These Future Shoes

a column from a 2001 issue Computer User

The biggest question I get at the Future Shoes workdesk is: "What the heck are Future Shoes"? Here is the answer to that question.

"Future Shoes" was the name of a TV program I wrote and produced about 25 years ago for Minnesota public television. The idea then was to create a light-hearted, multimedia look at changes bubbling up through the substrate. It reminds me, in retrospect, of a combination of Monty Python and Bill Nye the Science Guy, only for adults. Future Shoes were the footwear you laced up in order to better engage with change.

After that show folded (after a lengthy run of four installments) I put the future on a shelf, feeling the market was not there for it. The Carter-Reagan recession was deep and hard, and sunny visions of the future were the last thing Americans wanted to see. OPEC was killing us on oil, Japan was killing us on quality, and Fortune 500 businesses looked like endangered species.

In that unlikely economy, I decided the world needed another business writer, one attuned to the big picture of change and transformation, from a human perspective. My writer friends, novelists and the like, found the decision incomprehensible. Business and writing to them fit together about as logically as military and intelligence or jumbo and shrimp.

But hey, a guy's got to eat, so I took the few bucks I had saved up and bought my first computer, a funny beast called the Franklin Ace -- basically an Apple II+ with WordStar. With 64K of RAM running dual operating systems, I was ready to take names and administer savage verbal butt-kickings.

A magazine gave me the assignment of writing about the future of rust-bucket cities like Cleveland and Gary. And that is how I found myself standing in a blizzard at the Milwaukee Fairgrounds at about midnight in January, 1983, with a line of about 4000 applicants for a dozen assembly line jobs at a local chassis subcontractor. These people knew there was no future in the chassis business, and the odds of beating out the other folks in line were slim. But it was a chance all those shivering people were willing to take.

Talk about Saul on the road to Damascus -- this was my defining career moment. I realized that this painful, subzero scene contained everything you needed to know about the future. The future wasn't going to a pushbutton whiz-bang like most people thought, like The Jetsons. It was going to be a ferocious struggle pitting individuals and families against uncontrollable change. How do you adapt? What habits and mindsets do you let go of? What new skills and technologies do you strap on? What values do you hold onto, no matter the cost?

And what were those new paradigms and attitudes but future shoes?

So I wrote that story, and it appeared on the magazine's cover, with a series of photos of an old industrial smokestack being dynamited and collapsing in a cloud of dust.

When I moved back to the Twin Cities, I shopped the same angle to a new newspaper there, called Computer User. The paper created a new category, the computer rag. This was 1988, and I've been with them ever since -- twelve eternities in techno time. Over that period Computer User spun off a network of eponymous entities nationwide, and last year merged with a competing rag, Computer Currents. So when the editor asked me to do a weekly column for the online version of the paper, something a little different, I knew I wanted to revive my old metaphor, Future Shoes.

To me it combines the seriousness of the transformation around us and the silliness of where we might stand in the flood of new possibilities at any given instant. And it gives me a broad umbrella under which I can talk about things as global as bridging the digital divide and things as personal as the sick feeling you get in your gut when the phrase FATAL ERROR appears onscreen, and you wonder what, or who, has just expired.

I am still misunderstood. Somehow I got on an e-mail marketing list for Italian shoe manufacturers -- you know, pumps and brogans. So every day I get news summaries in Italian about upheavals in Milan.

But hey, it makes sense to me that when you're talking about something that hasn’t happened yet, not everyone is going to understand. The future isn’t what most people think it is, "out there," waiting to tap you on the shoulder and give you instructions. It's right here, and it's bubbling up right now through your personal substrate.

And I know that somehow, like Scarlett O'Hara and Gloria Gaynor, I will survive. One of these days these shoes are going to walk all over you.