• by Jack Feuer , December 3, 2008

It's good to be a barbarian. That's what the future will call us, you know.

One hundred years from now, we'll be wired at birth and surfing the Web (we'll call it something else by then) with our eyeballs. After a century of multicultural mixing, we'll all look alike except for personal quirks made possible by future tech, like feathers or horns or metallic eyes.

To those people (we'll call ourselves something else by then), our life and times will seem frighteningly backward, dangerous and uncivilized. Bushlike, so to speak. That's the barbarian part.

Here's the good part. When change hits socially backward societies like ours, it produces an explosion of opportunities. That's what we got here, folks. An insanely cool moment in history. What a great time to live through. What a terrific time to do marketing.

I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if our 22nd-century descendants don't romanticize the hell out of the next couple of decades. You see, we're at a nexus point. You may think that change has come, but what we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years is nothing compared to what's just ahead of us.

Technologically, we're no longer infants. We're toddlers now. We've have taken our first wobbly steps. And culturally? This is America circa 2008, kids. There's nowhere else to go but up.

The signs are everywhere that the Apocalypse has not come, and isn't even expected anytime soon. My personal favorite: Ann Coulter had to have her big fucking mouth wired shut.

Hey, when the incoming president's top-level appointments are almost universally well-received because they're competent--not simply loyal and long-serving--there's something truly revolutionary going on. After enduring the last eight years, it's still almost an out-of-body experience to write that.

Tell me you don't look at African-Americans differently today than you did on Nov. 3. They look like the future, don't they? And we may still be a center-right country, but when center-right means nationalizing General Motors, as The Los Angeles Times' Dan Neil suggested yesterday, and it sounds like a smart, reasoned idea, you've either just eaten a mushroom or these here United States may just be growing up.

Look how quickly 3G smartphones are reaching critical mass. And navigation devices. We've just seen the advent (clumsily) of holographs on newscasts. An online local rag, Pasadena Now, just fired all its local reporters and outsourced its journalism to India. (Not kidding.)

What does this mean for marketers? It means mass-producing commercial messages filled with competent, multiethnic people. It means flooding every channel you can find or better yet, create--with advertising that celebrates alternative fuels and vehicles and speaks in complete sentences. Advertising that embraces a sincere, unsnarky sense of responsibility. (OK, that last bit may be a little too much to ask.)

The future is here, and it looks wicked good. I mean, Sarah Palin gave a speech in Georgia last week and nobody cared.

Now that's what I call civilized.