Vintage futurists were a wild bunch. Reading their words now—decades after they first aired their hopes and anxieties for a future they couldn't have possibly foreseen—you're just as likely to think, "What were they thinking?" as you are, "Where did we go wrong?"

To get a sense of what I'm talking about, look no further than an obscure 1985 essay written by Michael Inman, the system operator (or sysop) of a defunct Toronto-based art bulletin board system (BBS) called the Pool. The essay appeared in an issue of Nexpress, a newsletter produced by a group of proto-net artists working on a technology called Telidon in the early 80s.

"As we use computers for security, banking, shopping, etc., our privacy is threatened"

Its title is "Reflections from the Pool," and it depicts an eerily prescient picture of our often dystopic present: mass surveillance, hidden economies, and damaging hacks.

I discovered it during my research for a feature I wrote on the history of Telidon art, and honestly, it blew me away. I did some googling and couldn't find any information on Inman, except for some mentions in lists of BBSes of times gone by. But it's so damn good, I can't help but share at least some of it.

Enjoy this unsettlingly accurate 80s vision of our dystopian present.

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