Cyberpunk vibes blends awkwardly to my eye — but perhaps unknowingly — with the aesthetics of cottagecore in this snapshot of someone sharing their latest PC build. It is a moment in a world where the sharp edge of high-tech merges with these textures of a more pastoral, craft-oriented, porcelain miniature vibe. This future is only ever slick, blue LED, neon-lit, hyper-digitalized reality in the CES show ‘future of..’ video. This is what we expect, but the future never looks like this. It is rather something more layered and nuanced — something lived-in. The cybernetic and the handcrafted coexist, embodying a tapestry of the extraordinary and the mundane. As the veneer of seamless perfect function and associated novelty of the new fades, we notice how the future becomes saturated with the sedimentary layers of human existence: values, rituals, practices, and habits built up over time. It is a world populated by collections of objects, relics of both the digital and the analog, artifacts that resonate with meaning and memory. The mundane seeps into the fabric of tomorrow, embedding itself in the rhythm of daily life. Technology, once the harbinger of radical change, becomes as ordinary as a cranky old cat, a sooty ashtray, an old armchair, a collection of porcelain miniatures and stack of dusty music CDs. In this everyday future, the lines are blurred between what is futuristic and what is essentially, irreducibly human.

It’s a bit of a bewildering and eclectic mix of the future and the past, the mundane and the extraordinary. It’s a bit of a head scratcher, but it’s also a bit of a delight. It’s a bit of a “what the heck is going on here?” and a bit of — well, this is a world lived-in, containing past and future dreams and stories.

I’ll leave it at that. The future becomes both quite ordinary in the end, containing these sedimentary layers of values, rituals, practices, habits, collections of stuff upon stuff.