The future at the next table

Four friends are sitting outside a café in Tunis as the evening cools, with mint tea and a plate of pastries between them, and each of them is holding a small miracle.

It is worth listing what is in those hands, because nobody at the table ever does.

Each one holds every photograph of their children since the day they were born. It can show them their grandmother's village from above, street by street. It can pay for the tea without a coin changing hands. It can put the face of a cousin in Montreal on the screen, live and free. It can answer almost any question about any year in history, read any sign in any alphabet, and tell them to the minute when the last bus home leaves.

A science fiction writer from the middle of the last century would have given a character this device and made the whole plot turn on it.

What is happening at the table is this. One friend is watching a forty second clip of a goat on a staircase for the third time. Two are deep in a heated thread with people they have never met about a referee's decision. The fourth is reading a quarrel between strangers about a celebrity's wedding.

None of this is a crime. Rest is allowed, and a goat on a staircase is funny.

But it is worth noticing the shape of it. We were handed the thing our grandparents imagined as the future, and what we mostly do with it is argue and watch nonsense.