I found a page of Ballard quotes about the future last night and basically every single one is bang on. It's horrible.
Some people have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future. As we move towards a more and more psychotic landscape, the psychotic traits are signs of a kind of Darwinian adaptation. [BBC Radio, 1998]
Our governments are preparing us for a future without work, and that includes the petty criminals . . . The psychopath, with his inward imagination, will thrive. He is already doing so. [GQ, 1996]
Nobody is interested in the future at all. I think the future has been annexed into the present. Occasionally a futuristic image is trotted out, ransacked like an image of the past and absorbed into the ongoing continuum that represents present-day life. [C21, 1991]
One of the reasons we’ve turned our backs against the future at present is that we unconsciously sense that the logics that will dictate our lives in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years will be completely unlike those which rule our lives today and have ruled our lives in the past. We may move into a very indeterminate, seemingly dangerous and chaotic era where all the old certainties and the social cement that held society together will have gone. [C21, 1991]
The Arab world, the Moslem world, may well take the place of the Communist world as the great bogeyman of the future. [JGB News, 1993]
People realize that they’re living in a totally valueless world—that morality is coming to an end, in the sense that the moral institutions that have underpinned society and given it some sort of fleeting purpose are being dismantled. [21C, 1997]
There were times in its history when the United States came close to suggesting what a utopian project might be, but the less appealing sides to American life now seem to be in the ascendant—there’s a self-infantilism strain that gives America the look of Peter Pan’s Never-never land. However, the future may well be a marriage between Microsoft and the Disney Company—an infantilized entertainment culture imposed on us by the most advanced communications technology. [intv. Hans Obrist, 2003]