The beginning

So: welcome to the future.

Not my words, you understand, but that of esteemed chronicles like The New Yorker and CNN. And not the actual future, of course; that would be a rather bold claim. This isn’t a jetpack and meal-in-a-pill scenario. I’m still inelegantly typing these words out with two fingers, for instance, rather than “thinking” them onto the page via some special helmet. And I can’t, as yet, use a foreknowledge of sports results, stock movements and Michael J Fox movies to make so much money I wouldn’t need scratch out largely asinine think-pieces like this. So, in summation: not the future at all.
However, they’re referring to a figurative future, something far easier to justify to fact-checkers. A future centred on what you hold in your quivering hands, no less. The iPad, you see, is set to change the world. With 40 million sales forecast by the end of 2011, Apple’s tablet will, in no particular order, a) singlehandedly save print media, b) revolutionise book publishing, c) force a re-examination of news consumption and d) get you laid. Although in terms of d), I’d suggest that the kind of person who’ll let you violate them merely due to your brand of tablet computer might not be the bedroom firecracker you’d hoped for.
But the rest could well be true. As Project went on sale, reports emerged that Rupert Murdoch will soon launch an iPad-only newspaper called The Daily, after it came to him in a dream or something. Which, like all Murdoch products, shall doubtless enrich humankind with its impartial political analysis and rolling coverage of shit exploding. Also: hi-def nudity, fingers crossed. But the point stands: the irascible Aussie despot doesn’t throw his corked hat into the cyber ring until he’s sure of a market. Apart from the Times paywall, maybe. And MySpace. But, well, you know.

Of course, working on Project doesn’t feel like the future just yet. Everyone envisions the standard Minority Report future, swiping LED gloves industriously around a perspex screen while Supreme Court judges look on, smiling benignly. And everyone thinks this because Spielberg suggested it, and anyway it’s a lot better than his A.I.: Artificial Intelligence vision of the future, where, if memory serves, a robot Jude Law will try to bum you into madness for all eternity. Or possibly Haley Joel Osment, which these days is both legal and considerably worse. And nothing like producing Project, which as everyone else who has made an iPad magazine will testify, is like making a normal paper magazine, but about 1,000 times more fiddly.
Good God it’s fiddly. Really. That Toyko feature? Two weeks, on its own. Swear to God.
And yet the hardest bit, if you’ll permit me a self-indulgent whine, is just convincing people what it could mean. You see, as with DVD players, iPods or really unusual pornography, the general public take a boringly inordinate amount of time to catch up with us spry young early-adopters. And that’s been the case here. Annoyingly, several dozen people still believe Project is merely a paper magazine about the iPad. Even ad executives – at least a few – audibly gasped when told there wouldn’t be an accompanying paper version. And my own mother, if she’s any zeitgeist bellwether, could only manage the adjective “nice” while prodding uncomprehendingly at the screen. Although to be fair, she still thinks googling is like “mooning”, but “when you’re facing someone”. So adjust your outlook accordingly.
And yet she’s not the only one. Even the painfully cool hipsters I hang out with can barely raise more than a bewildered eyebrow. One friend is still – still – making jokes about how iPad sounds like an electronic sanitary towel. Really? Worse, a female friend, trying to be supportive, keeps repeating how cool my “Powerpoint demonstration” is. Honestly: oof. Although, to put that in context, she did used to think Packard Bell made pasta sauces. Christ knows where this came from. Turns out she was thinking of Taco Bell. But their foodstuffs are chiefly Tex-Mex, so what the hell? Incredible.

In addition, comparisons with paper magazines are pointless. No, you can’t tear out coupons. Certainly, price-wise, it’s not an efficient fly swat. Nor can you roll in up rakishly in your back pocket, at least not without some sort of industrial vice. Instead, you find yourself extolling pointless virtues (“Look – it’s also a photoframe! And see here: Wuthering Heights… in Comic Sans!” etc). Rather than the iPad’s chief raison d’etre: feeling fractionally more smug than anyone with a laptop. And an entire evolutionary rung above any antediluvian dinosaur with a “book”. Meaning you can sit in a coffee shop, full of self-satisfied vim as you swish adroitly at the screen, even if you’re actually only stuck on Angry Birds. Specifically level 9-10, which is proving curiously impossible.
And for that reason alone (not Angry Birds) we hope you’re enjoying the first issue of Project. At least, up until this blog post. Project, alongside other launches, is both a bold new chapter in media, and a blind pitch into a potentially humiliating void. Whether it changes the fortunes of the written word remains to be seen; built into any new launch these days is the largely optimistic hope that people still exist who like reading stuff, and don’t mouth the words as they’re doing so. Moreover we fully expect, nay hope, it’ll be ripped to tiny bleeding shreds, because only through criticism and a dash of mindless abuse can real progress be made. But with a bit of luck this, or at least this kind of thing, really could be the future. Hey: if nothing else, you really could get laid. Take the aforementioned Tokyo guide, for instance: we defy you to read it next to an attractive member of the opposite sex, and it not trigger conversation. Even if that conversation does begin: “Hey – is that the new Kindle?”
By the way: it’s worth pointing out I did buy my mother an iPad while in the States. Ironically, I hid it inside a magazine to get it through Customs. No word on what she thinks of Project yet, although she does like Solitaire. But mostly? That it’s also a photoframe.
Which is progress, by anyone’s standards.

Chris Bell

[Images: iStockphoto, Minority Report © 20th Century Fox 2002, Wuthering Heights © Warner Brothers 1938]