And how we lost it.

“The old world is dying as a new one struggles to be born.”

We have no concept of the future. Not one worth living in, anyways. Our popular fiction is dominated by apocalyptic realism. Every year brings with it a dozen zombie movies, a handful of insightful dystopias, and a veritable array of world-ending disaster films.

There are no utopian dramas on Netflix’s front page. Even optimistic stories like Disney’s Tomorrowland set themselves up as the rebirth of a better world rather than the progression of the world that already exists.

From where we stand in 2020, it would seem that the only future we can imagine is doomsday.

An interesting essay could be written about why apocalyptic media is so popular. With climate change, constant threats of nuclear war, and the slow collapse of American geopolitical hegemony, it isn’t difficult to see why it’s easier to imagine the apocalypse than it is to imagine a better future. What is more interesting to me, however, is why 21st century futurism feels so hollow — so vapid.

Utopian novels like Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward were once so popular and influential that they inspired mass movements with their projections of humanity’s future. Today, this seems like an impossibility. Why?

I submit that the answer lies in late capitalism’s obsession with technology, and crucially, its refusal to imagine structural change. In staking our hopes for humanity on the inventions of Elon Musk rather than in a fundamental reshaping of civilization, we have made the idea of a better future so abstract, and placed its creation so far beyond the control of regular people, that it must necessarily feel fanciful and unlikely. And if a “good” future refuses to offer socio-economic change, those being crushed by the weight of the current system have no choice but to find escapism in a “bad” one. We’re left with no choice but to prefer apocalypse to human progress.