Prophecy

You know there is something extremely fun about telling the future. And it is not just fun to try to guess the future, it is even better if you tell someone else what your prediction is – you let them on to your guess.

Even if you are not correct, the anticipation created by telling the future is simply amazing.

there is a humbling aspect to it because one is almost always wrong & even when one is right there are usually regrets associated with the act of prediction.

But the point is not to be right – the point is to get the ego out of the way and convincingly try to predict the future through art.

Why is modern art not trying to recreate Nostradamus? Why the cut ups & other post modern conventions which have struggled so much with the progress of the other modern arts are not abandoned for the way more fun and readable lost art of prophecy I will never know.

But I predict that we will see a return to prophecy. And not the prophecy of the old testament, which speaks in cryptic tones, but a more concert fortune telling based on the progress of the palm reader and tarot card shufflers. A literature of prognostication which tells it like it will be without any fear of being wrong. And the value of being right will be removed.

As time moves into the arbitrary digital universe in which time starts on Jan 1, 1970 for no other reason then the fact that it was early then unix was invented – a time vexed by leap seconds – and truth will become a flexible commodity that will be malible by everyone – courtrooms will need to change the way in which evidence is presented, the way in which evidence is gathered, the way in which evidence is classified – the legal systems inability to deal with the fluctuating nature of digital time will cause significant problems in 2005.

Predictions like that should be made constantly by everyone everyday. They should be quoted like shakespeare. and they should be given over to the future generation as our greatest literary acheivement.