Dear people of the future:

There will come a time when you will be able to write a message on a computer to someone else with a computer and the message will appear on the screen the exact moment you send it. This will replace the need for a postal service to a degree, as this new method will be quicker (once we do away with dial-up but don’t worry about that for now), cheaper, and a lot less hassle than walking to the post office for a stamp and posting it. I know what you’re thinking, computers take a month for a cassette to load so you can play a game, but they do improve. We will start using proper sheets of paper in printers too, so there will be no more of those rolls of computer paper you have at school for drawing on.

You will also no longer have a telephone as you know it, but will have something like a telephone that you can carry around. As you get older they will develop to such an extent that you will be able to take photos with it, listen to music, watch videos, and even be able to do that computer messaging thing we’ve already talked about. Oddly enough, we will stop talking on the telephone but will continue to use it to send messages, but soon nobody will remember the quaint concept of talking on a telephone. We will still have a couple of phone boxes dotted around, but these will only be used by drug dealers.

Money will become a rare sight when you’re older as your wages will be paid straight into your bank, and you will have a card that you can pay for things with. You won’t need to talk to anyone in the bank anymore as you use a machine to do everything. Music will be available to carry around on something smaller than a matchbox and will hold up to ten thousand songs so no more records and tapes. You know the library? No need for that soon, you’ll be able to have books magically appearing on a screen device so paper books will be extinct. You’ll be able to record television programmes without video tapes, and you’ll be able to pause live television, although that will never stop fucking with your head.

Authors will be able to sidestep traditional publishers and have their books available to read on those magic screen devices, a payment method will be set up so that you can pay on your computer and the other person will get the money on their computer. Now you no doubt want to know how the author gets paid in this magical space-age I’ve been describing.

Cheque! 

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