Yes Future: Cyberpunk and Monarchy

This much is certain as we head into tomorrow’s drone debate (Mon. 8pm at Muchmore’s in Williamsburg): there’s no stoppin’ technology. 

A site linked on Drudge yesterday featured an article with this great headline: “Pet Parrot Uses Beak to Drive Around in His Robot” (it’s true: watch him drive! hee hee!).

But Drudge itself, the official barometer of reality, had several headlines simultaneously yesterday seemingly designed to confirm that we now live in the cyberpunk future (not to mention a picture of Justin Bieber wearing a gas mask), including:

•Seattle Bar Becomes 1st to Ban GOOGLE Glass...

•STOCK MARKET PLAN TO TRADE WITHOUT HUMANS

•SPACEX Founder: ‘I’d like to die on Mars’...

•Cubans evade censorship by ‘exchanging computer memory sticks’

That last one will confuse some aged leftists who didn’t know there was an authoritarian government in Cuba, but it’s a time for bridge-building and new alliances, so let’s not dwell on that. 

Nor on the possible confusion among some conservatives over another of the linked articles about the Queen of England declaring that the monarchy is “implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted  in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds [taken to mean sexual orientation].”

But more interesting than that familiar boilerplate, which now sounds almost as ancient and calcified as any church incantation, is her reported support for changing the monarchy’s rules of succession so that older females come before younger males – and note that it’s green-lefty-anti-materialist Charles who’s reportedly against the idea. 

If it were up to me, they’d just abolish the monarchy and democracy at the same time and no one would have to worry about what the Queen thinks, but in the meantime: if Kate and William have a girl, I suggest everyone celebrate her hypothetical ascension by buying a copy of Bryan Talbot’s fantastic monarchist/anarchist graphic novel Heart of Empire: The Legacy of Luther Arkwright.  It's sort of like Game of Thrones except with a hot psychic Princess Victoria. 

The rules of succession in the U.S., of course, will be explained in a future Rand Paul filibuster speech and episodes of the American version of House of Cards.