The Darkness Where the Future Should Be

Here is the problem: The future visions that are put out there into the world are either commonplace, boring, meaningless, (corporate) agenda-driven, uninspiring, or all of the above together.

The reason for that, in my opinion, is that our minds are stuck in old ideologies, old systems, and old narratives, which prevents us from thinking outside th

We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were

Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.

Old attitudes and ideas simply aren’t adequate to help us navigate what lies ahead. And pervasive gloom about the future risks being self-fulfilling.