GLEN 21

The following interview appears on the album Tomorrow by Jeff Mills, 1999, track Nº5: Glen 21, Time: 10:50. It was conducted by Andrea Covington, London. I listened for the first time one afternoon that Bernardo Risquez bringed the album to my flat, back in 2006.

Glen: What life is going to be like in 5 years? More crowded for a start, a little bit more crowded, more polluted hmmm… but probably not too different.

Andrea: what about in 7 years?

G: jjjj… a little bit more crowded and polluted than in 5 years.

Interviewer: what about in 10?

G: aaah… I think in 10 years things are going starting to look…that starting little change.

A: so that will be 2010?

G: yeah things there will be different shapes, but I don’t think life is going to be too different in 10 years.

A:20?

G: 20 years I think things are going to be different in the way we use technology, in the way that… the way that we communicate with each other is going to be getting… is going to be changing more dramatically after 20 years.

A:And what about 5 years after that, so 25 years?

G: yeah I think technology is going to be pretty awesome by then, I think that we are going to be maybe communicating in a completely different way that hasn’t include or suffer… I think the thing…the main, yeah I think the main difference is going to be information, how information is passed between people, maybe, maybe we have developed some form of non verbal communication by then.

A: so if you look back 25 years earlier to now, do you think is a change that dramatically if that live would live again 25 years from now?

G: Ah! Or live more so. I think we live in an accelerating culture. The rate it changes it’s speeding up all the time. The differences between now and 25 years time is going to be far more dramatic than the difference between 25 years ago and now.

A: Do you think is apocalyptic, after 2000?

G: Naa… 2000 is just a number that we’ve decided on, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a nice round figure for a good party!

A: O.K. what about 35 years?

G: In 35 years?

A: 10 years on from the acceleration in 25.

G: I don’t know… I think… ah…, well it’s going to be rough, It’s going to be… ah, things maybe are going to earn to get quite scary by then, in 35 years… that’s long enough for the population to be much bigger than it is now.

A: Well now, what’s life in the world is going to be like in 50 years?

G: fffffffff!!!

A: In 2050.

G: In 2050...?

A: You will be 70… 70 something

G: I’m going to be old! I’m going to be… Yeah I’m going to be on my 70’s. Well I hope it’s going to be nice and peaceful but I don’t think it would be. I don’t know people are probably going to be listening to some pretty down slamming music by then, I just want to know what’s the kids are going to be listening when I’m 70, what a thought. If we listen to the music that our grandparents were listening to it seems so squared so… I just want to see what’s kids are going to be dancing to when I’m 70, I think that’s going to be fun. I don’ know it’s going to be… I have a feeling that it’s going to be faster… and I don’t know… I think… life is going to be less natural, I think we are going to move… we are going to move further and further away from the natural world, we’re going to be living in more an abstract way from nature, we’re going to be… we’re going to be probably eating less and less natural food, so eating more and more sort of engineered food, probably we’ll need to save space from growing stuff and you know, anything growing indoor hydroponics that sort of thing, no fields you know, lobby techno by to many buildings and things. And cars are going be fast!!! If we’re still allowed to drive cars they’re going to be fast in 70 years. If you look 70 years ago… cars were really slow!!! In 70 years time they’re going to be hauling, they’re going to be really moving. That’s going to be kind of interesting! I don’t know…

A: What about a hundred years?

G: In a hundred years?

A: Do you think the world is going to be recognizable to people now?

G: If it would be recognizable? I don’t think separates cities and separates towns are going to exist anymore, I think it just going to be a huge metropolis, or maybe in a hundred years we’ll start moving people out to space, you know? Maybe we’ll manage to colonize some other parts of the solar system by then. And some people will be able to move off Earth whether they want to or no, I don’t know, maybe there’ll be like… instead of having rich parts of town and poor parts of town, you know, like rich planets and poor planets, and there will be just the really rich people that can afford to live still on Earth or maybe the rich people want to get the hell off it since it’s going to be so polluted and fucked up and everything else, I don’t know, will be interesting. I think… yeah, I think a hundred years things are going to start happening pretty rapidly. I think, if the population keeps on growing that much, in a hundred years we going to have to seriously start using different fuels, we can’t carry on burning fossil fuels definitely, I mean it’ll all run out by then. I don’t know, maybe… the electricity will be used a lot more and we’ll come up with new ways of generating it, yeah… I think… much more things will be electric and much… instead of burning fossil fuels we’ll come up with new ways of generating electricity, and all will be electric run, transportation, entertainment, everything.

A: What’s entertainment is going to be like?

G: Totally, totally personal, totally personal, interactive, entertainment is getting more and more interactive, people are wanting to have more control of their entertainment all the time, and started out with just having more control over, over like the sound and more control over the picture and more different channels to watch whatever so I think also it’s going to invade, it’s going to take over the senses a lot more, it’ll be kind of direct plug-in, you know? Instead of just psyche and sound you’ll be able to actually plug-in emotions and feelings and it’ll be yeah… just like to get into the wire directly in, stick your head set on and…

A: That’s almost happening now so… in a hundred years…

G: Yeah! In a hundred years I think it’s going to be… I don’t know, I think it’s going to be fairly… you know… fairly common to just stick the head set on and escape, you know? Virtual reality will be… virtual reality isn’t virtual reality now, it’s just… I mean, it’s a nice idea but… you know… written by… written by… by… science fiction for years, it’s not really virtual reality, it’s just two little TV screen drop to your head…

A: laughs

G: …it will be virtual reality when you know, when smells and emotions will be electronically triggered in your brain, you know, expediently triggered… you can just plug in and sense what somebody else experienced you know, it should be able to record sensations and emotions through electrical current…

A: That’s a nice idea!

G: It could be, but you know, you don’t think you’ll just create this kind of… this kind of a… people is used to be living in this false world, you know, people get sort of plug-in and block out, it’s going to be the ultimate drug!

A: What about 500?

G: Oooh fff... who knows? WHO knows? I mean, if you look at 500 years ago, you take somebody from 500 years ago to now, they wouldn’t have a fucking clue of what’s going on… and things are going… in the last 500 years culture is been accelerating so you look into the next 500 years, it’s going to be accelerating so fast that who knows, I mean it’s so hard to make a prediction, I think people will be maybe communicating almost on a telepathic level, I think the main… you know… communication has to change and if… whether is assisted or not, whether people will be communicating telepathically with some sort of electronic boosting assistant, something that reads to your brain patterns and translate something into somebody else’s mind… but I don’t know, but if you… I don’t know… that’s quite feasible within 500 years and if that happened, if you get enough people wired up they going to get started to talk super consciousness, you know, you’ll have human beings acting as more of the sound of the past.

A: That’s a good thing or a bad thing?

G: Who knows?! 500 years who knows what’s happening? If we still alive in 500 years… Oh we hope that we got the sense to look after ourselves properly, you know… but is almost like… if communication increases as fast as I think it might… in 500 years we human beings we’ll almost come around God, we are going to come so intelligent, we could be able to directly link each individual human mind into one super computer, it’s like the ultimate neuro-network, forget the internet, that’s just plug-in your computer in, it’s like you can plug your own brain into the internet… what have you created? You’ve created an enormous human brain! You’ve created this super… super all powerful being, almost like being omnipotent across the planet Earth, it’s like Gaia or something, you know… it’s like a living creation, I don’t know… that’s… 500 years is… and also I think that you know… I think by then the whole world will be dramatically run out of all the mineral resources that we need to survive you know… I don’t see how we build a… after we recycle everything you know… we’ll dug up everything out of the Earth that we possibly can, so unless we sort of tapping into the multi-magnet the get the mineral element out of that I think we are going to be out in space, we’re going to be looking for… looking for some mining things in space and building things in space by mining and extracting the elements we need from space, there is no way you consider… I think definitely if things are going to be happening we are going to be colonising other planets, but we can’t… you can’t consider of ship… hmm… millions of tons of aluminium up into space, you’re going to have to mine it and produce it in space, and that’s going to be… everything is going to shift off the Earth… in 500 years.