It’s definitely a legacy of postmodernism: a cascading collapse of grand narratives, shifting social values replacing the previously held assumptions, major shake-ups in aesthetics. But if it was postmodernism, we’d be debating this only in a theory journal somewhere. I mean, ostensibly, there are people somewhere actually making money off of this. I’ve made a little money off of it, though not earning a living. And that’s the point, right? This is a carnival side show, but a carnival side show that will be scanning your home with infrared cameras looking for illegal activity, while we gawk at the skies.

If I could make a guess, one of the reasons that Mr. Pickard doesn’t buy it as postmodernism, is because he is selling it, as much more than theory. He is an associate writer & futurist at @superflux, which is a design firm that… well, in their own words:

While the many realities and non-realities of design-fiction are subject to on-going debate, it is clear that this is this is more than a intellectual exercise. Speculation is business. Speculation is industry. There is a need to be thinking very seriously about things that don’t quite exist yet, and there are people who are better at it than others. Their skill is such that they are paid to exercise it. This is a confusing terrain, but some people are drawing maps. They aren’t simply playing language games with it, or debunking it in a rehash of the Sokal controversy. How do you debunk a drone?

My personal alteration of the Arthur C. Clarke quip is that “an insufficiently understood _____ is indistinguishable from an insufficiently understood _____.” Of course, these days, everything is insufficiently understood, and so future-weird generally looks a lot like everything else that is future-weird. I mean, someone at a university understands how those quadrocopters fly in neat square formations through windows. But the rest of us just stare at the Youtube video, mind and jaw agape.

The glowing LED stalls of the future-weird semiotic marketplace on Fascination Street. Yes, you’ve been there. We all wish we were there more often. Don’t we?

And pretty much all the things that Rhizome.org has been so lovely as to let me write about, in my brief “career” in this jurisdiction. I don’t mean this simply as self-promotion (though it clearly is), it is just that the Intriguing Valley has kind of become my beat.

This story is unfinished. But while I am listing a bunch of things that are “of the iceberg” here, let me also throw out these notes by Joanne McNeil (@jomc) about the New Aesthetic. Joanne is someone who is very much in this conversation in my mind, even if she never tweeted in this Storify. She’s the editor of all of those Rhizome pieces I listed above, and she gets it. Even more than giving me a venue for those pieces, it is the pieces she has rejected that have been formative to shaping the Intriguing Valley, in my understanding. Not everything falls into this category, and we wouldn’t want it to do so.  This is not a catch-all lumped together category of things we do not otherwise understand, but is a positive principle in and of itself.