Make: Technology on Your Time Volume 13

Make Free

PREDICTING THE PRESENT

By Cory Doctorow

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS MAY NOT accurately predict the future, but they’re often excellent predictors of the present — people who notice just how futuristic the world’s become while we weren’t looking.

In my last column, I introduced you to Tom Jennings, the virtuoso queerpunk anarcho-engineer who invented FidoNet, one of the earliest networks for exchanging conversation. For nearly a decade, bulletin boards around the world used FidoNet, until the internet came to the average info-civilian.

Here’s an amazing story from the paleo-internet that Jennings told me, which illustrates what this “predicting the present” business is really about.

William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in 1982, describing ...