An Urban Oasis from Modernity

Going to the future only to take a step back into the past.

Craving a curry from the future is inconvenient, especially when the key ingredient hasn't been invented yet. So, I dusted off the janky time machine—it's seen better days but haven't we all—and aimed for a local market near my house, just a few years ahead.

This open-air market neighborhood used to close down to cars for something quaint called Pedestrian Sundays. Good fun, if you like that sort of thing. But in this future version, they'd gone full technophobe.

I mean, they've really outdone themselves. Permanent tech-free zone. Data-blocking contraptions that looked like leftover props from a sci-fi B-movie. It's as if someone yelled, "No more internet!" and everyone just ran with it.

It started as a stunt, of course. Some protest against the digital-everything nightmare we call progress. But then it caught on in other cities. Must've been after NPC Twitch streamers became mainstream. That's right, folks, real people pretending to be digital as AI avatars become more like real people—what a time to be alive.

In this brave new world, there's no WiFi, no data, just good old-fashioned human interaction. Remember that? Me neither.

As for the curry, it was just as perplexingly delicious as I remembered. That future spice? You’ll just have to wait. But the real spice was witnessing a place where technology had been kicked to the curb, and people were... talking. Face to face.

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Do you want to make your own design fiction using the image above?
I created an easy-to-use Photoshop MOCKUP that you can download and use.