Produced and edited by
Angela Estacio, Lauren Enholm, Justin Taylor
“In the future, you will not answer the phone, you will be the phone.”
“In the future, you will not work at your computer, you will be your computer.”
“In the future, you will not surf the web, you will be the web.”
“In the future, you will not think about the future, you will be the future.”
The Prophet of @ is my online alter ego. He is first and formost a hack Southern California prophet who periodically makes virtual and real appearences at which time he makes prophecies about the future of technology.
This is the first prophecy that the Prophet of @ made:
“In the future, you will not answer the phone, you will be the phone.”
As with all the Prophet of @’s prophecies, they are preceded by a mundane encounter with a piece of technology. In this instance, the Prophet of @ was waiting to catch a plane to New York and he observed several young businessmen with glowing and blinking “hands free” cell phones growing out of their ears. And thus, sprung the prophecy that in the future you will not answer the phone, you will be the phone.
Origins of the Prophet of @
The Prophet of @ came into being in 1999, the year of the Y2K bug, the year that great waves of millenial doom filled the airwaves and many normally level-headed industry types were predicting the death of the Net, the death of millions of avatarians, the death of e commerce, and even the death of all technology-based societies on earth. It was in this year of steadily building hystery over the Y2K bug that the Prophet of @ joined the growing legions of prognosticators, doomsayers, psychics, and arm chair futurologist and began to make his own hack prophecies about where technology is going in the future. Since 1999, the Prophet of @ has carried on the work of past futurists who sprouted from the heady days of the Enlightenment and it’s brain child, the Industrial Revolution. The Prophet of @ continues to follow in the footsteps of such future gazers as Phillipo Tomaso Marnette, the manifesto-weilding Italian Futurist who embraced the techno future with a vengence by demanding that all the libraries and museums of Europe be burned and all their contents of moldy tradition with them; Velemer Klebnikov, the Russian who lived in the future tense of his vision and gazed upon the invisible radio waves, predicting that these electromagnetic waves of “beyondsense” would blanket the earth and allow listenerstheopportunity to transend time and space; and Marcel Duchamp, the perpetual tongue-in-cheek Frenchman who casually, even off-handedly toyed with the future by his “amusing physics”.