I remember reading a speech by bruce sterling several years ago in which he said the role of the science fiction writer is uncertain in a world where advertisements constitute fully realized SF. I recall he cited AT&T's "you will" campaign.

This morning I picked up another thread of that conversation while reading Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agiculture. Berry argues the future is to the modern mind what dreams of heaven were to the medieval mind. Berry describes the modern vision of the future alternately as a continent to be colonized, paradise on earth, and simply more interesting than the present. Exploitation of the present world, he says, is often justified by invoking the future:

What has drawn the Modern World into being is a strange, almost occult yearning for the future… The great aim of modern life has been to improve the future -- or even just to reach the future, assuming that the future will inevitably be 'better.'… The future has been envisioned, dreamed, projected, painted for us by prophets of every kind: scientists, comic book writers, novelists, philosophers, politicians, industrialists, professors.

And:

The industrial Paradise is a fantasy in the minds of the privileged and the powerful; the reality is a shambles.

Of course, Berry wrote this treatise in 1977, since which time there's been a backlash against the future, especially in the three years since the web was forced to confront reality. Business models fell to earth; Wired Magazine, publishing bastion of the future, was sold and faded in influence; Bush came to power. The future started to look at worst like a dangerous, unfriendly place; at best, perhaps, just like any other place -- one that will be only as good as we choose now to make it, through our present choices.