perhaps I am.

It’s a peculiar feeling, particularly after spending so much of my life trying to get there.

What the machines cannot tell us

Since Juan’s death, I’ve been working on a musical tribute using that experimental radio system.

The machines can measure rhythm, dynamics, harmonic relationships and spectral changes. We’re investigating what happens when two recordings meet — not simply whether their rhythms align, but what one might become in the presence of the other.

But the measurements don’t tell them why Never Tempt Me brought me to tears.

And neither can I.

Not completely.

Perhaps it was the singing. Perhaps the words. Perhaps thirty years of memories, Juan’s death, my own life, the peculiar emotional weather of that particular moment.

Almost certainly some complicated interaction of things I couldn’t reliably enumerate if I tried.

Humans are like that.

We’re not always good at explaining the causes of our own feelings. We experience them first, then construct stories about them afterwards. Sometimes those stories are insightful. Sometimes they’re beautifully convincing nonsense.

But that doesn’t mean the experience is beyond investigation.

When reality exceeds our models, the answer isn’t to declare reality mysterious and give up. Nor is it to pretend the model has captured everything important. It’s to investigate what we’ve missed, develop new ways of observing and understanding, and recognise that understanding something doesn’t necessarily make it any less beautiful.

The fact that vibrations in air, passing through our wonderfully peculiar ears and into our even more peculiar brains, can produce experiences of such richness is extraordinary enough.

Especially when the vibrations originated in a few electronic circuits in Detroit decades ago.

There’s another small absurdity here.

Two of the recordings I’ve been revisiting, Never Tempt Me and Postcard From The Future, appeared together on the US CD edition of an Infiniti album called Skynet.

Yes, that Skynet. Or at least, it’s difficult to miss the association.

Here I am, decades later, using artificial intelligence to help honour a man who released music under a title associated with science fiction’s most infamous fictional machine intelligence.

Meanwhile, one slightly imperfect human voice keeps bringing the supposedly sophisticated biological intelligence operating the whole contraption to tears.

I don’t know what Juan would have made of that.

I rather wish I could ask him.

I’ve always been fascinated by intelligence in all its forms. By the possibility of minds unlike ours, by new ways of perceiving reality, by extending the range of what a conscious being might experience or become.

But I don’t want a future that discards humanity as an obsolete component.

What’s the fucking point?

The capacity to love, to grieve, to be curious, to recognise beauty, to be moved by an imperfect voice singing about freedom — these aren’t embarrassing limitations we need to engineer away.

They’re among the things that make the journey worthwhile.

If becoming something more requires becoming something less in all the ways that matter, we’ve misunderstood the assignment.

I suspect many futurists are enormous softies underneath all the technological ambition and cosmic imagery.

The machinery and the humanity were never opposites.

Juan’s music was evidence of that long before I had the words to explain it.

Homesick for the future

I sometimes wonder what became of the futures we imagined.

Some arrived. Some were grotesquely misunderstood. Some turned out to be technically possible and socially disastrous. Others remain stubbornly out of reach.

And some were never really predictions at all.

They were expressions of desire.

For freedom. For connection. For the possibility of becoming something more than the circumstances of our birth, our society or our technology seemed to allow.

But I haven’t left the Rebel Alliance.

And retreating to a forest was never quite the same thing as surrendering.

I still remember those instructions on the Underground Resistance records.

Create. Experiment. Transmit.

The equipment has changed rather dramatically.

The transmissions continue.

Perhaps they’re reaching fewer people than the younger activist once hoped. Perhaps some disappear into the enormous background noise of a civilisation increasingly adept at drowning out anything that doesn’t serve its immediate interests.

But the uncertainty cuts both ways. I can’t assume the world will become what I hoped for, and I can’t honestly claim that all the possibilities have been exhausted.

I’ve learned enough not to mistake a promise for a prediction.

And there are things worth enjoying without demanding that they change the world.

The forest. The music. The people you love. The extraordinary things that already exist.

The future I imagined as a child has become part of my past. The world I inhabit would have seemed like science fiction to the person I once was. And yet I still find myself looking towards something that hasn’t arrived.

Still a little homesick.

Still unconvinced that this is as good as things can get.

Juan Atkins is gone.

But his records are still here. Those little machines are still sending messages from a future that hasn’t quite arrived. A voice, gloriously imperfect, is still making promises.

We will be free, just wait and see.

I don’t know whether we will.

The old rebel has somehow reached Endor.

Unfortunately, the mortgage is still payable in Imperial credits.