The Age of Futurelessness

Why can't we imagine anything good?

Not to be cringe, but I think we are in a crisis of imagination. And I don’t mean in a ‘the constant feedback loop of social media has atrophied our brains’ way. I mean that the handful of powerful people who design emerging technologies literally have no imagination. Their wilful refusal to imagine good futures for humanity has plunged our society into apathetic futurelessness.

We’re fighting for our lives here with bloated interest rates and absolutely vaporous public services while billionaires try and scan our eyeballs to authenticate humanhood or sell you a chatbot that talks to your aging boomer parents for you. These innovations are nothing; they are horrendous time-sinks that we all have to endure while tech bros play chicken with the earth’s expiry date. They do not match up with any real needs, and they represent a future no one asked for.

It’s like we’re stuck in a ‘don’t imagine; just innovate!’ hyper-reality. Innovation-speak is a verbal disease that has made hostages out of our minds, and politicians seem especially susceptible. My good friend

claddagh

just wrote about how innovation-speak has become the language of austerity, saying: “in reality, ‘innovation’ today is often a placeholder, a cover for inertia dressed up as change.” She goes on to say that local councils in the UK are asked to innovate by doing “more with less”. Meanwhile tech corporations are doubling down on untenable AI infrastructure and absurd consumer products — literally doing more with way too much.

Who is all this infrastructure for? Who the hell do tech CEOs think they’re talking about when they say that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music”? You have to have a cynically dark mind to throw up a billboard that says “STOP HIRING HUMANS”. You have to be the most piss-faced unrelatable generic NPC white male billionaire to feel proud of this new AI slop social media feed. It’s hard to understand why they are winning the narrative fight here, when the futures they are imagining for us are ones where we don’t get to have jobs, we don’t get to express ourselves creatively, and conversations with loved ones are mediated by a synthesised disembodied voice.

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Just recently Mark Zuckerberg announced that AI will replace the entire advertising industry because it can magically see into the brains of consumers and produce infinite ad campaigns. Ben Thompson, who interviewed him, seemed to egg him on the whole time like the guy pressing his face against the glass in the sicko meme. From Zuckerberg, these are just suggestions and ideas. There are no products here. It’s just an infinite torrent of vibes. He’s telling us a story about what’s possible with these wonderful new technologies. But, as Cory Doctorow pointed out, this story is not for us and it’s also not about anything new. It’s the same shit he’s been spinning for years about the progress of an invisible advertising machine, and the resulting perpetual financial returns. He has to say all of this stuff so that his investors keep believing in him; in some sense these imagined futures are thoroughly unappealing because they are only meant to inspire shareholders for just enough quarters to keep this dream alive. And the general public just get what’s given to them.

Governments are also stuck on the shit-future track, with OpenAI recently announcing ‘OpenAI for Countries’ — which again feels like less of a product, and more of an intention to secure themselves as the global hegemon in ‘democratic AI’, whatever that means. They want to partner with governments in a way that makes them the favourable choice as the main providers of AI infrastructure, positioning themselves as friendly, cooperative, and of no concern to regulators — while also insisting that they are a highly capable technology powerhouse who are the only ones who can safely shepherd us into the age of AI. In the announcement they say: “we believe that partnering closely with the US government is the best way to advance democratic AI” but also that they want to “provide a clear alternative to authoritarian versions of AI that would deploy it to consolidate power.” Which suggests to me that in order to buy the future they are selling, you also have to buy into their mangled understanding of the present: one where the US has not totally succumb to authoritarianism.

It’s hard to feel like you have any agency in a world where the next big idea is always just over the horizon, and the promised future that comes with it is even further away and can only be unlocked at the next subscription tier. A future where OpenAI provides “more efficient public services” and a pair of Ray-bans can dox me on the street doesn’t make me excited; it gives me anxiety. In fact I was just reading an interview with Jonathan White (author of *In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea)* in Real Review, and the interviewer said: “That promise — that in the long run everything will get better — has now been perverted. Fear of death has been replaced with fear of life: just 1 in 20 people over the age of 70 suffer from anxiety. Amongst those under 30, that figure is more than one third.”

The ‘fear of life’ line really got me. We have no idea what’s going to happen because we are stuck following the whims of impotent politicians and sad Silicon Valley men who are being twatted by their own midlife polycrisis. Why are they the arbiters of the future if they can’t imagine anything good? Is it up to us to imagine things now? I’m not smart enough to answer these questions please help.