Imitating the future, breaking the present

Tech companies are only pretending to innovate, through copying futuristic aesthetics from science fiction without understanding their purpose.

Technological progress has always come from humanity’s grasp exceeding our reach; before we could build drones we needed to imagine flight. However, our successful flying machines bore little resemblance to their fictional counterparts. Design has not learned this lesson, and continues to try to wow users by recreating familiar aesthetics of futurity, rather than the outcomes depicted in this media. And whenever it does this (as with any aesthetics-first effort) the result is always a failure. The inevitable future disappears like so much smoke.

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