Here's Your Flying Car

"Finally, an answer to the perennial question," Jim F. writes with a mordant chuckle in an e-mail sending me on to The Register, where I read that

flying-car firm Moller International -- whose four-decade quest to produce an Everyman aerial ride has seen no aircraft delivered… has "created a full-featured flight simulator package for use by all who have been eager to operate the Skycar, the Company's unique 'roadable' aircraft."

Stop yer bellyachin' all you anti-futurological negative nellies! Are you blind! The flying car future is all around you, here and now. The futurological promise has been achieved, and right on schedule.

You say it's just a cartoon? What's the difference?

What did you think the futurologists meant by "The Future" in the first place? It's never been anything but a cartoon.

The key epistemological gesture of futurological discourse has never been predictive so much as the substitutive move of confusing materiality (living bodies, embodied minds, economy as commonwealth, knowledge as commonsense, culture as collaboration, history as social struggle) for cartoons (eugenicist optimality and avatars, AI, free market pie-chart pieties, reductive scientisms and logocentrism, consumer monoculture, techno-determinism and singularitarianism).

The article goes on to add that

Moller International has an accumulated deficits of $45,525,462 and a working capital deficit of $11,376,885 as of September 30, 2009…. Historically, funding was funded by certain shareholders, including, Dr Paul S Moller ("Dr Moller"), the majority shareholder, in the form of short-term notes payable. As of September 30, 2009, amounts outstanding to Dr. Moller total $3,170,979. In addition, Dr Moller has granted MI a deferral on the payment of rent for the office building. The total deferred rent, including interest owed to Dr Moller at September 30, 2009 amounted to $3,089,563. There is no assurance that MI will continue to receive funding from shareholders in the future or that funds from other sources will be sufficient to provide MI with the capital needed to continue as a going concern. It also appears that Dr Moller himself has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.