What We Called the Future in 1998
A time capsule, opened on schedule, full of predictions.
The capsule promised us flying commutes and paperless offices. It got the loneliness half right and the technology almost entirely wrong.
The capsule was buried by a sixth-grade class in 1998 and opened, as promised, twenty-five years later, to a small crowd that included exactly one of the original students, now a grandmother.
Inside: a floppy disk no one present had a drive to read, a handwritten guess that "cars will fly by now," and a newspaper clipping about a modem speed that made the room laugh out loud.
What nobody predicted, reading it back, was the specific kind of connected loneliness we actually got - not the isolation they feared, but something stranger, everyone in the same room and somewhere else at once.
