Never Such An Open Sea
There is no such thing as responsible futurism, but "everything stays normal" is a special kind of bad.
Oswald Spengler, a most morbid symptom of our modern middle age, saw in contemporary “Faustian” society a distinctive yearning, a sense of setting out towards some far horizon, ever onwards and upwards in infinite space. But that world is dead; that culture is gone. For the children of the denouement, there is just that single finite fate, lying straight ahead. Which is not to say that any of us have much idea what it is. Maybe industrial civilization even now races towards collapse, and almost all of us will die. Or perhaps it’s just the opposite - with respect, that is, to industry, not to you and I. We’re no doubt doomed to something: call your loved ones, say goodbye. These might be the final years before what began in Uruk ends in San Francisco, and our silicated cancer bursts outwards towards the stars. Maybe it will take us with it; maybe it’s the end. Either way, nothing will ever be the same again. And yet even certain self-styled Marxists have now begun to claim that everything, everywhere, has had enough of change. There is no alternative - and yet these “Marxists” say, the dream has not yet died. But I digress: despite their different dreams and nightmares, the prophets all agree: we are near or at or just now passed the final off-ramp, and are now firmly on our way. We approach that moment when all the neon open signs go out; the ending of an age.
Or so they say. And yet our brave new world, it seems, still has familiar people in it. Sure, our vile offspring might eat the asteroids for breakfast, and Mercury for lunch. They might cloud the inner system with un-selves beyond our counting; if we are very, very lucky, they might leave a little wedge of light for Earth. They might shove every last potential life the Solar System might ever host back beneath old Malthus’s jaws when all the lower fruit is plucked - but don’t you worry. If you don’t want to be pulped like an ant beneath a tank tread, all you have to do is call dibs. So says Robin Hanson. Surely the awakening alien god of technocapital will respect that. The right to property is sacred and inviolable, as all of human history can attest.
Or maybe everything you’ve ever known is moments from collapse. The refineries will burn, the harbor gates slam shut. And when the dust settles, when all is said and done - you’ll write free verse for your daily bread, and tend a garden on the side. Jo will run the magazine, and Zeke will have his bar. The death of everything they know will sand the corners off the squares, and with the modern scum scrubbed off our inner light will shine. Local permaculture will surely feed eight billion souls - or else all those starved subaltern bodies (never people, though we dare not speak it plain), several billion strong, will just expire off camera as the real protagonists of life on Earth gaily go about their days. But what’s important is that none of us will ever have to do anything icky again, ever, because all the ickiness just died. Everything will change, except what we can’t imagine changing: that will always stay the same.
The “end of history” types, at least, have stayed consistent: nothing will ever happen because everything will stay the same. Which is simply a straightforward contradiction: everything can’t remain the same, because what’s the same is change. Ours is the culture of a world which has spent three hundred years in accelerated motion - we will splatter on the windshield soon, or else go far away. “3% yearly growth in GDP” upon a human face forever is not a boring future, as if there was ever such a thing - it’s just pushing the event horizon a little further back. You cannot have growth like that forever, or even for much longer, without a change in things. At a certain point you produce so much, so cheaply, that the labor market will no longer have its sting. And you cannot rework the foundations of modern human life without changing everything that rests upon them. Nor can you predict just how they’ll change. the dream of picking out the superstructure latent in the base, while in principle compelling, has in practice simply not worked out.
This is all ridiculous. You have absolutely no idea how weird things might get. None of us do, because no one ever does. Most of us can barely grasp, if that, how weird things used to be before all this - in simpler times and smaller worlds than these. The sort of people who ask whether Caesar was on the Left have no business predicting distant future politics; if you think modern market norms are written into human nature, I am not inclined to hear you guess what more inhuman minds might do. If you think exponential growth amounts to nothing much, you should have failed 6th grade math. If you think its ending will be quiet, you’re a solipsistic psychopath. Optimism of the will does not replace arithmetic; good vibes are not a nitrate. Economics is not physics and the Good is not the Is. There are certain fundamental principles, we think, which will always stay the same. There will probably be no time travel. We will find no endless fountain of negentropy, and things will end someday. Suicides will not tile the cosmos; the South will not rise again. But that’s all we know. The rest is all fair game.
Maybe our descendants will be kinder than us; maybe they’ll be beasts. Maybe, just maybe, if the stars align, one hundred and nineteen years from now - everything will die. Maybe someone somewhere else will carry on the light; maybe it’s just us. Maybe we’re about to wake; maybe this is it. No one knows. You don’t know. If your lesser self demands less of you, if it really does insist, if you must pretend that you know otherwise and better? Fine. Be that way - but keep it down. Keep it to yourself. The public deserves an honest answer, and that can only be: jesus, fuck if we know. We do not get to win.