Charlie Jane Anders

There are no sewers.

There's something incredibly bizarre about the current system we have in the United States, where your waste gets flushed into a tunnel to be mixed with rainwater and often dumped into the ocean.

Not to mention toilet paper.

A bunch of techies led by Bill Gates are trying to reinvent the toilet right now, and it's possible that the toilet of the future could appear incredibly strange to someone living today.

So how does the history of the future, all of that trial and error, lead to a better way to go to the bathroom?

There are companies right now who are experimenting with a kind of cleaning wand that can substitute for toilet paper using compressed air or sanitizing sprays to clean you off, but what if those things looked more like flowers than technology?

What if your toilet could analyze your waste and let you know if your microbiome might need a little tune-up?

What if today's experiments with turning human waste into fuel leads to a smart battery that could help power your home?

But back to the city of the future.

How do people navigate the space?

If there's no streets, how do people even make sense of the geography?

I like to think of a place where there are spaces that are partially only in virtual reality that maybe you need special hardware to even discover.

Like, for one story, I came up with a thing called the Cloudscape interface, which I described as a Chrome spider.

that plugs into your head using temporal nodes.

And I got really carried away imagining the bars, restaurants, cafes that you could only find your way inside if you had the correct augmented reality hardware.

But again, second-order effects.

In a world shaped by augmented reality, what kind of new communities will we have?

What kind of new crimes that we haven't even thought of yet?

OK, let's say that you and I are standing next to each other, and you think that we're in a noisy sports bar, and I think we're in a highbrow salon with a string quartet talking about Baudrillard.

I can't possibly imagine what might go wrong in that scenario.