Sure, but the ad isn’t “hey, this will probably happen someday,” they’re saying "We’re already working towards this stuff.’ Except they weren’t. They were not actually developing any of this stuff. When it got made, ATT had nothing to do with it, despite the fact that they said they were going to do it before any of the companies that did do it were even in business.
I guess I’m just wondering if they actually thought their model of “all products designed by ATT for ATT customers” would work or if they were just confabulating in order to sell service and inflate their stock.
2 Likes
Have you ever had your DNA profile, your finger print, your iris scan, your facial map, your voice signature, your blood type, AND your personal financial and identification information leaked onto the internet for anyone to access at the click of a few buttons? YOU WILL!
14 Likes
They ripped half that stuff off directly from the original Blade Runner…
9 Likes
Jenna Elfman?
Phonebooth?
6 Likes
A) Hey Cory… watch who you’re callin’ weird. 
B) The President’s Analyst
10 Likes
And Blade Runner got it all from 1920s (or earlier) science fiction. The concept of “video phone” pre-dates video.
9 Likes
I don’t know about you peeps but I use a pay phone with a teleconferencing screen from a train station daily. Prescient and eerie!
3 Likes
I’m pretty sure it is.
2 Likes
Blast from the past – both the commercials, and this take. I could see claiming technology was making us weirder 20 years ago, but now? The future has turned out to be relentlessly normcore. We’ve ended up with all the dystopia and none of the cyberpunk aesthetic.
6 Likes
Posted, now recanted.
What I loved about those ads is how AT&T didn’t see how pay phones would vanish.
6 Likes
Yes, BladeRunner predicted that we’d still have payphones in the future a whole ten years before AT&T predicted it.
6 Likes
Ahem…
11 Likes
Go back to 1988. With Apple’s vision video “Project 2000”
About the only thing that hasn’t happened is a foldable flexible screen
for a padtop scanner thing. Also the future was full of large hair and shoulder pads.
7 Likes
discreetly, not "discretely "
2 Likes
Isn’t it Betteridge’s Law that states something to the effect of: any correction of an error in an on-line media shall contain in itself at least one error?
or should that be affect? 
1 Like
but mostly those are the poors…
2 Likes
Good one. Well, at least Aeroflot is still around.
2 Likes
