Prediction, Politics, Potential

Any pragmatic political movement needs to convince people that things can be different and will be different. We cannot sacrifice the prospect of a better future, and we cannot let destructive forces shape it for us. This is not "cannot" as in "literally can't happen". This is "cannot" as in "if we think we can't, we will be forced to seek imaginative alternatives that are better". Once again, the idea of "better" is contested: what are our normative calculations in saying what is better? For whom would these alternatives be better? There are a myriad of species on planet Earth. Its ecosystems are extraordinarily complex. Stepping back, if humans were to disappear tomorrow, life would still go on. There are countless planets in the universe, which is continually expanding without end.

Yet a contradiction remains: can't we make things better? If we accept things the way they are, aren't we giving up on ourselves without giving ourselves a chance? The question only grows more insistent the more it is repressed. Shouldn't we feel the need to improve the world and our place in it? If we don't, aren't we allowing oppressive structures to continue in perpetuity? And can't we acknowledge that things are bad?

Processing trauma requires a calm post-event environment. Yet you have to get to that environment first, even when the cards are stacked against you. A mental battle is fought, not at a physical level, but at a conceptual level: whether you allow yourself to succumb to the forces bearing down on you or twist their strands into a tapestry of your own. Afterwards, it seemed inevitable, but at the time, it felt impossible. This reminds me of Stoic thinking: you still decide how to act in your circumstance, regardless of how hard (Epictetus). This suggests reconciling individualism and collectivism: acknowledging individual responsibility can be a way of regaining agency over your life, which is one piece of the larger puzzle.

Conventional wisdom says we can only conceive of an event once it is over. However, if this were true, we could not cope with anything. Living requires processing events in real time, necessitating prediction, which is corroborated by recent neuroscience (Bubic, von Cramon, and Schubotz, 2010; Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019). To predict, you make logical leaps based on data you already have — but also data you don't and can't. Arguably, processing is imagination, and imagination is the precursor to action. This is why novels that shine a new light on realities, like Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1987), are essential; it is why art is a necessity, not a "nice-to-have". Art is a given system's attempt to conceptualise its current conditions, imagine new ones, and set on a path to enact necessary changes to do so.

We are experiencing a planetary trauma (Shomuyiwa, 2025; O'Donnell, Palinkas, 2024; for figures, see IPCC, 2023). We must recognise destructiveness near and far from us. We must recognise it in our planet and ourselves. We must recognise that it is woven into structures encoded in systems. As these systems actualise destruction, we must unspool the tangle of their threads and weave them into something better, all in real time. The cards are stacked against us, yet we must build to outlast current circumstances. Not only to some "natural" state, but if "nature" is what exists at any given moment, then we need to work from there. We need not only the clarity of dispassion but the clarity of hindsight. Present hindsight requires predictions of the future. To predict, given we need to work at such large timescales, at such complexity, from such a disadvantageous starting position, requires a lot of imagination.

The harder that existing gets, the more frustrated people feel. Frustration arises when we have ideas to improve things, but they're not heard. While people are listened to or not in varying contexts, this complexity is asymmetric. Like recognising the overriding destructiveness in our planetary systems, we should recognise the overriding tendency not to listen. This tendency leads to resentment, regret, and misunderstanding — and spirals into hatred, which then fuels destructiveness, in a vicious cycle. We have become a "society of strangers". Our level of technology makes global cooperation amply possible, yet most are prevented from realising this on a conceptual, ideational level. Look at the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or the Indignados Movement — while these movements' successes are disputed, social media played a key role in all of them. There are global forums for us to collectively get our voices heard, and they clearly are empowering in some ways — but once again, it's worth recognising the asymmetry of voices on social media platforms, where some are heard more than others.

We would alleviate much suffering if everyone's ideas were collectively heard, synthesised, and implemented. Thus, global frustration is a frustration with suffering. Suffering feels ever-more unnecessary with technological advances, yet technology is advancing it. This mismatch is incredibly confusing, unsettling, and upsetting. It leads people to rationalise suffering by resorting to discrimination instead of more intellectually and emotionally challenging pathways, which are notoriously hard to conceptualise.

Laboria Cuboniks's Xenofeminism (2015) represents one attempt at imagining a more equitable future. It presents a techno-materialist feminism arguing we should embrace technology to improve our lives: 'nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human' (0x11). It proposes a de-gendered rationalism, which, along with culture, can shape our technology and a just future (0x04, 0x02). It 'emphasises the importance of the mesopolitical sphere against the limited effectiveness of local gestures' (0x17), pushing for a fully structural understanding of our world and, thus, a structural response.

The first part of the book Inventing the Future (Srnicek and Williams, 2015) also rails against 'folk politics', which privileges individual over collective action, recreating the atomisation it purports to solve. The book is more focused on strategy than Xenofeminism and skews towards hierarchical organisation. However, there are other similarities: Inventing the Future is gender and race-abolitionist, focused on promoting universal human values and positive freedom, and heavily favouring deploying tech for progressive purposes. It argues for reduced work hours through automation and a universal basic income (UBI) (Chapter 6). It argues that raising labour costs will incentivise innovation to further reduce the workforce, meaning we will have more time for leisure, enabled by UBI (Chapter 7). This reflects Keynes's predictions in 1930 against the prevailing pessimism of his time and culture of an 'age of leisure and of abundance'.

The long history of working people fighting for leisure is explored in PostCapitalism (Mason, 2015), which takes a more economic angle than these other works. Similar to what Inventing the Future proposes today, it argues that organised labour historically forced capitalists to innovate. However, the rise of neoliberalism enabled the current economic cycle to stagnate, which has slowed innovation. Despite that, as digital technology (especially free and open source software) can be freely copied and modified, it is reshaping our economies in a participatory, post-capitalist direction. While the book is perhaps naive in its assumption that this reshaping will happen without much intervention, it still pioneered some incredibly important ideas at the time. It gives us yet another way of conceptualising the vast changes wrought on our world by the past century, predicting the future so we can build it most favourably.

All these texts have strikingly similar themes, which were also articulated in the global protest movements of the early 2010s and have continued to grow in sophistication: abolition of hierarchies; time for leisure, reflection, and positive freedom; and transition to a post-scarcity economy. Our theories and practices of enacting change and futurity have grown in sophistication over the last decade. Let's continue reshaping them as we use them to reshape our worlds.

Bibliography

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