THE ANTI-FUTURE, OR, CIVILIZATION'S NEXT DECADE

WHERE WE ARE, AND WHERE WE'RE GOING

You can sense it around you. In the wrenching feeling in your gut when you look at the headlines. Things are going wrong. For us. For this world of ours. For our civilization.

We’re now entering a period that I’ve come to call the Anti-Future. Let me try to summarize it for you.

The Anti-Future means what it sounds like, in a way. We are entering a period now of regress, where the wheel of time will unwind. It already is, by decades every year, in some places, like America. As a civilization, we are now at at standstill, and are moving backwards with incredible, implosive speed and violence.

All the follies, stupidities, and mistakes of the past are now being repeated, only all at once. And together, they add up to an era in history that isn’t a future anymore, but the smoking ruins of one, one in scarred by the craters of what could have been.

Anti-Future. Let’s take a few dimensions of it one by one.

Geopolitically, we now arrive at a time when the efforts of the last century, to build a peaceful, stable, and cooperative world have come undone. Instead, we find ourselves again in a time of what’s come to be called “great powers competition,” or “spheres of influence,” and so forth. These gild the lily. We are now regressing to a time of raw imperialism. America, China, and Russia all wish to not just build their own empires, but to undo the world as we once knew it, which was governed, even if imperfectly, by consent, justice, and some semblance of democracy.

This age geopolitically is more like the 19th century, or even the 18th, than the 20th. We are rewinding several centuries in years.

Understand that the Anti-Future is this real, this urgent, this devastating.

Now let’s discuss domestic political economy. Nations like America are headed for a combination of poisons so bleak we scarcely have names for them. America is already fascist. By next year, techno feudalism will arrive in full force. Mass layoffs will wreak havoc. AI will take what’s left of stable jobs and careers.

America is a warning in this regard. The path before us now domestically is very much one of techno feudalism. And that isn’t just a buzzword. It has urgent and dangerous and bleak meaning. Peasantry, serfdom, the loss of modern rights, institutions, possibilities. Society becoming a caste system, in which there’s an entrenched class of wealthy, who own all the capital, and a permanent underclass, who are forever in debt, born in it, dying in it.

How many centuries of progress are undone in this case? Now we find ourselves back in the time before the Age of Revolutions. Pre revolutionary France, Europe before the barricades and upheavals. Only now there is no possibility of revolution. Not in China, not in Russia, not in America, not beyond. The machines that make people peasants and serfs again also take away their dreams. They numb their minds. History no longer exists. There is no possibility but this one, Americans are told, and they believe it.

In these first two dimensions alone, we appear to be giving up centuries of civilizational progress. Not decades. Centuries. This is how bleak the place is we are at now. Think about it carefully if you can bear it. Do you think I’m kidding with you? Does the feeling in your gut screaming at you mean anything?

America’s technofeudal future is all but assured now. And with it, America’s economy will self-destruct. Many Americans will lose everything. They don’t know it, but that’s already beginning. The dollar’s plummeted—the average American has lost over 10% of their wealth. Nobody talks about it much. How high will that figure be next year? The year after that? Five years from now?

Now we’re discussing another dimension of the Anti-Future, the economic ones. As we regress by centuries, our economies also begin to shudder, crack, and shatter. If the future is techno feudal, in places like America, then what is an economy? How does it work? Is it just baubles for the mega-wealthy? Is everyone to be a journeyman and an apprentice? Where will stability come from?

Our civilization’s economy is gravely threatened by this descent into an Anti-Future. We grew prosperous—no, it wasn’t shared as equally as it should have been, that’s true—because we learned to, with difficulty, transcend the old demons of hatred, violence, and ignorance, to a degree. Each exorcism was bloody and painful.

And now? Ignorance spreads like a terrible malady. People reject the basic aspects of modernity. Billionaires crow to the masses that education is a waste of time. Studying the humanities, becomes a learned person, gaining wisdom from history, art, science, literature—these count for nothing anymore, when the world’s richest men are in league with pedophiles and fascists, and the only way through and up is to hope to join this class of monsters and rapists.

An economy like this, to put it bluntly, is going to be ruinous. If there is no point for anyone much to invest in education, for societies to invest in science, art, literature, truth, then where will tomorrow’s prosperity come from? Are we all to be the kinds of billionaires who think democracy is fascism, and fascism is salvation? Who believe that girls and women are playthings to be violated on private islands they can’t escape from?

And so we head into an economic trajectory that’s incredibly bleak. Our civilizational surplus has already been appropriated by the pedo-hyper-capitalist class, and that’s why, for example, the most basic fundamentals of all, like food, have become flashpoints even in wealthy societies. This is a harbinger of things to come. Even in wealthy societies, as our civilizational surplus falls, because in the Anti-Future, we don’t invest, we just keep letting monsters rape and pillage and steal, and I mean that literally, whether that’s the Epstein class, AI, all of it—because of that, the average person’s and society’s living standards are likely to fall precipitously.

Imagine where we are. Take my literal sentence above. Rape, pillage, steal. This is what we allow. It’s awful enough. But the flipside is in all this, we fail to invest in what matters, from climate change to democracy to, as mentioned above, education, science, art, literature, truth, because of course, the capital has been taken, destroyed, extracted, vampirically sucked dry.

This, too, is a form of violent, brutal regress. We don’t know where it will end, but here, too, we begin to speak of centuries of lost progress. Is there any other way to understand or put the loss of basic rights, dignities, the lack of investment, the violation of all our sacred modern principles, and all that that portends?

There will be a bright spot. Europe and Canada’s emerging axis of social democracy. This is all we will have to keep the lights of civilization burning over the next decade and more to come. And even then, a price will be paid by them to stay civilized, which is the drag of civilizational collapse elsewhere around them.

Like I said, I think that you should take the above seriously. I do. You asked me to create Havens for you, I did, and it’s doing very well precisely because unlike almost every other institution in the world, we think about all this together. Every year, Havens will have a new theme. Over the last year or two, of course, it was American collapse. Maybe this year’s will be the Anti-Future. I’ll have a think about that.

Most people are not going to think carefully about all the above. They’ll numb themselves. I used to pity that, now I scarcely have the time. They will lose a great deal. Americans have already lost their democracy, their futures, their society, and are well on their to losing their money, which in America is the ultimate loss of them all. Consider all that an example. In an age like the Anti-Future, the losses will range from catastrophic to severe to existential. We are all going to lose as a civilization now the fundaments of modernity. They are being raped, stolen, murdered, and pillaged before our very eyes. Geopolitically, politically, economically, socially, financially, existentially—I’ve given you examples of all those dimensions I hope are illuminating and clarifying.

The gravity and enormity of these losses will be incalculable. What is the price of saying we are regressing centuries in years? Does it even matter to put some kind of number on it? Only a very few will emerge intact. Americans still “can’t believe” this is happening. Don’t make that mistake. Understand where we are, and where we are going.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)