So on our “Ask us anything” formspring.me account, someone asked the inevitable question: “Where’s my fucking jetpack?”

So where is your fucking Jetpack, anyway?

HERE’S YOUR FUCKING JETPACK.  There, boom, a commercially available Jetpack.  You strap it on, it flies and you don’t even need a license in most countries.  All you need is a little bit of disposable income and wham:  Jetpack.  What?  You can’t afford it?   Well what did you expect; that when jetpacks came around that they’d be free?  I live in a country where free flu shots are considered a government conspiracy and you expect someone to strap a communist subsidized rocket up your ass and tell you to go to town?  I don’t fucking think so.

What are you looking for in a jetpack, anyway?  I mean, sure they’re cool and all – who didn’t hide in their rooms and gently bring themselves off while watching the Rocketeer?  But what do your really want – flight?  Well there are other ways to fly then strapping a giant engine to your back.

Oh yeah, speaking of flight, here’s your flying car, too:

It’s called a “helicopter”.  Yes, you need a special license and metric shit-tonnes of money to own and operate one making it prohibitively expensive and unrealistic for many reasons – but hey, don’t feel bad - NINETY-ODD PERCENT OF THE HUMAN SPECIES feels the same way about cars.   To break that down into more manageable numbers, if the world was a colony of 1000 people, by some accounts only 70 lucky bastards would own cars.  Everyone else?  Hoofing it, biking it, using public transportation or being stuck in a geographic area the size of a postage stamp by environmental factors.

So does the fact you can’t afford a flying car make you sad?  Congratulations!  Now you’ve woken up on the same side of the bed as the rest of the human race.

Okay.  Fair enough, you don’t mean flying car in a loose sort of way that could include a helicopter.  You want an honest-to-God Nick Fury agent of S.H.I.E.L.D “where we’re going we don’t need roads” Delorian with rockets strapped to its ass.

What is it with you people wanting to strap rockets to everything’s ass, anyway?  Remind me never to look at your porn collection.    (Well, I mean… if it has tastefully done ass-rockets, send it on.)

Flying cars are neat, too.  But let me direct your attention to this window.  Look out there… now assuming you’re in a part of the world where car ownership is the norm, then you’re looking at a place where there need to be laws in place to stop people from doing stupid shit while operating several tonnes of dangerous machinery at high speeds.  It is somehow not common sense to not down a beer, smoke a joint, text your boyfriend, pierce your nipples and skullfuck a Peruvian trout when driving a two-ton death machine.

But people who weren’t gifted with a basic survival instinct aren’t the only downer about motor vehicles.   You see, the people making cars are under no pressure to make safe cars.  Do you really want the same companies that have to be sued, threatened and cajoled by private citizens and governments to not make cars that blow up when hit by a stiff breeze to be the ones responsible for shooting you and your car into the sky?   That bit from Fight Club, about auto companies weighing the liability for death vs defects in their vehicles?  That’s a true story.

So where is your flying car?  Perhaps it is waiting somewhere behind the car that is not responsible for approximately 2% of all the death in the world, annually?  (For ex.  1.4 million worldwide in 2004.)   How in the hell is anyone supposed to level up to super awesome flying cars when we can’t even get cars-that-don’t-kill-people-all-the-fucking-time down?

Okay, that’s enough yelling; the shouty old man routine gets old – fast.

But that said, the “where’s my fucking jetpack” meme pisses me the fuck off.

First of all, why the obsession over a future made in the 1910-1930′s?  Flying cars and jetpacks were the fantasy fetish objects of a different time.  Not a simpler time, because the phrase “simpler time” is like “military intelligence” – it’s a contradiction – we only think times were simpler thanks to temporal and cultural distancing.   Still, is that your future?  Really?  Or is your grandparents’ future?  The Jetpack future is a future born of the past.  It is a future created by people who lived in a world that had never seen the artificial suns rise over Japan, had not seen the realities of our space program, and probably couldn’t conceive of a black man in the White House or Celebrity Big Brother.

If you’re really serious about wanting the Jetpack future – and I know some of you are…

Hell, you’re listening to a man who once blew up a poster of Thomas Edison with homemade explosives while screaming “Nikola Tesla thou art revenged” at the top of his lungs and running naked through the woods.  Which is to say… I have my own hang ups about stolen futures.

If you’re serious about the Jetpack future, then don’t stop at “this is not my future” – make it your future.  Claim that vision of now that circumstances and small minds have denied you and find other like minded people and build it.

When Steampunk came back, you had people who looked at the future-of-a-different-past in some works of fiction and then started to make it real.  Not just with cute costumes and at conventions, but with building their own machines, starting real community and carving out a niche where that future made of cogs and springs and the rushing of superheated air has weight and takes up space and becomes real.  Now you’ve got people getting into D.I.Y. and sustainability and reclaiming urban spaces thanks to a subculture that in the beginning, just really liked some sci-fi books and had an unhealthy fixation with top hats.

Here’s the thing; if you stop at “this is not my future” and go no further, then someone else will make their version of the future and I can almost guarantee you’re not going to like it.   I can guarantee this because you already don’t like it.  We’re living in the future of men who saw people as commodities and human lives as disposable sources of income.  It’s not some grand conspiracy, it’s just people who have a vision of the future where the top 2% get richer and the rest of the world… well… you want to be in that 2%, right?  And the only way that is going to happen is if you buy into their future and not into the steam-sustainability-and-goggles future, the Ayahuasca-and-shamanism future, the Russian-feminist-ninja future or the Japanese-post-gender-newtype future.

We don’t have nice things because we let other people take them away from us.  We have these futures that seem alien to us because we let them happen.  I’m including you, me and 99% of all the humans and mutants I have ever met in that “we”, too.    We are the reason there are no jetpacks or flying cars or universal distribution of water and food.  ”We have met the enemy,” as a great man once said, “and he is us”. We contribute to a future that has no place for us in so many ways:  inaction, being convinced that we don’t have voices that count, being convinced that the only choices we have are the choices we can buy, despair, alienation… the list goes on and on.   We let the beautiful, amazing, weird, fucked-up futures we hold next to our hearts die stillborn in the face of futures so alien to most of us that they might as well be dread Cthulhu sleeping beneath the waves.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though.  If you want the jetpack future?  Find the other people who want it and make it.   If you see the people around you stand mute while the dreams of human accomplishment are ground into the dirt and they instead run over each other to embrace steaming mediocrity and you don’t think that’s a fair trade? Say something.  Contrary to slick movie quotes, the Devil never even bothered to pretend he didn’t exist – instead he made so many of us believe the lie that our voices and actions don’t matter.

Fuck the Devil.  Put on your tophat and latex gimp suit or Rocketeer jacket and carve out that future – Jetpacks and all if that’s what floats your boat – and don’t let me or anyone else get in your way.

At least we do have the alien dancing girls.