It’s a New Decade

It’s the end of a decade, the 2001 Space Odyssey decade. That’s how I see it anyway. I first saw 2001, on acid, at the downtown theatre, I forget the name, just off Market Street in San Francisco, behind the pool hall that was the model for the pool hall in The Hustler. The acid was unnecessary.

Stanley Kubrick was a great prophet of a major aspect of the mood of the coming decade, the relationship of man to machine, man to network, man to virtual reality, man (and woman) to the web. He anticipated the charisma of the digital, and the corresponding monotonal analog detached restraint of the human, in the way Doctor Heywood Floyd talks to his daughter on the tv phone, while in orbit, and the way she, as young as she is, knows to talk back. And in the impersonal way that the astronauts react to HAL and to the delayed video from Earth, from their parents.

But Kubrick, and Arthur C. Clarke, were wrong about all of the technical particulars. HAL didn’t really come true, nor did ventures to the outer planets, or even the moon, let alone a psychedelic alien accouchement of the singularity.

To celebrate the new decade, here is a selection of my favorite photographs from the past decade, except for the first four, which were taken in the previous decade.

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