When Will This Low-Innovation Era End?(blog-admin.wired.com)

    ...We look at the present day through a rear-view mirror. 
    This is something Marshall McLuhan said back in the 
    Sixties, when the world was in the grip of authentic-
    seeming future narratives. He said, “We look at the 
    present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards 
    into the future.”

    He went on to say this, in 1969, the year of the crewed 
    Moon landing: “Because of the invisibility of any 
    environment during the period of its innovation, man is 
    only consciously aware of the environment that has 
    preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully
    visible only when it has been superseded by a new 
    environment; thus we are always one step behind in our 
    view of the world. The present is always invisible because 
    it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of 
    attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an 
    earlier day.”

    There are six people living in space right now. There are
    people printing prototypes of human organs, and people 
    printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh
    and the human electrical system.

    We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got
    robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just
    stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a
    cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are
    getting ready to launch three satellites the size of
    coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone
    apps.

    Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more
    than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of
    computing power and an eight-track tape deck.

    In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously
    unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the
    surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on
    Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this
    is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on
    your phone, because this is the present time and these
    things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in
    fact a communications devices that shames all of science
    fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators.
    Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it
    couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice
    Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile
    phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass
    windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things
    happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn
    wizards.

    That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said     
    that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. 
    And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but 
    magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all 
    now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning 
    it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room 
    with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science 
    Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across 
    the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.