SMART HOMES FOR BLOGGERS: While we kick politics around every day here, my primary metier (hey, if Nicholson can use it in Chinatown, I can too...) is writing about technology, including home automation and home theater. My review of one of my favorite home automation books, and some suggested additional reading, is now up on on Blogcritics.

UPDATE: In a nice bit of syncronicity, James Lileks' latest Bleat--inspired by a visit to a renovated 1970s shopping mall-- also looks at technology and the future (as well as all the possible futures of the past):

The Mission style was the vanguard of its day, as was the International Style, as was the Mall design of the 70s; they were all a taste of things to come presented for our approval.

But now we don’t know what the future is supposed to look like.

Ever seen the front of those machines they use to bore subway tunnels? Concentric rings of sharp teeth gobbling and moving, gobbling and moving. That’s the culture we live in now - it consumes today as it bores towards tomorrow, and it’s always fixed on the next six inches it needs to eat. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems as if we stopped looking ten, twenty years ahead, stopped conjuring up these worlds in which everything looked new and improved. If that’s so: why?

Perhaps it’s because the present makes those old visions of the future look infantile and silly. We’re not wearing one-piece jumpsuits and taking meals from a pill-dispensing machines, or flying off to work on jetpacks. We have the stuff that counts. We have computers and communicators; we have a global information network, a space station, robot war machines, cybernetic implants. And we still wear jeans and eat hamburgers, and Elvis had a number one song in Airstrip One last year.

The very idea of the future is undergoing a renovation - it’s not a city on the other side of a wall. The best lesson may be this: there is no wall. In the end the very idea of “The Future” may turn out to be a 20th century conceit, the reason the globe churned itself up fighting one rancid conception of utopia after the other. The future is back to being what it always was: an accumulation of tomorrows, not a wholesale refutation of today.

Now we’re fighting the ultimate futurists: men who concept of the future denies the idea of progress. Their future is a snake biting its tail. Our future: sitting in an early 20th century chair in a mid-century mall connecting to the wireless network with your laptop to make revisions on a project due next summer. It’s not necessarily an inspiring vision; it does not seek to remake mankind and perfect its impurities. It does not promise heaven on earth. But this only means that tens of millions won’t be sacrificed in a lunatic attempt to bring it about.