First: technology is not everything What would seem most surprising to a time traveller who could be transported by some cosmological chance from the beginning of the twentieth century into our time, a distance of 100 years? Certainly: the miracles of technology would be hard to deal with. To see a jumbo-jet rise gracefully into the evening sky, to experience the tactile sophistication of driving in a BMW, to watch a computer rapidly produce pictures, symbols and networks - that would no doubt considerably raise the pulse of our wanderer through time. But our time traveller would already be familiar with many of these artefacts as blue-prints or prototypes. Aircraft, mobile phones, escalators and even the television set would have analogies from a time when the waxwork panorama already anticipated the cinema, the telephone was widespread (if only for local calls) and the huge world fairs were presenting "the miracle of electricity". Let's imagine that our time traveller lands in the middle of Berlin on a gentle summer day. On the Kurfürstendamm the floats are being prepared for the "Christopher Street Parade". Gays in leather are standing around in large groups, smoking Marlboro Lights and wearing Lederhosen that are split open at the back. Cheerful lesbians, with pierced nipples, are kissing each other, while Japanese tourists take photos, giggling. What would deprive our transtemporal adventurer completely of his composure would be what he would probably call the "morals and manners" of our present day. The "immoral" way women dress and behave (and smoke!) in public. How titillating underwear is displayed on randy bodies on enormous posters. How children talk with their parents - indeed, the whole chattering, obscene language of nowadays, the flood of pictures and optical deconstruction - that would surely transport our poor time traveller into the most severe spiritual distress. Last century, future researchers particularly made technical elements their theme of continuity. To be honest, most of these visions have faded away, in spite of computers, mobile phones and jumbos. In her book Rocket Dreams, Marina Benjamin seems almost offended when she says: "Where are they, our space stations, our wonderful underwater stations, where we can spend the rest of our lives in utopian comfort with a cool martini? (.) So, where are they, the miracle cures for cancer, the space travel and the flying cars for everyone?"1 This is a book about the culture of the future. About the question of what the future feels like. About everyday things. Life. Death. It moves along the question of how complexity comes about in human systems and how it might march on. That doesn't mean that technology has no role to play. But technology is not seen here as the carrier wave but as a product of the human, an expression of ultimately social human wishes, illnesses and fantasies. Technology is the answer to a question that we sometimes forget. And its evolution by no means runs linearly into a determined, hyper-technological future but, like all living evolution in leaps, contradictions and digressions. Even technology has its own kinds of nostalgia, its retro and backward-leading paths. The proud bird of our childhood, the swan-white Concorde, now stands proud, but cannibalized, in our museums.