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In This Issue

• DeLovely? DeLorean.
• What Would Future You Do?
• What Are Your Plans For That Junk?
• Letters to the Editors
• The Adventures of Young Boy and Park Girl in 4-D
• Hipsters Remember Awkward Tweens at Brooklyn Bar
• You Can Call Me Ishmael Anytime
• Oh, Take Me Over Awkwardly
• People Know Me. Cool People.
• Not Even Time Thwarts Yo Mama
• I Plan To Own The Future
• How to Write Love Poems for Girls Who Can Read
• Lies My Robots Told Me
• My Ears Are Bleeding! Wait, That's Just My Vagina.
• Veritas Forum Takes Stand Against Death
• Too Jewish to Play Ska?
• Damned Interface Technology!
• The Church of Timeology
• THEY WATCH
• The Staff of 21.5

Michael Bredin

Promises have been made. Ever since I was a child, people have told me fantastic stories about hover cars and robot maids. In fact, if you look back at what Ford and General Electric and other prominent American companies were saying about life in our current century in 1950, you’d think we all live in glass pods with robots serving our every whim and the average family goes to Space Disneyland at least once a year. The truth? No one lives in glass pods except Buckminster Fuller, robots generally only come in animal form, and Space Disneyland is a hellish, overpriced dump. These technological innovations have underperformed to an astonishing degree. But we here at the Fed are proactive, so the following is a report about the biggest technological underperformers of the past 50 years and how they can better our decidedly non-Jetson-like existences.

Hover Cars

What’s Wrong: Where’s my damn hover car? I think we have all been asking ourselves that question. Ford and GM told us that when trapped in a traffic jam we‘d just be able to hover above the rest of the cars and fly to work, laughing at all those soccer moms and impotent businessmen trapped in their Toyota Camrys. But where has technology taken cars? The most technologically advanced car on the market today is the Honda Prius, which is essentially a glorified iPod-playing lesbian golf cart.

What Can Be Done: Throw New Jersey, Connecticut, California and other notoriously traffic snarled states out of the union. They can form their own country, one that, controlled by NJ, CT, and CA, will probably give its citizens universal health care, child support, and economic security, and have really relaxed marijuana laws.

Ray Guns

What’s Wrong: Depends who you ask. A lot of people at Columbia are happy that ray guns haven’t been invented yet, because they hate guns, and therefore, America. Others (none of whom live in Manhattan) will tell you that it’s every American’s right to have a ray gun and that ray guns don’t kill people, distopic, robot-driven orgies of blood kill people. Either way, the Jetsons had ray guns; so did Star Trek. Hell, even the parallel universe of Star Wars had ray guns, and that was the 70’s.

What Can Be Done: The government should spend less money on programs deemed useless by today’s lawmakers, like Welfare, Medicaid, the EPA, and science, and divert that money to unscrupulous scientists who will build us ray guns and then turn against society and have to be stopped by an elite team of super heroes, just like in Boccaccio’s Decameron. I have yet to read the Decameron.

The Art of the Future

What’s Wrong: Everyone thinks that modern art is devoid of logic, reason or organization. Look at the prices that a Basquiat canvas covered in grafitti or Jeff Koons’ sculpture of the Energizer Bunny with big, prominent balls can fetch. Modern art has reached a point where it is too cool for its own self, living in a former lead paint factory with its old college roommate Dave in Williamsburg.

What Can Be Done: The future of art lies in artists like Kelly Clarkson. If we determine art based on a weekly call-in show and let the public eliminate what it likes the least, we can have art that is truly representative of our time and culture. “Since You’ve Been Gone” will be this century’s glorious and awe-inspiring anthem. Wait, no, that’s a terrible idea.

A Graduated System of Genetically Engineered Human Beings, Alpha through Epsilon, as Promised by Aldous Huxley

 What’s Wrong: I know what you’re going to say, “but Michael, we already live in a world like that! The Alphas and Betas are Democrats and the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons are Republicans.” Ah, the bitterness is strong in you, Ivy League student. Sadly, that’s not the real division. The division between levels of humans in our non-genetically engineered world lies in whether or not you find Everybody Loves Raymond funny (Alphas don’t). But still, that’s not nearly anything close to what Huxley promised us.

What Can Be Done: I place the creation of a graduated system of genetically engineered human beings squarely in the hands of the College Board and www.collegeboard.com. Hell, they already think they assign castes to the people of the world.

Have your own complaints about technology gone awry? Would you like to share them with the Fed and be able to show the community what you think? Well fuck off, your ideas are shallow and wrong.