So yesterday was Back to the Future Day, October 21st, the actual date Marty McFly lands in when he goes forward in Part II, and I told myself all week I wasn't going to write about it, because I could already tell every tech blog on the internet was going to run some version of "we still don't have hoverboards, but here's what we do have." I didn't want to be the fortieth person doing that post. So instead here's a smaller thing that actually made me laugh out loud at my desk.
I was pulling up directions to the coffee place around the corner (the one on 4th, not the Starbucks, the actual good one) and noticed Google Maps had added a hoverboard icon next to the usual driving, walking, and transit options. Just sitting there in the row of travel modes like it was a normal thing you could pick. I tapped it out of curiosity and it basically just gave me walking directions back, like the app itself was in on the joke and shrugging at me. Small thing. Took somebody on that team maybe an afternoon to build. But it's the kind of Easter egg that feels like it was made by an actual person who thought it'd be funny, not something that got run through six rounds of brand approval, and I have a soft spot for that. It was gone by this morning, near as I can tell, makes sense, one-day gag.
The other thing I can't stop thinking about is the Pepsi Perfect bottles. If you didn't see this: Pepsi made an actual real-world version of the bottle Marty drinks in the 2015 diner scene, sold in extremely limited runs through a few retailers, and by yesterday afternoon they were showing up on eBay for something like ten or fifteen times the original price. I saw a six-pack listed at $700. Seven hundred dollars for soda in a novelty bottle. I get collectibles, I really do, I own a shelf of stuff I probably shouldn't have bought, but there's something almost admirable about how fast the scalping machine spun up on this one. Somebody's bot was probably faster than any human clicking "add to cart," and within an hour it had turned into eBay arbitrage. I didn't try to get one, for what it's worth. I'm not paying rent-money prices for carbonated sugar water with a movie prop label on it, no matter how good the marketing team's timing was.
And that's really what got me about the whole day — not the hoverboards-don't-exist-yet angle, which, sure, fine, obviously, but how much of 2015's actual future turned out to be logistics and marketing rather than technology. The movie promised us flying cars and dehydrated pizza. What we actually got is a supply chain good enough that a novelty beverage company can spin up a limited nostalgia product, ship it to a handful of stores, and watch a resale market form around it within literally hours. That's the real 2015 tech story if you ask me. Not the hardware. The speed at which hype turns into a market.
Small aside because I have to say it somewhere: I also spent part of yesterday afternoon fighting with Slack notifications that would not stop buzzing my phone even after I'd muted the channel twice, which felt like a pretty fitting bit of 2015-future irony. We didn't get self-lacing shoes but we did get software that ignores your settings. Anyway.
I did rewatch the trilogy last night, first time in a couple years, and the thing that always gets me isn't the tech predictions, it's how confident the movie is that 2015 would look basically like 1985 except shinier. No smartphones anywhere in that future. Nobody's staring at a screen. Doc Brown builds a time machine out of a DeLorean but somehow nobody in 1989 imagined that the biggest change in daily life thirty years out would be a rectangle in everyone's pocket that never stops buzzing. Kind of a nice reminder that the big swings people make about "the future" almost always miss the actual boring thing that changes everything, and hit the flashy thing that never happens instead.
Hoverboards zero, phone notifications infinity. That's where we actually landed.