Technology. Constantly updating, an incessant barrage, ping pongs between utopian and dystopian. The enthralling flood of information. Promises. People want to believe. They desperately want to hear about something POSITIVE. They want to be told there is PROGRESS being made. Tech fills that need. Tech makes those promises.

ART, on the other hand, does not. ART is a mirror, and when the subject is deformed, the image isn’t pretty. It challenges you to think, reflect upon yourself and the world.

Who in the hell wants to do that? Leave reflection to the old, and all their fretting and gossip. We must ACT. BOLDLY. And through sheer cunning, skill and luck, we will WIN. Win what? Whatever’s at stake, that’s what.

FALSE FUTURE: What is the FUTURE when the FUTURE is NOW?

Well, by logic your definition of FUTURE must be FALSE. Your FUTURE is antiquated. This might seem nonsensical. But the FUTURE is an idea. We only make it real when we look back. If we think about the past, the FUTURE is the present day, and thus inherently FALSE.

But how else would we praise ourselves? Look at how far we’ve come! Look at what we can do! But this is not the FUTURE. This is the plain old, everyday, NOW. Blah! Unless you're dead, we’ve all got NOW. Everyone and their mother has NOW. I want the FUTURE, damnit!

Technology sells us this FALSE FUTURE, the mundane NOW dressed up as TOMORROW. Here are some examples in the year 2025:

- Large Language Models write your essay, email or research paper! They can act as a casual, non-judgemental confidant and therapist, or a friend or love interest. Oh, and sometimes they lie, you know, just to placate you. You’re pretty demanding asking all of these questions, so you kind of deserve it, don’t you think? No, they don’t tell you when they’re lying, that might upset you.

- Delivery tech will bring you your food or anything else! (for a fee)

- Can’t pay? No worries! You can get a small loan for that cheeseburger, at the super low interest rate of 34%!

- But now that you’ve got some time, hop on a sports gambling site and win win win! All with free promotional credits! But don’t win too much or you’ll get banned. Sorry, bud.

- Or make a few quick stock trades. You could pay off the cheeseburger by pumping your new crypto coin! Or how about shorting the burger company stock (it was pretty mid anyway, and the fries were soggy).

- Cars are driving themselves! In certain areas. Under close supervision. Sometimes people burn them. Sometimes they kill people. Cool.

- Humanoid robots exist! They're kind of useless right now, but they are sick as hell. Watch ’em run. Give ‘em a gun!


In the context of all of this, ART feels old and stuffy. But it’s always been old. Because ART is WISDOM. And WISDOM is only useful when you reflect.

ART seems stuffy because it feels shut-in, unaware of all the damn PROGRESS we’re making out here. How could you possibly care about a painting? Generative AI diffusion models can shit 30 of them out in under 12 seconds. Look at them! Not too close! What's wrong? Okay that's enough looking. Geez, everyones a critic now? Here's 30 more. Look, this ones got a kitty cat! What do you mean it's weird? Okay here's 30 more. Stop scrolling so fast! What do you mean SLOP?!

If you do not reflect, and only plow ahead, riding a wave of tech and hype until it crashes into calamity, then up again and down again, then you do not need WISDOM, ART, or any CULTURE for that matter. Everything is being created and destroyed at your feet, in a never ending cycle of BOOM AND BUST as you drown in the SLOP.

Masculinity. I’ve heard people fret that men have it hard these days. But this FALSE FUTURE is a YOUNG MAN’S DREAM WORLD. A tech playground of winners and losers. Where you can test your skill (in anonymous online interactions)! Gamble on everything. An amusement park where you can actually die! Hahahaha! Not really, it's actually really safe. Like really really really safe. Can’t win? Cheat, you idiot.

Colloquially, formed sheet metal (particularly 18 ga mild steel) is the language of the automobile body, a fixture of classic Americana. In custom car culture, shaping panels with a hammer, a stump, and wheel is a long standing tradition. This is how obsessives and eccentric madmen craft their rolling masterpieces. Legends of American counter-culture, they exist as the wild cousin to large-scale, assembly-line consumer product manufacturing.

Yet, to the unacquainted, set the two side by side in a field and both would simply be described as “cars”.

Growing up, I obsessed over cars of all kinds, and dreamt of one day shaping them. I drew them over and over and over, until one day I simply got bored, and consequently gave up that adolescent dream. Why?

Through much reflection since, I've zeroed in on the culprit: literature. Academia and books, especially the modern novel, cast a derisive shadow on my quaint automobile obsession. Feeling embarrassed, I eschewed it completely and strived for more meaningful subject matter. But of course, like many formative endeavors of youth, my newfound disdain was a bit wrongheaded, not to mention pretentious.

Cars cars cars. Whether a hotrod, a commuter, or self-driving, they’re all cars. One critique of modern car design stuck with me as particularly insightful. They lamented that these once beloved objects of desire were now so bland that they had become nothing more than appliances, like a dishwasher. But here’s the thing, they’ve always been appliances. No amount of artistry and style can separate a car from its operative nature. Usefulness is part of the charm, is it not? But it also serves as a hard limit on the object's potential as an art object.

But, what if the powerful, expressive craft of shaping metal was unshackled from the motorized vehicle, free from the demands of fenders and passenger compartments?