Environmentalism (Spoiler Alert: It's a play on words - I don't actually care about the planet)

I tend to think about the future a lot. Not in a goal-seeking, career-growth sort of way; it's really more of an abstract, pointless speculation sort of thing. Give me an entire day in a coffee shop with a notebook, and I'll come away with twelve pages of feverishly scribbled notes on the possible ramifications of the iPhone. When you do this professionally, they call it Futurology.

And there's a lot of hubub in the futurology arena about atoms and bits, how the world as a whole is moving progressively from the former to the latter and there's nothing we can do to stop it. This is a transition so natural that we won't even be aware of it for much longer - the closing of video rental chains because of digital downloads, the death of the DVD (and inevitable stillborn death of BluRay) for the same reasons, the obviation of personal snail-mail, file cabinets and dead-tree books thanks to laptops, e-readers and the Internet, and on and on it goes. People sometimes resist the concept of this movement, holding tenaciously to the mediums they love too much to let go ("People will never stop reading books! Nothing can replace them!"), but this is really just an act of preemptive mourning - there simply is no real debate to be had on the subject.

The cultural repercussions of this are staggering, obviously, and better suited to more robust futurologists than myself (a good discussion can be found in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital - I think he might've actually invented the Internet). I've been thinking lately about one specific ramification: as more and more commodoties are downloaded directly from the cloud (the current pretentious mot-du-jour term for the Internet), there's obviously less need to sell them in stores. Toasters and blue jeans will obviously never be digitized, but the prevalence of online shopping still means that brick-and-mortar stores can no longer compete with the cloud for either price or selection. Going forward, the only hope that physical retail spaces possibly have for continued existence rests with their ability to provide a shopping experience markedly more enjoyable than sitting at home in front of a computer (or really, sitting anywhere with an iPhone). In the Future (ie 2011), the only physical commodity of any value will be enjoyable environments.

We can already see this fact previsioned by the success of Starbucks, a company that decided to break into the coffee business 2000 years late and somehow came out on top, thanks mostly to earth tones and Jack Johnson. In hip young towns like Tucson, every strip mall is packed with food franchises emulating this strategy, trying to provide food, sure, but also (and maybe more importantly) a pleasant place to be for fourty-five minutes. The only major retail outlet seemingly bucking this trend is Walmart, where pale fluorescent lights bathe uncountable mounds of indiscrimate crap in some infernal representation of capitalism's worst excesses - the whole experience makes me think of Dante and purgatory and how maybe I should quit my life and work an orphanage in Africa to attone for humanity's evils. But I think Walmart's days are numbered (though that number may admittedly be quite high) - just by sheer girth and ubiquity it can compete for now with the cloud for price and selection on many of the cheap, crappy goods that people wouldn't think to buy online. But it's also kind of evil, so I'd like to think that's working against it.

This trend goes much farther than just retail. As globalization makes local community less inherently necessary, traditional stalwarts like churches have found themselves with fewer congregants. I was at a meeting recently where the main presentation was on growth strategy from a pariticularly successful megachurch. The megapastor started by admitting that the goal of his church, to bring people into a closer relationship with God, was actually impossible from an organizational standpoint. You can't just do that to people, and it's impossible to measure the success of your efforts with that well-meaning but totally nebulous yardstick. His conclusion was that the only thing they could even hope to succeed at was providing an environment conducive to forming a closer relationship with God. That's it. Just make the space. And, apparently, it's working. They have many thousands of people attending every week in a time when most community church's count themselves lucky to break fifty. I mean, whatever, I wouldn't want to attend a mega church, but the point stands.

So where's this all headed? I'm not sure. It means that libraries can still exist, even when books don't; people will still need a pleasant place to go and read. Maybe they'll serve coffee, and maybe the large touch screens in each corner of the building will just as easily browse music and appliances as they will books (I'm picturing a kind of iTunes-style CoverFlow thing on a larger scale). So they'll still be there, but maybe you won't be able to tell them apart from a Barnes & Noble or Virgin Records (as if those will still be around).

Of course, this is all assuming that virtual reality doesn't take off in the near future. As far as future-technology goes, it's made surprisingly few leaps in the last few years, but I suppose it's also inevitable. If that happens, maybe we can reclaim all those unsightly strip malls for community gardens. That would be nice.