[Blog] What is the hell is “The Rad Future”?

As far as the phrase itself goes, it came from a friend, the two of us being children of the 90's, and wanting a tagline that at bare minimum sounded more positive than ‘Bad Future’ which sounded very, very cool but words have energy.

Beyond that, I’m taking this question as clearance to navel-gaze.

I have been a fan of cyberpunk and cyberpunk-adjacent media for most of my life.  While the worlds in the stories like Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, and, of course, the eponymous Cyberpunk are sometimes a little horrifying, I’ve always been entranced by the common threads of humanity in the characters we see in these settings. 

These days with personal and societal hurricanes blowing us in any direction at a given moment, it can be difficult to know much of anything. For many of us, a lot of the time the idea of the future can be suffocating. We see our world today and conjecture about what tomorrow is going to bring us. Headlines and group chats and 24-hour news cycles and doom scrolling.

It’s so easy to become fatigued with all that needs doing and never seems to get done. I do my best to take everything one day at a time, with varying results. But there is something about the future that makes me consider things more radically. And I mean that in the textbook way:  relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something.

What is the nature of the time yet to come?  Let’s translate this from pretentious philosophical phrasing:  what the fuck am I even doing?

And the answer I have right now is that I make things.

I don’t say that in a valorizing way, I have always wanted to create things and see the response to them. I work in game development, I stream and try to make a space where people can relax, laugh, and have a space that is separate from all the things that may be bothering them.  I also make stuff and do these things because it helps me process - I act, draw, write, crochet, knit, and a handful of other artistic things.

So if it helps, “The Rad Future”  is the place where we find the answer to the question “What am I doing?”

I hope that you’ll join me in the radical future.