Tomorrow’s Mirage
I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve Googled myself more times that I can count. How could you not? I suppose there are better things to do with your time, but if I went down that road I wouldn’t do anything. I’ve learned that there are a couple notable Gabriel Valdivias: yours truly, a Senior VFX artist that worked on Diablo IV (!!), and a 27-year old suspect of robbery and carjacking. I sincerely hope the other two had their own Substacks because they would be infinitely more interesting than this, but alas here I am carrying the mantle for all Gabriel Valdivias. I’ll do my best.
Most times I encounter the results of my search, I get a good look at my frontal lobe by rolling my eyes when I see the content I’ve put online. For some reason, I’ve insisted to do so for almost two decades now.
First, in a blog I creatively called “El Rincón De Gabo” (which is now defunct and apparently replaced by a sports blog with the same name?). I learned to code there by painstakingly adding my favorite song from the soundtrack of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to autoplay as you enter the website. Then, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
YouTube the worst one because there are full length videos of conference talks I’ve given on the topic of design, my eventual craft of choice. The reason I gave thes talks is not because I have a lot of knowledge to impart on the world, I just happened to be an early designer in a team that was part of the zeitgeist of the industry around 2016: Virtual Reality.
The Design industry was fascinated with the topic— it was new, exciting, and terrifying all at once. Not unlike AI today, there were proponents who proclaimed it was a once in a lifetime technology and critics who assured us it was the death of social interactions as we know them. Naturally, they were looking for experts to give a peek into that world and I was (/ am always) looking for attention. So it became a match made in heaven. For a couple years, I gave tons of talks about the topic and the ‘future’ of design. In retrospect, I was wrong. Or rather; I was too early, which is often what ‘wrong’ ends up being.
It’s really tempting to be the one that stares into the horizon and calls out what’s coming. There’s an arrogance to it that is deeply satisfying. “You guys haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Just you wait.”It creates a hierarchy in the most valuable dimension: time. So, I understand why people are drawn to it in the age of AI. It’s new, exciting and terrifying all at once.
We’re now drowning in people pontificating about the future. Collectively calling their shots hoping to be on the right side of history. No matter where you look, there’s someone saying the future is here. They paint a binary reality where everything you knew is gone and a new set of unknowns are here to replace it.
I’ve grown tired of that discourse. I fear that we’ve spent so long looking ahead that we miss what’s right in front of our noses. This is why I’ve always been turned off by space exploration (it’s nothing but a brazen example of colonization). I find it more worthwhile to direct your attention towards problems worth solving today, rather than gearing up for the next step change in society.
It’s easier to talk about the future than the present. The further it is, the easier it becomes. You get to project your optimism (or nihilism) and ignore the mistakes you made this morning, which you’ll have to deal with in a couple minutes. The longer the timeframe, the more abstract you get to be with it, and the more abstract something is, the less controversial it is.
Although, I do understand there’s a level of self preservation to this. Ultimately, the obsession with the future, like most things, is self-motivated. Peeking into the future can tip you on where to place your bets and have an outsized impact as everything unfolds into place. Maybe that’s why I am starting to reject it. It’s masqueraded in proclamations for humanity but in reality it’s just a vehicle for your ego. The same ego that moves me to Google myself and the same ego that places judgment on my previous actions and praises my current ones.
I do think the present is more interesting than the future, at least to me; I also think the present is weirdly under-described, at least with any accuracy. We've all gotten so conceptual that description has suffered in the most general sense. I'd sooner expect a person-on-the-street to have a worked-out "ideology" than to be able to relate the contents, nature, feel of a single room in their house! This is to say nothing of our near-universal poverty of language for plants, types of architectural element, types of face and body, clothes, etc.
I'll only add: I also think the past is often more interesting than the present. I was reading Chesterton ably roasting intellectuals for often saying that on the one hand, "no group has any claim to truth over any other group" (or tradition, or civilization), while on the other hand asserting that one group certainly does enjoy supremacy: the present. So while they might say it's absurd to privilege the values of one society over another, they're united on feeling that the society of the past is without any epistemological standing at all: fools who just "didn't know what we know."
The avenue into the past for me is usually individual authors, from whose lives and works I regularly learn that almost everything I "know" about the past is as false and empty and reductive and motivated as everyone we "know" about the present.
And man: I feel you on the same of prior posts; I cannot believe the shit I let fly with. I console myself that the Internet forgets everything even as it records it, and no one can post without showing their ass; but man: it's not easy lol!!!