Flying cars are for sky cities. We don’t want sky cities. That’s what happened to your flying car.

It’s as simple as that.

Look, listen, remember: Once we were heading for space. That’s where we’d built our gleaming sky cities — in a different atmosphere, with different tech, for a different world. And, of course, to tie the worlds together we’d build our own skies higher — so that our Pale Blue Dot would always be reaching up for our brothers and sisters in the heavens, up there, out there. Sure, some visions start on the ground and build up, others float on platforms above the clouds, but once we though we’d stop building out and start building up.

Of course, sky cities don’t come with private gardens.

Most cities don’t come with private gardens.

They come with public spaces, if built right, where men and women and boys and girls can meet and play during the day. But those gardens aren’t safe at night, and the darker parts aren’t safe during the day. And we never got space, and we likely won’t in my lifetime, so we went back to building out.

The suburbs: Close enough to work in the city, but far enough for a private garden. And you certainly don’t need to fly there.

That’s where your flying car went. Let it go. It’s just getting in the way now, because we can not rewind.

(And there’s a different rant, but I’ll say this: Why do you think so many people are trying to rewind to to the last industrial age of widgets and gears and cogs and tubes? Later.)

What we have are the cities, and the suburbs. I’m speaking from an American point of view here, because that’s where I live and that’s what I’ve got. I’ve lived from coast to coast, here, carefully avoiding the flyover states because they terrify me, carefully avoiding the suburbs because they terrify me too. So I’m pulling on a decidedly American City point of view — Eastern and Western seaboard. Let me always live near the sea.

I forget, all too often, that the suburbs and the land bound states exist. I forget there are places where the public spaces are all malled to oblivion, and the teenagers cannot even gather there anymore for fear of danger in numbers. I forget the parks close, even there, at dark. I forget that college radio stations should not broadcast past their borders or they may be pirates.

I forget, because I live in the city and play online, that the web is one of the only places left for the almost-growns to play. And many of the adults, too. Because who actually has time to tend that garden with the commute every day?

And what have we done to it? We’ve malled the public spaces, we’ve locked the private gardens, and we increasingly thought-police the places where people can gather in the name of NSFW.

It’s no real wonder, is it, that our vision of the future fleets between nothing at all and dystopian visions. At the least, if the world starts falling apart, there will be new places to build. At the very least.

Silly people.

We’ve got the tools to build a floating city, right here. One that doesn’t need to be split into ghettos based on any socio-political standards. One that doesn’t, like real cities do, screw DXing broadcasts from the ends of the earth. One that doesn’t, if you’ve got half a brain, need to close at dark for your safety. (Although, for your health, you should go out into that real world now and again.)

We don’t need to tear it all down and start again.

***

So yeah, that’s really all to say I’ve made new projects for myself and might be quiet again for a minute.