I have seen this future on a thousand screens
Pink. Green, orange, purple, hard curves and soft shines. Spots of light in darkness. Streams of people moving in and out, pulsing like fluid vortices in an engine boiler, veering in clots and clumps as if pulled by a randomly changing magnetic field. Strange surfaces and angles. Mass transit moving like a steady breath of stops and starts. And all of this within a well that reaches several storeys below ground and several storeys above, to the sound of a hundred different musics, four hundred different voices.

I think it's the sound that struck me most. A boppy beat made of ten discordant muzaks and the sounds of chatter, a late night energy yet visually still it's a mechanical plastic dream. I looked at the people around us, the restaurants and shops and entertainment outlets. When you spend a lot of time in suburbia you forget that this is real. As real a place as the wilderness. It's a world of constant stimulus of sound and noise, of movement and lights. The window displays, the advertisements that move and sing and dance on their own, that talk to people's mobile phones as they pass. The streams of connectedness, of attention, that link all the disparate elements of this giant microcosm. Drawings of the future used to look like this.

Do you remember seeing visions of this when you were small? Movies, or novels, stories of a strange world? It's all here, all now. I have seen this future on a thousand screens, and it tastes just like they told me I thought it would.

When I visited the USA sixteen years ago I was struck by the degree they'd allowed advertising to take over their lives, to permeate their world. It was like a maze for the eye - you couldn't look upon anything simply. It was all full of noise, full of voices of colour demanding your attention now, dammit, now, because you needed to look. When I moved to Melbourne three years ago it struck me much the same. Learning to drive here took effort, because every surface was covered with demands, with adverts, with the things you Needed to See. Some highways even had flatscreens that played advertisements in full motion, five metres high and ten metres wide. The official highway signage was in an arms race for your eyes, bringing its own moving and flashing data at ever increasing brightness, resorting to more and more absorbingly stunning images to draw your attention back from the ads to the roads.

Tonight we were on foot, in a place designed only for people. Stimulus from all sides, warring with scent and sound and colour, hard and shiny surfaces to reflect and catch. Physical design to scream for attention, as the self-focused happy-people thronging the walks pretended to ignore it. Instead they pulled out their phones and photographed themselves texting the numbers on the wall, sending messages to unknown robots and in return receiving more free stuff for everyone's favourite consumer number one. In intangible form, a data stream of lights and colours that might as well be money if it isn't dreams.

I slipped out of the stream, and into the ladies room. Inside, a beautiful lady with glossy perfect hair and an immaculate uniform handed out boxes of multicoloured plastic utilities to every woman entering, giving each a genuinely stylish smile. Between guests she tidied - smoothing nylon flowers by the mirrors, straightening a knocked photograph beside the fur-covered rest chair on soft purple carpet. Creating the glamour, the beautiful illusion. She adjusted bottles of perfume and body spray on the counters, spraying some into the air to extend the experience to all senses. And it was an experience she was selling, for free, in little boxes of coloured plastic and that bright white smile. It extended right into the cubicles where the advertising of her employers faced you down, forcing into your eyes as you sat unable to look away. Magnetic fairy floss for the missing mind, so you'd know what it was you wanted to taste.

I saw this future on a thousand screens, and it tastes just like they told me I thought it would. But I never dreamed it so close.