The Future Sucks

We used to dream of flying cars, why did we stop?

“The Prologue and the Promise.” Mural by Robert McCall

When I was young - an amount of years ago that you shouldn’t worry yourself about - people were obsessed with the future. Star Trek was still on TV, Back to the Future was a cultural touchpoint. People loved to imagine a futuristic utopia right around the corner. Someday, soon, we’d have flying cars, robot butlers, hoverboards. We would be able to retire young because our labor was done by androids. The possibilities seemed endless. The internet was still a fairly new phenomenon and was fully open source — long before techno robber-barons found a way to commoditize it, steal it, squat on it; long before the attention economy made its way into every facet of our lives.

Over the last two decades this shifted. Not since the development of the smart phone has any technological advancement truly delivered on its promises. The internet itself began to trend towards an increase in consolidation under just a handful of corporations, and as those companies vied for market share, the products got worse.

Every new invention, “killer app”, or technology that came out, has come with it a weight of the ways it will be used by the worst elements of capital to suppress and repress the people or rob them blind. Instead of Rosie the Robomaid, they gave us Daleks to “combat fair evasion” on the subway. Instead of hoverboards, we have “murder robots” on police forces, robot dogs used to spy on citizens, and “GPS guns” to track and trace drivers. Instead of apps that make your life easier, they steal your data and send it to police departments to prosecute and convict women who get abortions. Instead of sharing the abundance, we got the Blockchain, which extracts obscene amounts of energy from the earth just to launder invisible “money” from the bottom to the top. In the desperation to create the next big thing, tech has created a wasteland full of algorithms that make the world worse.

We’ve entered an era of Silicon Valley business models that revolve around taking services that used to be good enough - like taxis - and put those unionized workers out of business in favor of a gig economy that is less safe, less reliable, and more expensive while also being more perilous for the worker. The commons is now full of squatters — useless middle men whose only raison d’être is to further immiserate the working class while degrading the quality of things that we already had by being the self-appointed toll collector between you and what you need.

Take GuitarTabs.com - a website based off of OLGA (Online Guitar Archive), that was once a widely used source of user-submitted guitar tabs. It became, almost overnight, a virtually unusable app that only sort-of functions if you pay a fee — not to the contributors who actually provided the labor of course, but to some faceless tech bro who purchased the database. While this is a benign example, this model has been applied to virtually every single thing you buy or use. “Software as a service” has become the norm. You don’t purchase Photoshop, you rent it. Even your car has a subscription fee now. While the right proclaims that communism means “You will own nothing, and you will be happy”, it applies much better as the unofficial slogan of the era of technofeudalism.

Enter the “AI revolution” which uses large language models trained on everything from Reddit posts to famous art, to churn out hideous slop at alarming rates while overwhelming power grids and hastening climate destruction. The International Energy Agency (IEA) said that in 2022 cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence accounted for 2% of global energy demand and is on track to use even more. Despite the fact that AI has only a few narrow use cases where it is truly helpful, Silicon Valley has been mass marketing Artificial Intelligence integration in every single product it creates, even if it degrades the good itself. Google search now features an “AI overview” that is so often wrong that it has even encouraged people to eat glue and rocks. AI image production is used primarily by engagement farming bot accounts on Facebook to create disturbing, uncanny pictures whose sole purpose is to generate interactions from confused seniors. ChatGPT is used so frequently by students that it’s affecting their ability to write. AI deep fakes can now reskin people’s faces in most videos — implicating innocent people in things they never did. Despite the seemingly obvious pitfalls of this “innovation”, it is being pushed on us at all costs.

AI slop

Under capitalism, every new technological development has become another way repress, suppress, surveil, and skim from the working class. In the quest for infinite growth in a finite world, Silicon Valley has to churn out something every so often that promises to change the game. But because the motive is profit for just a few, its virtually guaranteed that every “next big thing” is the working class’s next big headache.

It’s no wonder we’ve stopped dreaming, the future is a nightmare.

Disconnection from the past and a hopelessness for the future is the background music to the current era. Cultural and political malaise is widespread, to the point where “deaths of despair” are skyrocketing. A rapidly warming planet ruled by people who see profit as the only imperative, that is crushing billions between its global political and economic systems, can lead many if not most to feel like the good old days are never returning.

The ruling class, in its quest to control and subdue the populace, has integrated next generation tech into policing, the war machine, and now even hiring and firing decisions. So much for the old IBM maxim “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.” While the majority of Congress is so old that they cannot open a PDF file, they are doubling down on catastrophic technology they don’t understand with billions in tax-payer dollars to Silicon Valley charlatans to develop profit-negative vaporware that still, somehow, makes these guys even richer.

Inherent in the dawn of the dead internet is a sense of loss of the world we could’ve had instead of this one. While these algorithms are trying replace us as workers, they are also trying to replace us as musicians, artists, and writers. The morbid hands of capital seem to have a stranglehold on everything that makes it worthwhile to be alive. When the promises for a liberated future are replaced by the promises of predictive policing, facial recognition, and smart drones, it can feel like there’s nowhere to run that you won’t be at the mercy of the digital panopticon.

The cure for this sense of hopelessness and imprisonment is to lean into a bit of utopian thinking and dare to imagine something entirely different. We must start dreaming of the future again, engaging with it, to instill a sense within ourselves and others that this better world is still possible, despite it all. We need to show people what technology could be without the profit motive; sharing the benefits of saving labor hours, automating things that humans no longer need to do. We can socialize the benefits of technology so it can be the force for good it was sold to us as, but we can’t do that as long as someone stands to profit from our misery.

We need only to look at the country that our leaders are most threatened by for examples of a future that can inspire and delight. Between the development of MagLev trains that can give air travel a run for its money, to the innovations towards fusion energy that could liberate the world from the need for fossil fuels, to China’s DeepSeek AI, a new open-source LLM that that has crushed the value proposition of OpenAI in just days, China is showing the world a futurism that delivers. A futurism that is inclusive of the proletariat rather than exclusive to the technofeudalist overlords that have created a fake economy, a fake jobs market, and fake demand for fake products that only serve to enrich the few. Instead of the delivering gains to a handful of billionaires while the lives of the working class trend towards further precarity, China has given us a glimpse of the possible when mankind’s creations are shared.

It simply isn’t enough to engage with social and economic problems of the working class, we also need to see cultural production as a worthy field in which to play. While we must be scientific in our prescriptions, we shouldn’t be afraid to be dreamers too. We need to be storytellers, painting a picture for the masses of a world without technological limits. We need to create media and art that allows people to visualize our aspirations for the future. We need to name the swindlers that stole tomorrow from us and show the working class how to reclaim it. Challenging the dominant narrative of the possible can be a powerful balm against a broken mode of production that has rendered us hopeless. We need to take back the optimism that the dream thieves have snatched from our hands. By marrying a program for working class liberation with a boldness of imagination, we can reignite the collective belief in a future worth fighting for—one where the working class not only survives but thrives, seizing the dreams that were always rightfully theirs.