So, I keep getting spammed with these annoying starlink commercials where it's like some old guy talking about "the future" and how "it's hard to predict the future, but I'm sure it's gonna be fantastic" or something like that.
My knee jerk reaction to the commercial is "F U Elon Musk"...but...honestly, it's kind of a frustrating realization to realize that I'm no longer the optimist I used to be about "the future." I was a more OG technofuturist. I've ALWAYS liked the future, and the idea of new technology, like pocketable computers (smartphones), and flying cars, and robots that do all of the work for us, but it seems like unless you're some ###hole tech CEO, the masses have lost their enthusiasm for the future, and so have I in a way.
I mean, this is kind of an expansion of what we were talking about the other day about how college grads are booing tech CEOs going on about how AI is changing everything. I should LOVE AI and LOVE the future. But I also can't blame people for being pissed at this tech for taking their jobs. And it pains me to actually sympathize with literal luddites, but here's the thing. All this "future" stuff is all well and good, but a lot of the time, it's fundamentally incompatible with our existing social institutions. Capitalism is a system based on scarcity. it's based on the perpetuation of scarcity. It's based on manipulating peoples' wants and needs to pressure them to work to produce more stuff, while simultaneously monetizing the crap out of things. And I think that's what kills "futurism" for a lot of us. Capitalism just ruins everything.
Now, I'm gonna preface this again by saying, I'm NOT a full on leftist. Capitalism is the best system we have at this current stage of our development, and it will need to be necessary well into the future. Even with these futuristic sci fi aesthetics, we're probably gonna need to rely on some level of capitalism for that stuff to work. After all, it is capitalism that spurs technological development. yes, the state can help direct resources, but between a capitalist economy where these ###hole CEOs innovate to make a profit and a state run economy where state bureaucrats have to be the ones to make things happen and often don't, the decentralized structure of capitalism is gonna be better. Obviously we should have some mix of both, and I am for a mix of both, but yeah. Capitalism is necessary. You do socialism and society seems stuck in a perpetual time warp of the era that the socialism was implemented in, which is why most socialist countries (minus modern day china, itself a hybrid economy) end up looking like they're perpetually stuck in the 1950s. Because guess when many of them implemented socialism? Exactly.
But at the same time, capitalism, especially the more purist forms of capitalism we've trended toward since the mid 20th century, well...it seems like no matter how technologically advance things become, they still suck. We talk about robots taking the jobs, but we don't ask "well how will we take care of people when robots take the jobs?" We just talk about "creating new jobs", which itself is dystopian, and output the burden on individuals to sink or swim. Meanwhile systemically, we have a "war on normal people" while main streets are turning into ghost towns, major metropolises do look futuristic but then rent is insane amounts and it's difficult to get anywhere because high population density, car centric infrastructure, and jobism aren't really compatible with each other. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Smartphones give us access to unlimited amounts of information, but then much of it is paywalled, and those phones become "leashes" for our employers to get ahold of us at any time. Despite all the labor saving devices, our lives are as fast and busy as ever and it's stressing us out. We can't afford things. When we can, they break on us because of planned obsolescence, yeah, we literally make stuff designed to break or go obsolete to keep people on a never ending cycle of consumption. Tech CEOs start going on about "the future" but it's never something where we're like "WOW WE WANT THAT" but rather its forced on us. AI has some uses, but it's not THAT amazing of a technology, and yet CEOs talk about "the future" where they sell "intelligence" to us on tap. We build datacenters that spike our electricity costs and suck up our water and create massive levels of pollution for this tech, which many of us dont want, and we're always told we're gonna be "left behind" if we dont embrace it. And while being "left behind" sounds like a blessing given the modern context, because they control the infrastructure and the institutions we depend on, we end up being forced to embrace it or being "left behind" literally means using old deprecated tech that doesnt work any more and not being able to do our jobs and getting fired.
On the energy thing. We should embrace green energy. We should want "free energy", but the wealthy dont want that. They want us on oil and gas because it's energy they can control us with. If they cant charge us for it, then it's a bad idea, capitalism is designed to create constant dependence on the system, it's not freedom like it's sold as, it's a cycle of dependence sold to us AS freedom.
Btw...that's the core problem. Capitalism can't become too efficient at meeting peoples' needs, or it might obsolete itself. This cycle of dependence was created intentionally. It was created a hundred years ago, ironically by FDR, who I normally see as a hero. But in this case, he was a villain. The wealthy and powerful feared a society in which people didn't have to work, and had no desire to consume. They feared capitalism would automate itself out of existence. So instead they created consumerism to keep us on a cycle of work and consumption. ANd then as all that new deal stuff was rolled back half a century later, we went back to the gilded age more or less. We're in a new gilded age. And that's the problem, and this system was designed to enslave us.
And in this system, what are we getting from "the future?" We're getting mass surveillance as palantir decides to spy on us en masse and create massive blackmail databases on us. We're getting robot dogs that kill people. We're getting the president of the united states declaring people with "anti capitalist" beliefs as potential terrorists and putting us on watch lists. Technology is becoming dystopian, rather than utopian.
Rather than living in like star trek, or the jetsons, or futurama, we're getting something more like say, total recall, where the martian government kept people paying for air to keep them in a state of constant desperation to work for them. It didnt matter if there was tech that would auto terraform the planet into an earth like state, the control and desperation that scarcity created was the point. And they'd kill anyone who actually tried to end their control over people. And that's kinda where our society is. We invade foreign countries, force capitalism and dependence on them, bomb them if they disagree with us, and now we're trying to mass surveil people. Given trump's alliance with big tech, we're heading toward like a form of techno fascism or techno feudalism, than anything star trek like. We're heading toward a future like cyberpunk 2077 where people are in a constant state of poverty and desperation while corporations control everything. Basically, we're not going toward the good futures, we're going toward the bad futures.
Look, i love the aesthetics of futurism and the whole idea of the future being all sci fi technology that makes our lives better, but I'm kind of realizing this is full on incompatible with our social systems. It doesn't matter how great the future is on paper, as long as we dont deal with our underlying social institutions, it's gonna suck, and in some cases, this new tech might make our lives worse. Robots that do all the work dont matter if now we have to figure out how millions of people get paid, because our social institutions are designed around work. And btw, I do have answers on that, at least in the transition, but will we implement them? Lol nope. Because the rich people control everything and they dont wanna give up anything to the peasants. So they're destroying the fabric of society, won't allow the proper changes to make lives better for the masses, and stuff gets worse.
And did I forget to mention how dystopian everything is and how we're on a constant cycle of paying for things that are supposed to make our lives better, but in reality just make things harder and more complicated, and how we're ruining the environment, and how we're creating tools of mass surveillance and oppression?
Yeah...
Like, again, I wanna believe in "the future", but until we start fixing our social institutions, we're going toward the more dystopian science fiction worlds, not the actual good ones.
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