The Genius Speaks

I work at a restaurant for the time being and last night I was working a private party for some alumni from NYU Stern (their business school).  It was a riot, and by that I mean boring as fuck.  I did overhear one investment banker comment to the other that socializing has completely changed, thanks to social networks like Facebook.  He then went on the surmise that in a hundred years (in which time we’ll all be dead) people won’t even talk to one another but instead will be connected to one another in some kind of mental internet that he had designed in his fantasies.  Listen to me, I’m all for suspension of disbelief, but there were just too many questions for me: what are the limits to this mental internet? can everyone know everything that I think? do I have to know what they are thinking?  Facebook already takes up too much of my time, when this new mental internet comes out, how will I keep a job?  more importantly, when will I masturbate?  My party was mid first course, and I was about to ask this asshole exactly what the parameters of his vision were, when something occurred to me:  When I was ten years old I told my neighbor that I wanted to drive a racecar when I got my license.  Her response was that by the time I got my license, people would be driving flying cars.  I turned 16 in 1997, and to this day --I have kept up with automotive trends-- they haven’t made a flying car, they can’t even make one that doesn’t need tires, shit I haven’t even seen a decent hover-craft.  So if they can’t make cars cooler, they’ll never get around to this mental internet, right?  Technology goes where people will buy it.  That’s why I can find six hundred pictures in a series of a man getting pissed-on in a public bathroom in Munich while five mechanics and two butchers look on.  Meanwhile, try to find how much it costs to get your license in NYC (I’ll wait, go try)... of course you didn’t, why would you?  It’s $16, I just saved you an entire day of searching, you’re welcome.  The point is people will pay for porn so it’s way more readily accessable, than other boring shit.  The other point is we can’t guess where technology is going, because we don’t know what will be important to people en masse.  Who’d have thought that sharing pictures from my weekend barbecue would compel 17 people to give me a thumbs-up, but it happened.  So this fool from my party last night makes some big statement about social networking, and all the other fools guffaw at how smart he is, and how they’d never though of that, and how right he is, meanwhile I laugh quietly to myself thinking of what an idiot my old neighbor looks like right now, because cars aren’t flying; and someday in a hundred years when there is no mental internet I will laugh at this man for how foolish I knew he would look...and it will be a hearty laugh.