Bruce LaBruce on Microsoft's “WASP technocracy” vision
Responding to Microsoft’s recent future concept video, LaBruce says:
I suppose you could argue that in the future all differences of race and class will be magically erased in favor of some sort of flavorless ethnic and political neutrality, but really, did Microsoft have to start the video by identifying us with the subjectivity of a privileged, white, English-speaking woman in, of all places, Johannesburg, a city where severe divisions of class and race are still entrenched despite the overturning of apartheid? After smiling at her vaguely ethnic chauffeur at the airport, our postfeminist avatar communicates through techno-telepathy with the decidedly black bellhop of her hotel. Apparently some things never change. The representation of race in general in the video is bafflingly backward thinking and unimaginative. Why not a future in which humans use technology to change the color of their skin at will, for example, or at least to overthrow the neo-colonialist regime that seems to extend unchallenged into the world of tomorrow? But no, our resolutely white heroine drifts into the hotel lobby like a doped pony, where other wealthy guests sit in the sterile chrome and silver environment like so much human taxidermy.
A virtual polar bear–now apparently an adorably extinct species thanks to global warming–asks her what she’s making for the bake sale. More charity, of course, which the elite class has plenty of time for now that their business interests are all managed so efficiently by the insidiously invisible technology on display.
The future is a bland, benign Minority Report in which actual minorities have been wholly subsumed by the WASP technocracy, rendered with a pale pastel blue color palette and bad lounge music. Thanks Microsoft.